Though the new "Sabrina" has been updated to include micro-chips and corporate raiders, French fashion shoots and the Concorde, it doesn't transcend its time the way the old screwball comedies did. It doesn't even illustrate its own time memorably. Instead, the movie leaves us peeking through the trees like Sabrina, while trying to tell us that old movie fairy tales like this one are eternal, as relevant in our day as in their own. It's doubtful the people who made "Sabrina" themselves really believe that -- though they'd obviously like to. [15 Dec 1995, p.C]

Thompson clearly loves this story, and, even though, she's playing the less spontaneous of the older Dashwood sisters, responsible Elinor, you can feel her spirit rising out to embrace the part. It makes her beautiful to watch. [13 December 1995]

Georgia, written with rare honesty and economy by Leigh's mother, Barbara Turner, and very sensitively directed by Ulu Grosbard, is a tough-minded look at show business and families. [10 Jan 1996]

This film works so well simply because every moment of it is suffused with the joy a new baby brings into the world. Save for a needlessly mean comic shot at an Arab businessman, it couldn't be more appropriate for family viewing. [8 Dec 1995, p.D]

What Kasdan's "Earp" needed was more humor and better villains. "Wild Bill" has the humor and villains, the flash and energy, the fire and style. And when, at the end, Hill seems to throw it all away, it almost hurts. But you can say one thing about "Wild Bill": Unlike most movies, it has a lot to throw away. [01 Dec 1995, p.C]

It's impossible, when we watch "I Am Cuba" today, not to see some poignance in its soaring shots, sadness to its thrilling vistas. [08 Dec 1995, p.C]

You can't praise highly enough the contributions of the ensemble--De Niro and Pesci especially--but it's Scorsese's triumph. [22 November 1995, Tempo, p.1]

Toy Story is a complete joy.

The direction is on auto-drive, the dialogue lacks wit and the story logic is non-existent. [03 Nov 1995]

Total Eclipse is a biographical film steeped in ecstasy and despair, seething with madness and torment.

I don't see how you can get away from calling Cage’s performance a great one. [10 November 1995, Friday, p.C]

For years I've criticized Murphy for not working with the best directors or powerful female co-stars. But he does that here, and his movie is still a clunker. Relatives are listed in the credits; maybe he needs to stop trying to completely control the films he makes. Either that or it's time for another stand-up concert film. [27 Oct 1995, p.B]

The Doom Generation can't help but choke on the poisonous fumes of its own cloudy existentialism. [10 Nov 1995, p.G]

One of the sharper, funnier, better-cast, better-written movies around right now. But there's something about it that, well, comes up short. [20 October 1995, Friday, p.C]

Serves up horrendous lead acting, murky cinematography, bland atmosphere, unengaging romance, mug-crazy cameo performances, bash-on-the-head satire and ill-timed slapstick gags that look like outtakes from a Bozo the Clown show gone berserk. [20 Oct 1995]

American movies about childhood often have a spurious feel. They can be grandiosely phony or sentimental--or both, as in Home Alone. Unfortunately, Now and Then, despite massively good intentions, fits right into the program. [20 Oct 1995, p.J]

Not for a moment did I believe any of these characters. They were not as provocative as the clips Fiennes was selling, and, in a strange way, "Strange Days" is undone by the very product it condemns. [13 Oct 1995, p.B]

Jade, like many another recent erotic or techno thriller, is packed with talent, polished and technically dazzling. But, daring as it might seem in its sexual content and exposure of bad behavior among the mighty, it's curiously soft at conveying what these characters really believe. [13 Oct 1995, p.J2]

Kidman crafts a characterization of breathtakingly controlled artifice, dead-on timing, dizzyingly precise humor. Her part is a knockout--in every sense of the word. [6 Oct 1995]

It's a misfire--but a fascinating, magnetic misfire, a film full of first-rate talents forced into absurdity, struggling to bring believability to nonsense. [22 September 1995, Friday, p. C]

The film's big lap-dance sequence is impressive, however, if only for the sheer athleticism of Elizabeth Berkley's contortion. Later, when she pulls the same stunt in a swimming pool, we recognize the show for what it is--a male fantasy film in which the women are little more than rag dolls. [22 Sept 1995]

Unstrung Heroes is an extremely moving and surprisingly funny love sonnet to family, tolerance and the joys of individuality.... One of the best films of the year. [15 Sep 1995]

OK, it's a formula picture, but the ingredients are lively and combined with style by director Beeban Kidron.

