A rash and prurient tale, full of the sort of stylish venom that could almost elevate it to artful kitsch. Almost. [29 May 1992, p.C]

While entertaining and often genuinely frightening, thanks to a remorsefully blue cast to the cinematography, this thick stew can be tough to swallow under Tony Maylam's bumpy direction. [3 May 1992, p.C7]

The movie is full of dead ends, logical gaps and bizarre inconsistencies. Yet Donaldson is deft enough, both in his composition of shots and his direction of actors, to create a scene-by-scene sense of competence and control that carries the picture across some very rough spots.

A string of slapstick sequences at the end of Brain Donors...finally unleashes its potential for subversive hilarity. But the wait is long and not altogether compensated by Turturro's smooth delivery.

Deep Cover is a rousing entertainment but also a cunningly subversive piece of work, one that burrows from within genre conventions to defeat expectations and undermine smug certainties. It`s a movie that gets under your skin in a way that no amount of speech-making can.

As much as the film may try to peddle warmth and solidarity, it remains disturbingly cold and impersonal, limited by the formulaic writing of Bob Tzudiker and Noni White and stymied by Ortega's apparent distance from his cast. [10 Apr 1992]

Garris, filming mainly in a bobbing and weaving, hand-held camera style, keeps the scenes pared down to their functional essentials, wisely substituting speed for nuance. Sleepwalkers gets the job done. [13 Apr 1992, p.5C]

FernGully is surprisingly courageous in its politics and adventurous in its stylistic choices.

What "M.A.S.H." did to service comedies, what "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" did to westerns, what "The Long Goodbye" did to detective pictures, The Player does the to Hollywood success story. [24 April 1992]

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's "Delicatessen" is an exuberantly wacky, perversely droll black comedy with an ample dose of gentle whimsy-"Eating Raoul" out of "Mr. Hulot's Holiday." [17 Apr 1992]

Only director Apted`s admirably low-key, matter-of-fact approach to the material keeps it from becoming unbearably artificial.

It's a funny, frequently rousing film, with a warmly appealing acting partnership at its center-between basketball hustlers Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson.

With last week's elections in South Africa finally pointing the way toward a dismantlement of apartheid, it can't be said that the timing of "The Power of One" is particularly astute. But this is a film with no particular relationship to the real world in any case. [27 March 1992, p.M]

The movie has a big, warm, fuzzy heart - and not a bellylaugh in sight. [30 March 1992, p.5]

A genial if predictable romantic comedy about a couple of mismatched ice skaters who come together to try to win an Olympic medal in pairs figure skating. Oh, yes, they also fall in love. What results is sort of "Dirty Dancing on Ice," with Moira Kelly as a wealthy, spoiled, teenage ice princess with her own rink, and D.B. Sweeney as a rough-and-tumble hockey player at the end of his career. Directed by Paul Michael Glaser - yes, Starksy - directs cleanly, but the chemistry between the co-stars makes it work. [27 March 1992, p.C]

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Very little sense of the performers' humanity emerges from behind their stage roles, perhaps because Bogdanovich has directed the supposedly spontaneous dialogue to sound just as forced and theatrical as the scripted lines. [20 March 1992, p.2]

Along with the studies of individuals, "American Dream" is a sharp study of the future of American unionism. [03 Apr 1992, p.I2]

A good-hearted comedy of clashing cultures. The film finds great fun in coaxing out and mocking a range of regional differences, from mutually impenetrable accents to radical variants in dress codes, but miraculously never descends to broad, dismissive caricatures.

The story, however, was interesting and the minor characters, as well as the photography, were enjoyable to watch. Not to mention you get a preview of what may be next in home entertainment. [13 Mar 1992, p.N]

The movie`s underlying message seems to be that racial harmony can best be achieved by allowing white boys to beat the stuffing out of minority kids- that`s what really earns their love and respect. There must be a better way.

Despite the superficial Hitchcock trappings, from the Bay Area locales to trains and high places, the comedy thriller is neither particularly comic nor particularly thrilling, and after this outing, director Carpenter (Halloween, Starman) may wish to stay out of sight as well. [28 Feb 1992, p.B]

Medicine Man is a sympathetic project that gets done in by an excessively aggressive screenplay - one that keeps manufacturing artificial conflicts and false climaxes where some more relaxed character work would have gracefully done the trick. [07 Feb 1992, p.3]

What is genuinely chilling about Final Analysis lies not in the foolish plotting but in the completely callous attitude of the director and writer, who are interested in their characters only as compositional elements or, at best, game pieces to be pushed around a board. It`s a cold, distant work of no compassion and, finally, no importance.

The movie assumes its multiculturalism with grace and humor, moving between its various worlds with a delighted eye for distinguishing features and a rich sense of character. [14 Feb 1992, p.B7]

It's meant to be uplifting, but the material is so undernourished that bench-pressing a phone book already seems beyond it. None of the characters has been filled out beyond the underlying conventions and the few distinctive mannerisms contributed by the actresses who portray them.

It's a perfectly competent film, but the title quantity is the one thing this dry and earnest movie hasn't got.

Zanuck seems unsure whether to swoon or to scold, and the distance she preserves between herself and the characters occasionally feels smug and exploitative. Still, Leigh preserves her integrity throughout, adding an inflexible reality principle to the often extravagant goings-on. [10 Jan 1992, p.J]