Graced with good-humored comic energy, they overcome sizable script problems and turn Ron Shelton's White Men Can't Jump into a sassy and profane urban fairy tale that finds laughs in some very clever places.

Seeing a movie that doesn’t know the meaning of shameless, that refuses to worry about plausibility, that acts as if subtlety hadn’t been invented yet, does have a very basic kind of intrinsically cinematic pull.

Though it’s basically a kids’ movie with a cartoonish structure, it’s laced with lewd innuendo: jokes that suggest teen-age sex, homosexuality and even pedophilia. The core of the humor is raunchy, but the tone is sunny and even-tempered. It even tries to go for a few inspirational moments: feminist statements or sermonettes about overcoming fear and realizing potential.

The off-the-rink sequences bristle with as much passion and energy as the dazzling skating sequences, featuring some of the world’s greatest figure skaters.

A reminder of the difference between exhilaration and exhaustion, between tension and hysteria, between eroticism and exhibitionism. The line may be fine, but it is real enough to separate the great thrillers from the also-rans. And Basic Instinct is not a great thriller.

What you’re left with is a lot of bustle and jabber, and occasional sparks from the cast. Caine has some fine comic moments of high exasperation, there’s great wit in the way Burnett arches her eyebrows and, as a besotted trouper, Denholm Elliott’s puttery calm is like a balm amid the delirium. It’s a delirium that finally seems more appropriate to the sitcom than to the stage.

Seeing working-class Americans standing up for themselves with eloquence and dignity is enough to make you proud, but seeing how futile it finally can be for union members to dream the American dream calls forth a different set of emotions entirely.

Because it is confident of its story and its powers, “Howards End” takes the time to establish itself, to allow its characters the space to demonstrate subtlety and complexity.

Given the temptations to goof it up, Pesci's performance in My Cousin Vinny is something of a triumph. As Vincent Gambini, a swaggering pint-sized New York lawyer who only recently passed the bar on his sixth try, Pesci modulates his usual psycho-nuttiness and gives it some recognizably human, even melancholy, undertones. The movie is a very mixed bag, but it's not quite the dumb fest that the TV spots make it out to be. Pesci gives Vinny's ultimate vindication a note of bittersweet triumph.

Every scene in this cautionary tale about science running amok has spectacular views, unusual camera angles and moves, or dazzlingly outre computer effects. And every scene, story-wise, gets mushier and more outlandish or perfunctory--until the movie seems disengaged from itself.

Though it doesn't really work, there are enjoyable things about it.

It has a trashy, low-road, rabble-rousing spirit but it also has high-road pretensions. It’s a violent movie that wants to make an anti-violence “statement,” the oldest ploy in the boxing film genre.

The special effects tricks are often nifty, but where's the wit? Memoirs of an Invisible Man doesn't earn its seriousness. It fades into invisibility while you're watching it.

Directed by Mellencamp from a script by Larry McMurtry, the result is a curious, wayward blend of small-town anomie and intrigue and hero-worshipping narcissism. [21 Feb 1992, p.F10]

The Wayne's World concept, which, egged on by a rabid studio audience, works so beautifully in skit format, ends up feeling dragged out and energy-less at feature length. [14 Feb 1992 Pg. F1]

There are nice things in Medicine Man but it only works perfectly when it leaves its characters up a tree. [07 Feb 1992, p.F10]

Watching this San Francisco-based film is a bit like looking at "Vertigo" through several heavy layers of scrim.

Despite the awkwardness of much of the staging, and the unevenness of the script, the movie does give you a sense of real people living real lives. [14 Feb 1992, p.B9]

Fried Green Tomatoes is a folksy enigma, an ordinary film blessed with a number of out-of-the-ordinary performances. Not only does its plot deal in part with women stuck in unhappy circumstances, its very existence makes you wonder how its trapped actresses managed to make the best of a dramatically disheartening situation. [27 Dec 1991, p.F1]

Though it is a vivid, promising piece of work from first-time director Ernest R. Dickerson, it also shows how difficult it's becoming to deal with this material in any kind of fresh manner.

The film’s premise is promising but undeveloped.

But the film isn’t just a well-made TV-style thriller either. It’s on to something--the way upwardly mobile parents, hoping to make their lives more professionally fulfilling, unwittingly bring the danger of the unknown into their lives.

With moments of odd, dark humor sprinkled among the violence, this traditional study of psycho kittens in love breaks just enough new ground to be an impressive piece of work.

Light Sleeper, with its cool, critical view of life on the edge, is no film to dismiss or ignore. It's a failure perhaps, but an honorable failure. If it isn't saved by grace, it has many saving graces.

It's a movie for people who really dig Cronenberg's mulchy fixations-and probably for no one else. [27 Dec 1991]

A poetic attempt to re-create a bygone culture as not only a role model for the present but also a positive mythology for the future, the movie's strong visual qualities and epic emotions make it a bracing remedy to swallow.

As sanctimonious as it is sincere, this is a well-meaning picture that is seriously stuck on itself, that can't hide its air of self-satisfaction. [25 Dec 1991]

To her credit, Streisand has turned in a handsome, seamless piece of very traditional Hollywood direction. This is mainstream filmmaking at its main-streamest, smooth and glossy and reminiscent, in fact, of the kind of work Sydney Pollack did with Streisand in "The Way We Were" and without her in "Out of Africa."