The actors in Nadja seem to be having such a good time that it's a shame the movie doesn't give them more room, and get even wilder and more eccentric.

A clever, amiably low-key mix of family drama and romantic comedy.[18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

The Baby-sitters Club movie, written by Dalene Young and directed by Melanie Mayron, winds up seeming just as packaged and programmed as many of its summer competitors. The books, however obvious, don't talk down to their youthful readers. But the movie does. [18 Aug 1995, p.F]

A near-classic blend of mystery, personality, humor and terror, laced with one stunning shock after another. [18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

A lovely, sprawling romance that turns out to be as much a success story for Keanu Reeves, as he matures into stardom, as it is for Mexican director Alfonso Arau, who proves equal to his first big Hollywood budget. [11 Aug 1995, p.B2]

It is difficult to decide what is more annoying. The complete lack of execution in this film, (despite the presence of some very talented actors), or the realization that these lame screenwriters were so devoid of original ideas, they resorted to picking at the carcass of a tale that has been done and redone to death. [11 Aug 1995, p.28]

The usual bad movie sometimes gives a few chuckles, amuses audiences by making them feel superior. But young director Leonard makes a different kind of bomb. Fascinated with technology, Leonard makes cutting-edge techno-turkeys, with wildly elaborate visuals and ridiculous plots. [4 Aug 1995, pg. I]

More than "Natural Born Killers," it's a real deconstruction of the whole love-on-the-run crime genre: drab, grim but effective.

Something to Talk About, which is something to see, makes us a delectable present of its own bright, brawling little world: wisecracks, venomous Charity Leagues, horse shows, last dances, skeleton-filled closets and all. [4 Aug 1995, p.C2]

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

Irwin Winkler's The Net, which should have worked a lot better than it does, is a glossy, intricately plotted, mostly implausible suspense movie about a woman on the run.

The movie makes a worthwhile attempt to break down some thick emotional walls and, at the same time, tell a good story. That it is mostly successful in providing more than a few solid laughs and smiles--in what, after all, is a war picture--says a great deal. [28 Jul 1995, p.H]

Clueless is no "Fast Times" when it comes to character development or the merging of comedy and drama, and it might have worked better if it had been more story-oriented and plot-centered. But thanks to Heckerling's spirited direction and cutting-edge script, it is, "like . . . majorly and furiously golden." [19 July 1995]

These lessons in multiculturism and tolerance should fall easily on young viewers only expecting to be entertained. [14 July 1995, p.D]

A bomb? Not quite. Anyone who gets a kick of train thrillers should get knocked off the tracks by this one. [17 July 1995, p.N2]

It's a big, smiley, free-floating blimp of a comedy: a farce about reluctant fatherhood that could use some parental guidance. [12 July 1995, p.N16]

Species is an Alien ripoff, but that doesn't make it a bad movie--not when it contains a plausible premise, a great-looking female villain, a wonderful supporting cast of good guys, and genuine tension. Only a routine chase sequence in sewer tunnels limits the excitement at the end. In other words, we're talking about a solid, surprisingly intelligent action picture here.

It's a nail-biter and knuckle whitener of the first rank: a super real life techno thriller that reduces the fantasies of Tom Clancy and his clones to ground zero.

The special effects are surprisingly good. And the too-numerous fight scenes have a certain flavor, since Ivan's henchmen always explode in ooze when they are destroyed, which brings out the eeewww in the audience.

Though Haynes' methods are austere and his style dry, the terror of his narrative becomes more palpable as the film unwinds. The picture's eerie delicacy, meticulous technique and rapt formality may distance us, but they also steadily strip bare the panic at its core.

there's no joy in this movie. It's a safe, compromised, even preachy, fable; a wannabe hip romp that never gets going. [07 Jul 1995]

Streep is an actress known for her uncanny ability with accents, but her quiet performance in "Bridges" proves that she would have made a world-class silent-film star, too.

What charmed me most about the movie was the interaction of the dogs themselves. [02 Jun 1995, p.J]

The film is an epic treatment of a childhood curio. It's also the kind of elaborate movie stunt you can't imagine someone really pulling off. [26 May 1995, p.C]

At its best, it's an exhilaratingly grandiose Highland fling. [24 May 1995, Tempo, p.1]

This is a picture that may sound sappy but probably will enrapture audiences lucky enough to catch it. [19 May 1995, p.L]

Little Odessa is a portrait of New York subcultures, the Russian immigrant community itself and the orginizatsya, or Russian mafia, that employs Joshua. The cityscapes are wintry and menacing. The characters have a strong pulse.

