A small jewel about a most common experience-a first date. Writer-director Tom Noonan also stars as a quirky, shy guy who comes over to the Manhattan loft apartment of a co-worker (Karen Sillas) for a first date. Their dance of engagement is absolutely riveting and sad. Created as a stage play, it also works on film. A true sleeper. [09 Dec 1994, p.B]

The movie's humor is engaging but odd. The script is pretentious but sweet. And the symbolic use of the flying machine-which pulls you back to "Brewster McCloud"-doesn't work very well. But a flawed film like "Arizona Dream," with its wistfulness and pain, is still twice as interesting as most of the bloated, slick, empty successes that tend to get released here, films that look as if they were dreamed up by used-car salesmen in a desert. [6 Jan 1995, p.L]

Step by step, Yakin and the 13-year-old Nelson-who plays his part with a beautifully wary, quiet calm-take you into Fresh's harsh world, accustom you to its murderous routines, ways and lingo, its boredom and sudden violence. Seeing it through Fresh's relatively innocent eyes gives it harrowing edge and clarity. [31 Aug 1994, p.1C]

This is simply marvelous entertainment that breathes life into a genre that I thought had been dead for a decade-the prison picture.

The movie is slick, good-looking, nicely edited and empty. [09 Sep 1994, p.F]

Natural Born Killers is visually complex and thematically simple. Mixing film and video, black-and-white and color, morphing and animation, Stone breaks visual ground here for a major studio release. [26 Aug 1994, p.B]

Director Richard Rush is one of the more talented and mysterious figures in American filmmaking. But though it has been 14 years since his last feature (the 1980 live-wire classic "The Stunt Man"), his new movie, The Color of Night, is sometimes just as hip, lively and blast-your-eyes funny as ever.

On the whole, though, it is funny and compassionate, silly and sweet. [26 Aug 1994]

Airheads loses its guts and spark halfway through.

A dismal kids' comedy in which all creativity stopped after casting lookalikes for the old rascals was completed.

It's a movie that literally makes your mouth water. A smart, sprightly, lip-smacking comedy about a Taipei master chef who's lost his sense of taste and his tangled family problems with three romantically troubled daughters. It crackles with iridescent style and wit.

It Could Happen to You is the movie that "Sleepless in Seattle" wanted to be, an old-fashioned Hollywood romantic comedy for the '90s, brought candidly up to date for the post-sexual revolution era, yet shimmering with all the cockeyed satin-and-popcorn glamor of the past.

How can Reiner, who has been terrific in the past with both comedy ("This is Spinal Tap," "When Harry Met Sally") and children ("Stand By Me"), come up with something like "North," a movie that may set some kind of record for unfunny humor, forced satire and unappealing kids? [22 Jul 1994, p.C2]

Sometimes, it's exciting to watch a movie formula jell on screen-and that's what you can see happening in The Client, the latest, and best, of three successive films adapted from legal thrillers by John Grisham.

A smooth-swinging fable that lays solid wood on the issues that matter. [15 July 1994, p.F]

Clean up the language, and this little roach of a movie could play the bottom half of a double bill with Rowan and Martin's “The Maltese Bippy.” [26 March 1999, Life, p.9E]

The Shadow shows what can happen when you overdress pulp. You wind up with something gorgeous and suffocated, bejeweled trash floundering in its own oversplendid stuffings. [01 Jul 1994, p.H]

People always complain that movies aren't as entertaining, entrancing or outrageous as the best of the old Golden Age. Yet, memorably and magically, here's one that is. Don't let it dance away unseen. [22 Jul 1994, p.C]

Scheinman, whose long list of producer credits includes Stand by Me and Misery, makes his directing debut with a good sense of storytelling and a low-key comic style all too often absent in this kind of entertainment. [30 Jun 1994, p.28]

Wyatt Earp is a fascinating ride to a West where darkness and heroism mingle, a triumph for Kasdan, Costner, Quaid and the company. It shows how, in this frontier crucible, love and death, honor and slaughter, friendship and a walk toward doom, are all linked together as well. [24 Jun 1994, p.F]

Perhaps blackmail isn't an easy subject to warm up to, or robbery the best ground to rebuild a relationship on, but with a little care, some added ingredients and a bit more spice, Getting Even With Dad could have been a satisfying meal and not just an afternoon snack. [17 Jun 1994, p.H]

It bears repeating that The Lion King is quite entertaining as children's fare goes these days. But Disney has established a standard so high on animated features that anything less than a classic leaves you feeling that something's missing.

City Slickers II, perhaps, isn't really special. But it's the kind of movie Hollywood should churn out more often: a professional, ebullient, formula entertainment that doesn't insult your intelligence and hits its marks with ease, wit and good humor. Unlike most current mega-movies, it's classy, smart, sometimes gaudily tasteless fun-done with such zest and skill that it often makes you smile. And laugh. And maybe even smirk.

We know exactly where this picture is going at all times. Holding our attention, however, is a cast of fresh talent among the trainees. [03 Jun 1994]

If you are offended by jokes about sex, sex organs, sex, bodily functions, sex, the L.A. riots or sex, you should probably stay far away. But if you're up to the challenge, you should find Fear of a Black Hat to be a clever piece of work-a nasty satire with savvy and sass. [17 Jun 1994, p.J]

You might not think of this as a family film, but it is a great one. [27 May 1994, p.B]

The movie contains its moments, charms and felicities-even its sharp stings of pleasure and pain. [20 May 1994]

Too rich, too loaded, Maverick may have misplayed its cards, kept its eyes on the pot instead of the players. In movies, as in poker, you can't always trust a pat hand.