A charming if overlong Canadian film. [01 Nov 1993, p.F8]

Above all, The 'Young Girls' Turn 25 is an homage by Varda to Demy, a loving and luminous companion film to Varda's Jacquot de Nante. [12 Jun 1997, p.F11]

You can feel your IQ plummeting while watching The Beverly Hillbillies but since you lose 10,000 brain cells a day anyway, why not have a few laughs?

Given the opportunities for gratuitous mayhem, director Stephen Hopkins, working from a script by Lewis Colick, is reasonably restrained. He’s aided by his cinematographer, Peter Levy, who gets some real variation out of what might have been undifferentiated darkness.

Old-fashioned in form but modern in psychological dynamic, it’s a film that you can lose yourself in, that washes over you like a warm and enveloping mist.

A leaden business from start to finish, and the film's stars, plus Hemsley as Hogan's lively sidekick, David Johansen as the crazed villain of the piece and Mother Love as Pendleton's feisty cook, can't overcome Gottlieb's shortcomings. [11 Oct 1993, p.F3]

The filmmakers are so driven to show us Mr. Jones as a harrowing free spirit that they don’t put much faith in his redemption. They’re as hooked on Jones the high-flyer as Libbie is.

A hopelessly callow, leaden-paced attempt at film noir, is of interest only because it was directed and co-written by Francis Coppola's nephew, Christopher, and because it has a far more stellar cast than is usual for low-budget B pictures. [28 Feb 1994, p.F8]

A rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent, that in its own quiet way works up a considerable emotional charge. [8 Oct 1993]

After sitting through M. Butterfly, you'll wonder why they even bothered to try. [01 Oct 1993]

A sweet-natured, high-spirited comedy, that rare movie that plays effectively to all ages. Even rarer, it celebrates genuine sportsmanship, placing the emphasis back on how the game is played in the face of the winning-is-everything philosophy that permeates every aspect of contemporary life. [1 Oct 1993, p.F4]

In an effort to keep the thrills coming the screenwriters scatter about too many loose ends; they don’t provide the precise cat-and-mouse plotting that used to be the hallmark of the well-made thriller but is now virtually nonexistent.

It’s trying for swank bubbliness--Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” crossed with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” But director Barry (“The Addams Family”) Sonnenfeld and screenwriters Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner are more suited to slapdash nutso comedy. The swings between clunky slapstick and “heartfelt” moments are jolting. (They’d be even more jolting if the slapstick or the heart tugs were effective.)

Combined with the terrific creature effects, this smug stew results in at least a couple-of-dozen moments of wildly inventive fun and roughly twice as many puerile groaners. “Freaked” is a whole lot more entertaining than most films that open in a single theater without press screenings, but neither Tod Browning’s nor Monty Python’s reputation is in danger just yet.

It's a highly enjoyable spree that doesn't add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don't necessarily want it to add up to anything -- that's part of its charm. [24 Sept 1993]

If we'd never seen another film on the horrors of apartheid, all this might have been more impressive, but we have and it isn't.

The unsurprising, one-note nature of The Good Son, the fact that it’s a bump-in-the-night movie where all the bumps are visible a mile ahead, sorely constricts any possibility of excitement.

The Program tries to travel light and heavy, and the combination of noggin-banging action and deep-think doesn’t gel. Latham, who has previously bestowed upon us the ersatz pop reportage of “Urban Cowboy” and “Perfect,” doesn’t tunnel very deep into the world of college athletics. What he and Ward come up with is fairly standard stuff that seems derived mostly from old movies.

A beautifully done adaptation of the novel, polished, elegant and completely cinematic. It is also a bit distant, a film that doesn't wear its feelings on its sleeve, but given the effects it's after, that would be counterproductive. [17 Sept 1993, Calendar, p.F-1]

Packed with keening witchery and wild delight, Into the West should delight the susceptible, even as, perhaps, it annoys the jaded.

Striking Distance opens and closes with a pair of jolting high-speed chases, the first over Pittsburgh streets, the second over the rivers that encircle the city’s center. In between is a lively mystery thriller that hurtles past plot contrivances and unintended laughs to deliver the goods as a satisfying escapist diversion. Like a paperback purchased at an airport just before you board a plane, it serves well its time-killing purpose but isn’t designed to stand up under close scrutiny.

The occasional action scenes are as appropriately tortuous as the tired teen-out-of-water plot is torturous. This is a kid-flick that’s speed-skating on one leg.

It’s a difficult movie to get a fix on, but the difficulty is what makes it special.

It is hard to say what is more dispiriting about True Romance the movie itself or the fact that someone somewhere is sure to applaud its hollow, dime-store nihilism and smug pseudo-hip posturing as a bright new day in American cinema. [10 Sept 1993]

Overbroad, underdone.

