Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.

Jennifer 8 promises a plot of excruciating complexity, but the storyline turns relentlessly dumb. By the end the characters might as well be wearing name tags: "Hi! I'm the serial killer!" This is the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its torturous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion.

Intervista is not a very organized movie, and long stretches seem pointless and uninspired. It would not be of much interest, I imagine, to anyone who was not familiar with Fellini's earlier films.

Is The Lover any good as a serious film? Not really...I wanted to know more. I believe true eroticism resides in the mind; what happens between bodies is more or less the same, but what it means to the occupants of those bodies is another question.

The Jessica Lange character is wrong because she isn't selfish enough. In the original, the character was a tough dame who had married the fat spider for money, and was looking out only for herself. Here the character's motivations are marred by soft bourgeois values like affection and career dreams. The original film had a good girl and a bad girl; the Lange character wants to be both.

The hypodermic needle, which has been keeping a pretty low profile in the movies, deserves a better comeback than it gets in Dr. Giggles. So does the medical profession: Even those who still believe in it will find little to recoil from in this un-hellacious tale of a mad doctor's mad son returning to his small hometown to make murderous house calls. [26 Oct 1992, p.27]

What I liked was a horror movie that was scaring me with ideas and gore, instead of simply with gore.

In the end, though, its own grasp of morality is pretty tenuous. Its survivors learn from the errors of their ways not to make them again. Period. The film probably would have been better off taking the hijinks approach employed by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in "Neighbors." A food fight might have covered up a lot of those holes. [16 Oct 1992, p.41]

Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.

The formula is obvious: Die Hard Goes to Sea. I walked into the screening in a cynical frame of mind, but then a funny thing happened. The movie started working for me.

In its own way and up to a certain point, 1492 is a satisfactory film. Depardieu lends it gravity, the supporting performances are convincing, the locations are realistic, and we are inspired to reflect that it did indeed take a certain nerve to sail off into nowhere just because an orange was round.

Not an easy film to watch. Yet there is a certain fascination which develops. [10 Sep 1993, p.40]

It must be said that this movie is sweet and innocent, and that at a certain level it might appeal to younger kids. I doubt if its ambitions reach much beyond that.

The story is as pure and lean as the original fable which formed in Steinbeck's mind. And because they don't try to do anything fancy -- don't try to make it anything other than exactly what it is -- they have a quiet triumph.

A little more zip, and Hero might really have worked. It has all the ingredients for a terrific entertainment, but it lingers over the kinds of details that belong in a different kind of movie.

The part that needs work didn't cost money. It's the screenplay. Having created the characters and fashioned the outline, Tarantino doesn't do much with his characters except to let them talk too much, especially when they should be unconscious from shock and loss of blood.

Mamet's dialogue has a kind of logic, a cadence, that allows people to arrive in triumph at the ends of sentences we could not possibly have imagined. There is great energy in it. You can see the joy with which these actors get their teeth into these great lines.

The Last of the Mohicans is not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be -- more of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit -- but it is probably more entertaining as a result.

Innocent Blood is an uncomfortable marriage of vampires and mobsters; it doesn't work on either the supernatural or the criminal level. The payoff, in which the gangsters find that they've become vampires, is an exercise in missed opportunities. More's the pity, then, that the movie contains an intriguing character in Marie, a vampire who is woman enough to spare at least one man from her fangs.

School Ties is surprisingly effective.

This is a nice enough fantasy, but the premise of a dream gone sour is stale. And the Hollywood happy ending seems predictable pretty early in the movie. [22 Sep 1992, p.33]

This movie, like Boyz N the Hood, is uncompromising in its view of how things work in a neighborhood like South Central. It was made before the Los Angeles riots in April, 1992, but it provides a stark picture of the anger that was waiting to boil over.

Singles is not a great cutting-edge movie, and parts of it may be too whimsical and disorganized for audiences raised on cause-and-effect plots. But I found myself smiling a lot during the movie, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with recognition. It's easy to like these characters, and care about them.

But what Husbands and Wives argues is that many "rational" relationships are actually not as durable as they seem, because somewhere inside every person is a child crying me! me! me! We say we want the other person to be happy. What we mean is, we want them to be happy with us, just as we are, on our terms.

The real reason to see this movie, though, is because it makes a big yacht race seem so glorious, such grand adventure. Ballard is a former cinematographer with a knack for visualizing the outdoors.

The only true horror about Clive Barker's Hellraiser III is that this movie was ever made. It is the worst of the series, offering nothing but cheap scare scenes, a weird message about healing the wounds of the Vietnam War and sex scenes too explicit for kids. The acting is soap-opera shallow. [22 Sep 1992, p.33]

It's a sometimes entertaining movie, but thin.

The movie is effective, well-acted and convincing.