John Sayles and Haskell Wexler, who has photographed this movie with great beauty and precision, have ennobled the material.

Before Sunrise is so much like real life - like a documentary with an invisible camera - that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words.

As dopey as some of the flashbacks to MacLeod's early days are, they feature some spectacular shots of Scotland. It's best to just gawk at the visuals rather than concentrate on the story, however. The plot barely exists. [29 Jan 1995, p.58]

It's pretty good, in fact, with full-blooded performances and heartfelt melodrama.

The story, written by Benton from the novel by Richard Russo, unfolds according to its own logic. It has the patience to listen to silences. Above all, it benefits from the confidence of Newman's performance. He is not hammering the points home, not marching from one big scene to another, but simply living on the screen.

But in the absence of prime-time thrills, and more than a snip or two of the TV series' cutting wit, 95 minutes is a long time to stretch this simple-minded stuff. [13 Jan 1995, p.33]

Ladybird, Ladybird...could have been a predictable tear-jerking docudrama, but is too honest to stack the deck.

Singleton's film is interesting for a lot of reasons, but especially because he stands outside this campus system and looks at it with a detached eye.

The Madness of King George tells the story of the disintegration of a fond and foolish old man, who rules England, yet cannot find his way through the tangle of his own mind. I am not sure anyone but Nigel Hawthorne could have brought such qualities to this role.

The result is a little like a comedy crossed with a home movie. It is also, like many home movies, somewhat rambling, and overly dependent on knowing the names of all the players.

I.Q. is a romantic comedy with its heart in the right place, and all of the other pieces distributed correctly, too.

The special effects are convincing, the performances are forthright, and the direction, by Stephen Sommers, recalls his energetic, lighthearted The Adventures of Huck Finn.

Death and the Maiden is all about acting. In other hands, even given the same director, this might have been a dreary slog.

Despite its predictable philosophy, however, Nell is an effective film, and a moving one. That is largely because of the strange beauty of Jodie Foster's performance as Nell, and the warmth of the performance by Liam Neeson, as a doctor who finds himself somehow responsible for her.

To its credit, Street Fighter does have a sense of humor about itself. [26 Dec 1994, p.25]

The movie operates at the level of a literate sitcom, in which the dialogue is smart and the characters are original, but the outcome and most of the stops along the way are preordained.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

Director Gillian Armstrong finds the serious themes and refuses to simplify the story into a "family" formula. "

What's sort of wonderful is the way this movie takes that old formula and makes it fresh and new, with actors who give it wit and charm.

The plot is lame, but that doesn't matter, because Dumb and Dumber is essentially pitched at the level of an "Airplane!"-style movie, with rapid-fire sight gags.

Disclosure contains an inspiring terrific shot of Demi Moore's cleavage in a Wonderbra, surrounded by 125 minutes of pure goofiness leading up to, and resulting from, this moment.

Ty Cobb was by many accounts a mean-tempered, vicious, drunken, wife- beating, racist SOB who was impossible to spend any length of time with, and the movie Cobb faithfully represents those qualities, especially the last one.

It should be preserved by the Library of Congress, as an example of creative desperation. It plays like a documentary about a group of actors forced to perform in a screenplay that contains not one single laugh, or moment of wit, or flash of intelligence, or reason for being.

The great achievement of Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is that it allows us to empathize with Dorothy Parker on her long descent.

This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be.

A lot of actors can hold big machineguns and stand convincingly in front of special effects and explosions. Not many can stand in front of a camera and be nine months pregnant, and actually make us care.

Besson has a natural gift for plunging into drama with a charged-up visual style.

Here is a movie so concerned with in-jokes and updates for Trekkers that it can barely tear itself away long enough to tell a story. From the weight and attention given to the transfer of command on the Starship Enterprise, you'd think a millennium was ending - which is, by the end of the film, how it feels.