This is filmmaking at the very peak of the medium`s potential.

Walken seems to run on his own alternative fuel source - he's always easier to observe than to understand - which makes him the natural villainous hero for Abel Ferrara's seedy King of New York, a film more interested in leaving impressions than spinning a smooth narrative. [11 Dec 1990, p.9]

Pacific Heights wastes our time and the talent of three top actors, Michael Keaton, Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine. What possibly attracted them to this inconsequential exploitation film about a tenant from hell terrorizing his landlords in an effort to steal their home? We keep waiting for the film to develop some larger meaning or greater purpose. It never does. [29 Sept 1990, p.C2]

This is a very strong midlife-crisis movie about women. [28 Sep 1990, p.C]

Hyams' script may lack emotional thrust, but it's economical, and it tweaks the genre's traditional heroism, if only faintly. [21 Sep 1990, p.H]

The sentiments expressed are really no more noble or refined than those of a Chuck Norris picture, though Joano's style tries to stamp art all over the sequence. It sure isn't that, but it isn't good action either. [14 Sep 1990, p.B]

Though critical of the director's selfish character, the story does make a case for the macho man as someone who won't tolerate phonies. [14 Sep 1990, p.C]

Though it does know how to hammer home a point, Hardware doesn't always have matching nuts and bolts. It has an anarchic quality, a jolting, disorienting rhythm that makes us unsure of time frame in certain stretches and of motivation in others. [14 Sep 1990, p.I]

Postcards From the Edge is alive only when it's being as mean and vicious as its little heart can be, which is more than often enough. [12 Sep 1990, p.1]

All of the performances are first-rate; Pesci stands out, though, with his seemingly unscripted manner. GoodFellas is easily one of the year's best films. [21 September 1990, Friday, p.C]

The American distributor of John Woo's amazing Hong Kong feature, The Killer, is taking the easy way out and selling the picture as camp. But this movie is no joke: It's one of the most intense, passionate pieces of filmmaking you are ever likely to see. [10 May 1991, p.H]

What no plot summary of Darkman can provide is how much director Raimi ("The Evil Dead") brings to the party. In addition to giving us a conflicted hero - more disturbed than Batman - Raimi fills every action sequence and even routine plot scenes with fresh images that reflect his Darkman's rage. [24 Aug. 1990]

After Dark, My Sweet does capture Thompson's characteristic mood - a sort of lurid fatality, where moral questions have long since dropped out and there isn't much use struggling - but it doesn't have much of his distinctive, disruptive texture. The film is much too smooth for that, much too professional and much too carefully executed. [24 Aug 1990, p.H]

A movie about a pair of garbagemen that falls into the general category of refuse. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

There are moments of genuine charm and solid invention, but it's a film that doesn't believe enough in itself. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

Pump Up the Volume, an exceedingly well-written teenager-full-of-angst melodrama about a high school student who operates a pirate radio broadcast that criticizes parents and teachers while revealing the turmoil of adolescence.

Someone should have told Steve Martin that, prodigiously talented though he is, his over-the-top caricature of a displaced mobster could not sustain an entire movie, particularly one as scattershot as My Blue Heaven. [20 Aug 1990, p.2]

Eventually, Blatty's cat-and-mouse game with the viewer gets a little tiresome, and his own story, by definition, leads to a corner: an all-out, free-for-all exorcism finish that seems a bit dated now.

Veteran director Arthur Hiller keeps the vehicle galloping along with a sure hand, careful not to let any of it sink to a fatal level of believability and always on the prowl for whatever wit can be harvested from any gizmo at hand. [17 Aug 1990, p.B]

And yet there is enough of a core of sincerity to turn even the most preposterous moments-such as the film's dream-sequence finale-into something moving and true: You buy the feelings, even as the situations degenerate into the ludicrous and absurd. [17 Aug 1990, Friday, p.C]

The confusing screenplay, by John Eskow and Richard Rush, makes a few fumbling attempts to get a plot going (Downey crash-lands and has to be rescued by Gibson; later, their CIA bosses try to frame them for drug smuggling), but mainly the movie tries to get by on attitude, which is a mistake when Mel Gibson is its main perpetrator. [10 Aug 1990]

Jack Nicholson's impressive, convoluted and moody sequel to Chinatown. [10 Aug 1990]

It's much to Schumacher's credit that Flatliners, for all of its crazy excess, does not turn into camp.

A messy but nonetheless compelling movie.

A far more stylistically assured film than its fey predecessor, though it still carries almost no conviction.

Dugan can`t find a tone that allows him to preserve the shock of the gags while minimalizing their physical painfulness.

Though it`s a handsome film, carefully staged and courageously low-key, the transition to the screen only exaggerates the disposable nature of the material while depriving it of the novel`s one stylistic strength, its unreliable narrator.

If the film's diffidence is its greatest charm, it is also, in the end, its greatest limitation-it's a movie that seems afraid to declare itself, to make the big move that might propel it from the pleasant to the memorable. [03 Aug 1990]