The tone and feel of Wild Reeds keeps shifting between irony and sentimentality, violence and tenderness, rebellion and acceptance. And those oscillations fit the volatile nature of its subject: young love and friendship. Together with his attractive and excellent cast, Techine recalls and invokes the mood swings of youth, the intensity and bursts of near-delirious passion.

In French Kiss--a picture that isn't unusually funny or original but that has expert actors, smooth direction and ravishing French locales--we can get pleasure from the sheer, relaxed polish of it all, the effortless swing. It's a good time passer. [5 May 1995, p.C]

The splendid new documentary Crumb, a sympathetic yet woundingly candid portrait, catches the artist with much the same skill. [26 May 1995]

Soderbergh pretty much failed in trying to evoke a noir-like nightmare world in the 1919 Prague of "Kafka," his 1991 terror film. But here, he dazzlingly hews out a noir landscape in more unlikely territory: modern-day Austin, Texas. [28 April 1995]

It's more of a pastiche, a montage of brutality, a slow descent into Dante's Inferno until we reach the subbasement of a boy's soul. [21 Apr 1995]

There is much that is hilarious about this bleak house of horrors, based on the real-life traumas of writer-director George Huang. Most of the humor surfaces early--including a clever opening restaurant scene--as Buddy (Kevin Spacey, in a terrific performance) gives his new assistant, Guy (Frank Whaley), a harsh lesson in subjugation. [12 May 1995, p.H]

This movie might be better-maybe even a classic-if it were less urbane, if the New York tiger that Nicolas Cage and Richard Price unleashed could bare all his fangs, and not just fill the theater with his magnetic growl. Then Kiss of Death might really be a killer. [21 Apr 1995, p.C]

Exceedingly clever and very sharp. [12 Apr 1995, p.7N]

The flabbergasting scenes here-written by a team of "Tonight Show" and "David Letterman Show" writers and directed by hot, young TV-commercial and music-video director Michael Bay-are slick, fast, loud, mostly derived from other movies and often senseless.

Ultimately, the weight of the film falls on Goofy's powerful shoulders. He does his best, but like Norma Desmond, he can only do so much.

But, as with any other Merchant Ivory film, this one provides pleasures beyond the ordinary. [07 Apr 1995]

Chris Farley is fine at physical gags, David Spade is snappy with wise cracks and Brian Dennehy is a good actor who has the best part in the movie-because he gets to die halfway through it. Tommy Boy, an attempt at populist comedy, has some laughs. But it doesn't really have any ideas, meaning or real feeling. This movie has a heart of plastic. It doesn't beat; it squeaks. [31 Mar 1995, p.C2]

It's a distraction: a buzz in your head that won't go away. [31 March 1995, p.HI]

The whole grand tradition of the humor of movie stupidity, from Laurel and Hardy and Mortimer Snerd to Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, seems to crash and burn in this movie, which ends with Payne's idiotic laugh wheezing away over the end-titles. It almost sounds like the beginning of a laugh track-which "Major Payne" could certainly use. [24 March 1995, p.H]

Exotica may be a gloomy journey up river, but it's a trip worth taking. See it with a friend. One who has something to say. [03 Mar 1995, p.J]

Barker, who wasn't involved with the earlier Candyman, has never yet matched his stunning 1987 writer-director debut Hellraiser-and he never will if he keeps coming up with projects like this. [17 Mar 1995, p.J]

There's too much hardware, too little sense. Too much blood, too little flesh. Too much program, too little mind. That's the virus of the contemporary movie techno-thriller.

You may not want to accept what you see here; you may be unable to accept it. But it's doubtful you'll leave this film unmoved.

The Brady Bunch Movie, which was directed and written by at least five people whom we prefer not to embarrass, looks bad, sounds bad and doesn't make any sense. There's even something nightmarish about it. All these bad jokes and vacant sets become almost horrifying, as if the film were on the verge of proving that life itself is a bad joke on a vacant set. [17 Feb 1995, p.J]

Just one more example of Hollywood cramming any old idea it can unearth into a moneymaking formula. [17 Feb 1995]

Just Cause might better have been called "Without a Cause." Or "Without a Clue." [17 Feb 1995, p.C2]