If The Joy Luck Club doesn’t make you cry, nothing will. In an age of contrived and mechanical sentimentality, its deeply felt, straight-from-the-heart emotions and the unadorned way it presents them make quite an impact. No matter how many hankies you bring with you, it won’t be enough.

It was probably worth every costly cent for Kim Basinger to get out of doing the dreadful Boxing Helena -- but you have to wonder whatever there was about it that persuaded her to do it in the first place. [3 Sept 1993]

Daring in its willingness to risk looking maudlin by dealing with extremes, Blue doesn't hesitate to explore spiritual and psychological states that are beyond many films.

For a film that first seems a throwaway, it has unusual intensity and grip. It’s not another over-reaching, under-financed “Terminator” or “Total Recall” wanna-be.

It has ideas as well as jolts, themes as well as special effects, characters as well as gore. But, as adapted by writer W. D. Richter and director Fraser Heston, these Things seem disappointingly diminished, squeezed and stuffed into a box too small.

This series ran out of steam long ago, and director Blake Edwards hasn't exactly rung in a new era by casting Italian superstar comic Roberto Benigni in the title role. He seems to have caught the director's lassitude: He's frenetic in a charmless, groggy way. His squiggly mimetic movements don't add up to a character, just a conceit.

At 100 minutes Careful begins to bore, whereas at half that running time it might well have been unalloyed fun. [05 Nov 1993, p.F12]

Minor reservations aside, The Man Without a Face is a moving and substantial achievement. [25 Aug 1993, p.1]

though it has its share of boggling action sequences and will serve as an acceptable introduction to domestic fans not familiar with Woo’s work, “Hard Target” is an awkward mixture, not on the level of the director’s best work, and leaves open the question of how well his style can adapt to Hollywood.

Clever and amusing though it often is, “Murder” is also Allen’s whiniest film to date, and your appreciation of its pleasures will fluctuate according to your tolerance for his Angst .

On the movie's feeble plus side are Richard Gant's acting (as the coroner), Manfredini's music and one funny joke in the last half-minute. On the minus side: ludicrous characters. Garbled nonstop gore. Persistent loud, clanging noises that give you the impression of being trapped inside a malfunctioning radiator. Shadowy lighting that makes you feel as if you're staggering around in the dark. [16 Aug 1993, p.F3]

Rather than a fresh breeze, it's the stale air of gilded calculation, the uncomfortable feeling that things are excessively just so, that overhangs much that is genuinely appealing about this film.

As a director, Mak must have a remarkable capacity for inspiring a trust in his actors that would permit them to appear in one uninhibited scene after another; to his credit, he never makes fools of them -- and he furthermore gets terrific performances from them in the most potentially embarrassing situations.

Soft-core porn dressed up in a silly story about a murder at a sex-therapy clinic. [5 March 1993, p.F20]

It wins a few, loses a few. It makes us laugh, gets mileage out of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man.” In the end, the actors save it, especially two of the actors: star Robert Downey Jr., who may have moved into the Robin Williams-Steve Martin-Whoopi Goldberg category, and supporting actor David Paymer, who never hits a false note.

Writer-director Steven Zaillian proves as much of a prodigy as his chess-playing subject, turning out a film that is a beautifully calibrated model of honestly sentimental filmmaking, made with delicacy, restraint and unmistakable emotional power. The feelings it goes for are almost never the easy or obvious ones, and the levers it presses are all the more effective because of that.

It's worth recalling here that Carpenter made two of the better horror films of the modern era (Halloween and the vastly underrated The Thing), but career-nadir Body Bags is best zipped up quickly and abandoned along the comeback road. [07 Aug 1993, p.F16]

A super-adrenalized stemwinder, a crisp and jolting melodrama that screws the tension so pitilessly tight it does everything but squeak.

As poignant and pointed as it is funny (and it is very funny), it dresses up familiar forms with modern twists and ends up an assured and amusing comedy of manners. [04 Aug 1993, p.F1]

Rising Sun has gotten everything backward. Mystifying when it should be clear and clear when it should be mystifying, it is the murkiest, most unsatisfying of thrillers. And the biggest mystery of all is how a project that appeared to have so much going for it could have gone so determinedly astray.

It's a comedy about maniacs: a tasteful murder-comedy, which isn't that laudable a goal.

You can't beat this film for demented heart-tugs though. When Prymaat looks at a big pile of cone-like eggplants in the supermarket and lets out a momentary shriek of horror, you know you're watching nutbrain perfection.

