An abysmal, embarrassing sequel to the adult-talking baby movies. [5 Nov 1993, p.C]

What makes Victor Nunez's film so special is the modesty of its story and the power that Judd brings to the role. Very quickly, we get the feeling that this story is too familiar to young women. A special film. [03 Dec 1993, p.C]

The acting is terrific, understated and pungent, especially Quaid's and Ryan's performances. [05 Nov 1993, p.I]

Kalifornia is that deadliest of combinations: a pretentious B movie. It repeatedly smacks the viewer in the face and then pretends that it has some intellectual reason for doing so. [03 Sep 1993]

In Jan Campion's The Piano, the emotions are deep, fierce, primordial. Sexuality overwhelms the film's characters like ocean waves blasting against a cliffside. [19 Nov 1993]

What exactly is funny about "Basic Instinct" or "Fatal Attraction"? Other than sending up specific scenes-say, Sharon Stone's uncrossed legs from "Basic Instinct"-there is no humor to be mined. The "Airplane" films kidded the genre rather than just duplicating scenes; director Reiner is operating at the level of a high school parodist. [29 Oct 1993, p.C2]

The movie has a grotesque charm, a pie-eyed magic. With its crack-brained, spidery-limbed, Edward-Gorey-eyed crew of dashing skeletons, Frankenstein ladies, mad scientists with detachable brainpans, swivel-headed two-faced politicians and big bad bug-bag monsters, it comes at you like a Saturday afternoon kiddies' special gone pleasantly berserk.

Anspaugh, whose "Hoosiers" showed he knows from feel-good movies, directs this story as if he were conducting "Bolero," carefully building climax upon climax as the story spirals to an underdog triumph every bit as tearful as that of "Rocky."

Nonstrously over-whimsical. It's a gigantic, fatuous whoopie-cushion of a movie-big, smiley and flabbergastingly dumb. Watching it, you may get an odd, overwhelmed feeling, as if you were being smothered to death by party balloons. [15 Oct 1993, p.N]

Fantastic, exciting, a real cinematic/theatrical feast. [15 Oct 1993, p.I]

As directed by the Briton Mike Figgis ("Stormy Monday"), "Mr. Jones" is a muscular sort of movie, imposing action on characters who are feeling much but actually doing very little. Figgis' constant camera cuts are almost as animated, as jazzy, as Jones' highs. The director shows a daring sense of rhythm in his edits and, for this story, anyway, it works. [8 Oct 1993, p.D]

Some movies can lay claim to being the best thing around in a week, a month, a year. Robert Altman's Short Cuts is closer to being one of the all-time bests, among the finest American films since the advent of sound. [22 Oct 1993]

M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's visually stunning but oddly cold and sparkless adaptation of the much-prized David Henry Hwang play. [08 Oct 1993]

A lame comedy about the quirky true story of the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team that competed in the Calgary Winter Olympics...The intelligence level of the comedy insults preteens. [1 Oct 1993, p.C2]

Slick but forgettable. [01 Oct 1993, p.C]

Still, it's the bits and pieces of this movie, the eccentric asides, that rescue it-when they work. [1 Oct 1993, p.L]

For a while, I resented the sexist, cruel behavior in the film, much of it revolving around the hazing of underclassmen. But gradually, I saw the movie turn into a brash expose of stupid adolescent traditions. [24 Sept 1993]

Bopha!, a movie about emotional and political turbulence tearing apart the family of a black South African police officer, is good, but a little disheartening. Not because of the injustice and misery it reveals-but because you want it to be better.

But once the action wanders off the playing field, "The Program" shows all the cleverness, originality and depth of the Chicago Bears' offense.

It's a beautiful story that extends past the boundaries of time. [1 Oct 1993, p.M-2]

This movie is glum, murky, dour, takes place mostly in the dark, doesn't make much sense and has a surprise climax so ridiculous you may watch it with perverse, astonished respect - the kind you might grant the Joint Chiefs of Staff if they showed up for a press conference wearing lampshades on their heads and yodeling. [17 Sept 1993, p.F]

Airborne is a fairly shameless little picture, but at least it follows the First Rule of Cinema. It gives us something interesting to watch: the climactic hill race, with the largely unidentifiable racers zooming and hurdling one another on hairpin hillside curves...Unfortunately, Airborne also follows the First Rule of Bad Movies. Instead of telling a story, the filmmakers follow an outline (or, in this case, an in-line).

A stupid, stylized road picture. [10 Sept 1993]

As directed by a button-pushing Herbert Ross, "Undercover Blues" operates under the credo of "Grin, and the world grins with you." The ever-chipper Turner and Quaid try their damndest throughout, with Quaid often resembling a Cheshire cat whose face froze that way. throughout, with Quaid often resembling a Cheshire cat whose face froze that way. But all the pep in the world couldn't save this nonsensical mixture of low-rent espionage, low-ball slapstick and low-reaching cuddly family moments, like the baby's first steps captured in what looks like a Polaroid ad.

The Joy Luck Club may be stylistically rickety, but Wang does a good job with the logistics of the movie, integrating multiple time periods, dialogue in two languages (English and Mandarin), two locations (San Francisco and China) and overlapping casts - several characters require two and even three actors to play them at different ages - to make a watchable whole. This is not a movie to be watched lackadaisically. Blink twice and you could lose the train of narration. [17 Sept 1993, p.C]

Not as worthless as you may have heard. [10 Sept 1993]

Slow-paced and repetitive, Needful Things is overlong and overwrought, and the whole thing should be promptly exorcised. [27 Aug 1993, p.A]

Poor Roberto Benigni, the Italian comedian who has been given the unenviable assignment of filling the shoes in which Peter Sellers stumbled so effectively. In Son of the Pink Panther, Benigni works from a real dung heap of a script.