That conscious absurdity is at the core of The Quick and the Dead. It's a rousingly grotesque, often wildly entertaining western horror-comedy, with co-producer and star Sharon Stone as a sexy lady gunslinger taking on all comers in the gunfight tournament from hell. [10 Feb 1995, p.C]

There's something in Shallow Grave that is admirable, beyond its obvious display of youthful talent. [24 Feb 1995]

The story ceases to make sense. It sounds clever on paper, but on screen it degenerates into a series of random scenes that don't connect until, by the end, there are more questions than answers, and more goo than resolution. [03 Feb 1995, p.J]

Stirred by the winds of nostalgia, lapped by its ocean of dreams, "The Secret of Roan Inish" is one of the loveliest surprises of the year. [03 Mar 1995, p.C]

There's a lot of beauty and excitement in Legends of the Fall - not least from the actors. [13 Jan 1995]

It's a simple-seeming but luminous movie, an intelligent, very funny and dead-on small-town comedy-drama adapted and directed by Robert Benton from Richard Russo's gently humorous 1993 novel. [13 Jan 1995, p.C]

It's not classic horror, but it'll do. [13 Jan 1995, p.18]

A powerful experience. [20 Jan 1995, p.B]

John Singleton stumbles badly with a terribly awkward but well-intentioned drama about political correctness and race at a contemporary university. [13 Jan 1995, p.B]

Blessed with a biting script by playwright Alan Bennett, a veteran of the old satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, Hytner's Madness rollicks through its tragi-comedy of royal humiliation and political maneuvering, winking at the follies of today's royals and anti-royals as it does.

It's a spree of a movie, one of the most impishly entertaining of Altman's career. Smart, sparkling, almost sinfully amusing.

I.Q. has a commendable idea. Brains aren't everything. You should follow your heart. Fine. Agreed. But just like E=MC2, you gotta prove it. With brains and heart.

This is nothing more than a half-hour Ramar of the Jungle episode, blown up to motion-picture length.

There's something so charged and beautiful about Jodie Foster's performance as a Smoky Mountains wild child in Nell that it carries you past a lot of glossy bumps in the movie. [23 Dec 1994, p.C]

It is beautifully shot and the production design is first-rate. Another strong point is the presence of some excellent actors in small roles. Unfortunately, they all have to work opposite Van Damme, who keeps trying to be witty and smart, but still comes across as a bit of a lunk.

Director Suri Krishnamma, depends on Finney for its power. His great performance carries the film over its shallow spots, its wish fulfillment, its pull toward caricature. [03 Feb 1995]

It's hard to create snap-crackling languor or laid-back frenzy. And there's also something condescending in the entire conception of Mixed Nuts. [21 Dec 1994, p.7]

Armstrong and screenwriter Robin Swicord have pared the work's sentimentality and bolstered its intellectual content, [21 Dec 1994]

In Richie Rich, the cliches are generic, and the film runs out of gas early on. [21 Dec 1994, p.7C]

Disclosure is pure and simple trash masquerading as significance. [9 Dec 1994, p.B]

Jones lets it all loose here. It's the performance of a lifetime: full of menace and venom, eloquence and fire, rot and pathos, crackling rawness and realism.

Perhaps if writer-director George Gallo ("29th Street") had tried to simplify this potentially sweet story, instead of mucking it up with all sorts of chases and shtick, it might have worked as a modern Christmas fable, complete with charity, kindness, and Three Not-So-Wise Men. But instead, we are presented with a Christmas buffet of overstuffed fruitcake and overspiked punch. Too stale, too sweet, too much. [02 Dec 1994, p.J]

Mrs. Parker is a comedy even though it's sad, and a sort of tragedy even though it's funny, with such foggy borders between the two that pathos and humor seem to smear all over each other, like makeup running with tears. [23 Dec 1994, p.N]

It's a shiny, glib, hollowly good-looking movie that always seems to be cooing at us-coldly. [23 Nov 1994, p.9C]

The performances are all superb, but special mention should go to Melanie Lynskey, a first-time film actress, who brings a frightening calm to the role of Pauline, and Sarah Peirse as Pauline's mother, whose main fault seems to be exhibiting too much care and concern for her strong-willed and imaginative daughter. [25 Nov 1994, p.M2]

There's so much emotion and so many ideas in this film that it's both angering and exhilarating. The acting is fine, the writing superb, the production crisp.

By using the author's name [Branagh] sets us up for something closer to the text of the Gothic thriller than James Whale's classic 1931 horror film. But Branagh's version is too respectful and ultimately, well, lifeless.