The boys are breezy; their companions glib and glittery. This big studio mix of bang-bang and badinage isn’t really a bad movie. But a lot of it suggests a fancy misfire: a super-powered evening at the town’s most expensive eatery, where everybody starts out psyched up to have Big Fun, and things start to slide. What happens? The food disappears. The music is too loud. The conversations are brittle, the jokes are pushed too hard, everyone laughs too much. And, at the end, in case your attention starts wandering, people start pulling out guns and killing each other.

The improv is convincing enough, and the actresses strong and loose enough, that you may really feel like you’re eavesdropping on actual conversation. And that’s intoxicating, in spots. But the chat grows so self-consciously therapeutic in this see-through “Lace” that most voyeurs will want to go peep in another TV window well before the sex talk turns to taxing teariness.

There's a muscular sincerity to this movie, a power and spread to its imagery that triumphs over the occasional candied purple patches or strained plot twists. [16 Jul 1993 Pg. F1]

So even at 96 minutes (and padded out with pointless, uncredited cameos by Garry and Penny Marshall) “Hocus” feels thin and undernourished from an adult point of view.

In truth, every part of this film trades so heavily on Eastwood's presence that it is impossible to imagine it with anyone else in the starring role. [09 Jul 1993 Pg. F1]

Relentlessly awful. Not even Terry Kiser’s wandering corpse is funny this time around.

The phrase "by the numbers" was invented for the way Harper crafts this script. After coming up with a good notion, opening and close, he simply fills up the middle innings with the detritus of several decades of TV sitcoms and high-concept kid movies. [07 Jul 1993, p.F1]

In the end, you can’t have much movie fun with freakiness if you aren’t willing to freak the movie out a little.

Actors as well as athletes have a prime of life, a time when everything they touch seems a miracle. And the crowning pleasure of watching Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in this rollicking version of Much Ado About Nothing is the way it allows us to share in that state of special grace, to watch the English-speaking world’s reigning acting couple perform at the top of their game.

The result is a top-drawer melodrama, a polished example of commercial movie-making that manages to improve on the original while retaining its best-selling spirit. [30 Jun 1993 Pg. F1]

We don't make those kind of Lubitsch-Wilder-Capra movies anymore, because it's hard to kid about what goes on behind bedroom walls when the bedroom doors have long since been flung open. So Ephron invents strategies to keep us, teased, outside the boudoir. [25 Jun 1993 Pg.F1]

You may not respect What’s Love Got to Do With It, but enjoying it is inescapable. A high-energy mixture of spectacular music, vigorous acting and cliched situations, this is a rough-and-rowdy fairy tale with a feminist subtext, and if that sounds perplexing, Love so pumps up the volume you won’t have much time to think about it.

This John Hughes production (citywide) based on the Hank Ketcham comic strip is pretty tepid tomfoolery but at least it’s not assaultive in the way that most kids’ films are nowadays. It’s trying for giggles instead of guffaws.

Last Action Hero does have occasional moments of humor, but overall it is lacking in fun or magic. [18 Jun 1993, p.1]

The film's plot may have more holes than one of Tequila's innumerable victims, but when a visual stylist like Woo is at his peak, no one even thinks of caring.[30 Apr 1993, p.F6]

All the imagination and effort (including 18 months of pre-production) that went into making the dinosaurs state-of-the-art exciting apparently left no time to make the people similarly believable or involving. In fact, when the big guys leave the screen, you'll be tempted to leave the theater with them. [11 June 1993, Calendar, p.F-1]

The role fits Fox like a glove but perhaps at this point in his career he should be scouting for something less form-fitting.

Make no mistake, the high-flying stunts in director Renny Harlin's film are definitely state of the art, and while they're going on, the film works up a serious level of excitement. But as soon as the action stops and the inevitable talking begins, Cliffhanger falls to earth with a considerable thud. [28 May 1993 Pg. F1]

Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too.

The movie knocks your eyes out, at the same time it dulls the mind’s eye. Ultimately, it’s one more stop in the arcade, beckoning, waiting to soak up time and money.

Sankofa unfolds as a kind of oratorio--the film’s music in itself is incredibly rich and intoxicating--in which people deal with terrible cruelty through ritual and incantations of the African gods. It is a celebration of the strength of black people, in drawing upon their spiritual roots, to defy their oppressors--past and present alike.

Exceptionally well-crafted, Made in America is the kind of picture Hollywood often aspires to but rarely succeeds in bringing off -- smart and sophisticated with a wide appeal. [28 May 1993, p.F1]

Their instincts as filmmakers override their instincts as moralizers. Menace II Society is best--and most shocking--when it just sets out its horrors and lets us find our own way. [26 May 1993, Calendar, p.F-1]

The new erotic thriller that somehow manages to make voyeurism seem about as exciting as one of Cher's infomercials.

