Somehow the movie fails to connect with the amazing energy of Hawking's ideas. We're left wanting to know more about either his theories or his life, but what we get is a little of each.

The movie gives people a piece of the AIDS nightmare - a view of HIV-infected men struggling to retain romance - but the piece is sharp and brittle, with little humor truly working. And despite the somewhat serene ending, it is really shot through more with the characters' rage than anything. [14 Aug 1992, p.42]

This is a story which, in other hands, could have simply been an all-female slasher movie, but Barbet Schroeder, who produced and directed it, has a mordant humor that pushes the material over the top. It is a slasher movie, and a little more.

The film reflects a passing era even in its visual style.

Despite the obvious rip-offs of other films, the cartoony, slapstick humor does generate enough charm to pull chuckles from a young audience. But too much of the action - the sword-fighting and basketball stunt scenes, especially - looks distractingly fake. [08 Aug 1992, p.26]

Empty at its core, Raising Cain is a deeply cynical, spiteful effort by a director who seems to be both punishing himself for Bonfiregate and sticking his tongue out at those who turned on him when it threatened to become his last train to Hollywood. [07 Aug 1992, p.33]

Neither funny nor scary, Buffy ends up as little more than a bunch of stereotypes (Reubens excepted) squaring off with each other as true love triumphs. Maybe it should have been called "Pee-wee's Big Denture," and given people something to sink their teeth into. But for now, Buffy remains lifeless. [31 Jul 1992, p.43]

As Hollywood experiments go, the new black comedy by Robert Zemeckis has more than its share of witty lines, sight gags and special effects. But even while you're appreciating its better moments, the cast is numbing them with their Arctic charm. [31 July 1992, p.43]

Walker finds an unexpected wit and depth in her character. [7 Aug 1992, p.38]

The movie lacks the cleanedged economy of the screenplay for The Player, and it could have benefitted from less talkiness and fewer characters, but as a portrait of a particular Hollywood strata it is bittersweet and knowledgeable.

Too bad the movie relies on special effects to carry the show, and doesn't bring much else to the party.

Cool World is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line.

I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences.

Not only does The Best Intentions work, it works so well that its emotions are hard to shake off. Here's an epic that pulls no punches in depicting the crushing, unresolvable conflict that frequently defines marriage more than hugs and kisses. Here's that rare soap opera with more hard lather than soft suds. [14 Aug 1992, p.42]

Prelude to a Kiss is the kind of movie that can inspire long conversations about the only subject really worth talking about, the Meaning of It All.

The real surprise of the movie is Eddie Murphy, who finds his character and stays with him.

The movie has a real bittersweet charm. The baseball sequences, we've seen before. What's fresh are the personalities of the players, the gradual unfolding of their coach and the way this early chapter of women's liberation fit into the hidebound traditions of professional baseball.

The movie is a thriller, with all the usual trappings of a thriller, but the director, Jonathan Kaplan, is able to place the story in a plausible world. The performances go for unstrained realism, the settings are slice-of-life, and until the final scenes even the sicko cop seems somewhere within the realm of possibility.

I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don't think it's a bad movie; it's more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story.

The charm of the movie comes in the performances - in the way Martin and Hawn lie to themselves and each other - and in the dialog, which is endlessly inventive as one lie piles upon another, and the characters test each other with a high-wire act of falsehood.

A good-looking movie with hard-working performances and a bubble-brained script, which nevertheless stumbles over a truth from time to time. Class Act could be a trial run for something really relevant.

The first time I saw the coming attractions trailer for Sister Act, I roared with laughter and delight. Unfortunately, it's better directed than the movie. The trailer has high energy and whammo punchlines. The movie is sort of low-key and contemplative and a little too thoughtful.

Far and Away is a movie that joins astonishing visual splendor with a story so simple-minded it seems intended for adolescents.

Whatever its deficiencies, there's no downplaying the emotions of parting with Ripley. So much attention is paid to the special effects in movies like these, Weaver's accomplishment in developing, deepening and richly glorifying her character stands to be underestimated. [22 May 1992, p.51]

Perhaps if Encino Man boasted a looser cannon than block-jawed newcomer Fraser or gave more focus to the sleepily funny Shore, who comes across like Mork from Woodstock by way of the Valley, it would overcome first-time feature director Les Mayfield's timid, by-the-numbers approach. [22 May 1992, p.52]

The film is too confusing to be successful, but too striking and visually beautiful to be ignored.

There are elements in the movie that make it worth seeing, and that set it aside from the routine movies in this genre.

It's so rare to find a film in which the events are driven by people, not by chases or special effects. And rarer still to find a story that subtly, insidiously gets us involved much more deeply than at first we realize, until at the end we're torn by what happens - by what has to happen.