[An] often hilarious film...Abrahams and Proft’s nonstop throwaway humor keeps spirits lifted and a smile on our faces, and it also has the admirable effect of deflating those action movies that exploit violence in the name of a pious, if dubious, patriotism.

Ward's "Map" is a wildly ambitious film and, often, a wildly beautiful one--and if it isn't quite a masterpiece, if we sense that Ward's resources aren't enough for the World War II London scenes, in the end, any flaws or lapses simply may not matter. Movies, especially ones with a broad epic canvas and international logistics, don't often get this intimate. They don't give you such a sense of nerves stripped raw, joy or misery nakedly expressed.

Violent and over-sexy as this movie may be, offensive as some may find it, it never loses its grinning good humor, its revisionist drive, its shoot-the-works spirit. It’s a killer entertainment--with an accent on “kill.”

Though replete with amusing situations and clever lines, its strongest suit is the delicately pitched comic performances of its actors, most especially star Kevin Kline.

What's exciting about Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is that, in Jason Scott Lee, the movies have created a new star out of an old star. The film is a tribute to Bruce Lee but it's also a tribute to the transforming powers of performance. Lee does justice to Bruce Lee while, at the same time, creating a character out of his own fierce resources. He is, quite literally, smashing.

A sincere attempt at epic filmmaking, it has been unable to translate its aspirations into believable, non-cliched cinema. What unrolls instead is approximately three hours of violent, cartoonish posturing incongruously set in the realistically evoked milieu of East Los Angeles. [30 Apr 1993, p.F1]

Tokyo Decadence is likely to stay with you long after the theater lights come up.

[A] deft and delightful romantic comedy of errors.

King and Romero are a natural match, and though this isn't the best of the King-derived horror movies--The Shining and The Dead Zone probably are--it's close.

This sentimental stew is not without its flavors, and the cast tries hard to be winsome and adorably distraught.

On the plus side, this is probably the only film ever made that credits a “Moose Unit.” There are some great shoots of moose.

Boiling Point is taut and crisp, and when it’s required, Harris handles violence with swift dispatch rather than the large-scale fireworks that have become de rigueur.

He [Caton-Jones] has made the film all of a piece, making sure that the three lead performances complement rather than overwhelm each other. [9 Apr 1993, p.F1]

Redford's Gage is so busy being exquisitely sensitive and polite he neglects to project any energy, and without it the crucial morning-after part of the movie gradually collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. [07 Apr 1993 Pg. F1]

This “Field of Dreams” field has been plowed so many times that the land is no longer arable. Isn’t it time to cultivate a few new cliches?

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

Whatever magic the first two movies may have had -- and it wasn't always that apparent to anyone over the age of 10 -- has long since congealed, like stale pizza. Or mock turtle soup. [22 Mar 1993, p.F9]

Not good enough to be remembered past next week, not bad enough to get worked up about, “Point” is a factory product pure and simple, something to throw onto the screen until the next something comes along.

Most movies about black inner-city life have been so male-oriented that Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. seems like a bulletin from the other side of the tracks. It’s more of a harbinger of better things to come than a solid achievement in its own right, but it’s moving in a fresh, invigorating direction.

The movie has bounce and bite, but it skitters around too much. Its needle is hip-hopping around between too many grooves.

Fire in the Sky, a UFO movie, doesn't fly. It claims to be based on an actual case of alien abduction but the movie is as phony as a $3 bill. [13 Mar 1993, p.F4]

Though its unhurried pace and ultimately sweet nature give Mad Dog and Glory the feeling more of a diversion than a major work, those who get into its eccentric comic rhythms will definitely be charmed. [5 Mar 1993, p.1]

Except for that music and a bit of the acting, Swing Kids is unsatisfactory from just about every point of view. [05 Mar 1993]

Amos & Andrew starts out with a promising premise but everything in it is off -- the timing, the tone, the performances. It's the kind of film that makes you wonder from moment to moment just what E. Max Frye, the writer-director, had in mind. Maybe nothing? [05 Mar 1993, p.F10]

Falling Down encourages a gloating sense that we the long-suffering victims are finally getting our splendid revenge. The ultimate hollowness of that kind of triumph reflects the shallowness of a film all too eager to serve it up. [26 Feb 1993, p.1]

Ash's dialogue keeps the movie just goofy enough that even audiences that don't go in for schlock-horror phantasmagorias will be tickled. [19 Feb 1993, Calender, p.F-8]

The movie musical may not have been dead after all, just resting up until this lot came around. [12 Feb 1993, p.F10]