The best thing about High Heels are the performances - [Victoria Abril]'s tense, voracious daughter, Parades' star-turn mother, the sinister Bose, the arrogant Atkine - and the lucidity of Almodovar's narrative style, which by now seems as natural as breathing. [20 Dec 1991]

The movie is like a big, smug, sunny ball of fluff, batting around in a crystalline cage. It's bright and well-meaning, but there's little to grab onto or feel. Not even the presence of those expert actor/farceurs, Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, give it any real presence or bite. [20 Dec 1991, p.16]

Disturbing, infuriating yet undeniably effective, less a motion picture than an impassioned. [20 Dec 1991]

Levinson has always been a director who completely understands the concept of the American Dream, and his sensibility is perfect for this story of a man who cared so little about money that he was willing to stake everything he was or ever hoped to be on a crackpot scheme to turn a corner of Nevada desert into the pleasure dome of the American West.

The best things about The Last Boy Scout are the editing, Bill Medley's singing, a few moments of Noble Willingham villainy and Willis--whose weary, exasperated style exactly suits this kind of material. But the worst things about Scout are its slickness and self-confidence. A story about lonely heroism in a sick age should be a little hipper to what's really heroic and what's really sick.

Jim Jarmusch gives us five different, self-contained episodes in five taxis in five cities on one night. The episodic structure breaks up Jarmusch's usual funky minimalism: It makes it less of a drag. Episodic movies usually don't work; we seem to settle into a story just when it ends and we're thrust into the next one. But Jarmusch's film may be a special case. Unbroken, his vague, meandering scenarios have sometimes dawdled into oblivion. But here, as in his last film, Mystery Train, the anomie is at least given some variation.

For very much like Peter, it has clearly gotten harder for this director to break free of the lure of material things and believe in simple magic. And whatever problems his Hook has, there are none that making the film on half of its budget wouldn't have cured.

There's an urgency about "Star Trek VI" that comes from its deliberate topicality. [6 Dec. 1991, p.F1]

The movie is twinkly and antiseptic so that when tragedy hits big in the final half hour, it seems coercive. It's like a pipsqueak Terms of Endearment.

Wised-up as well as traditional, with a striking and detailed look and a strong storyline, it is sure to charm a wide audience both now and for a long time to come.

It makes clearer much that was so vague in the original; it even jokes about how confusing its premise is. In short, audiences who made the first film successful enough to warrant a second will be getting a bit more for their money.

A terrifically effective scare show, a virtuoso work of cinematic terror incorporating superior cinematography and production design -- and, most important of all, comic relief. [04 Nov 1991, p.F6]

You feel protective about Leigh's work because its almost indescribable virtues touch the heart, yet far from being some delicate flower, Life Is Sweet has the wild, brazen, anything-goes energy of a 2-year-old, willing to take chances that would freeze the blood of another, more timidly conventional film.

Two Evil Eyes could give youngsters nightmares and is absolutely not for the squeamish--special effects maestro Tom Savini supplies the grisliness--but Romero and Argento fans are not likely to be disappointed by these tales of the supernatural.

No matter what you've been used to, Idaho is something completely different, a film that manages to confound all expectations, even the ones it sets up itself. [18 Oct 1991]

It’s one of those movies that seem fabricated for a shopping mall: decorative, pretty, vacuous.

Chances are you'll have a good time with Frankie & Johnny, but you won't respect yourself in the morning. It's that kind of movie.

Over the years the movies have made precious little use of the distinctive talents of Eartha Kitt, but adults who accompany children to Ernest Scared Stupid, Disney's silly Halloween kiddie horror comedy, can be grateful for her stylish, witty presence.

Even though it ends up falling off the tracks--maybe even because it falls off the tracks-- Homicide absolutely holds your interest with the passion that powerfully felt but ultimately screwy efforts often have.

Ricochet is genuinely scary, suspenseful and disturbing in the best sense.

It’s not that Dogfight doesn’t have any story. In fact it has two, but neither one has anything like the weight of a feature, and the connection between the two is too tenuous for even a director as capable as Nancy Savoca (making her first film since the much-lauded True Love) to bridge.

The Man in the Moon, a gently scary ballad of a movie, is about how love can open your eyes and then blind them with tears. Perhaps that sounds overly sentimental. But this deeply moving film, directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Mark Rydell, from a script by first-time scenarist Jenny Wingfield, never strays into bathos.

The film itself is a genial, slight, entirely predictable football comedy, but it serves Bakula well.

Although overly self-involved, Penn is surprisingly focused as a director.

A proverbial whimper of a finale, Freddy's Dead, the sixth in the series, feels like the product of people who have no vested interest in keeping their franchise alive...You notice almost immediately how underpopulated the movie feels--by ideas, by special effects, even by phobic young cast members waiting to fall asleep and be slaughtered.

Whenever The Commitments threatens to get bogged down in its own problems, Parker is savvy enough to pull it back with more of that invigorating music on the soundtrack. When that band starts to sing, the screen fills with genuine life, and that is too rare a commodity for anyone to second-guess for long. [14 Aug 1991, p.F1]

Mancini's script, here as before, never rises above simple sadistic button-pushing. [30 Aug 1991, p.F13]

Branagh has mastered the tricky high-wire act of simultaneously kidding the conventions he is being absolutely faithful to, allowing us to squeal with both fright and knowing laughter. His is a film lover's film [23 Aug 1991, Calendar, p.F1]

Rourke and Johnson are worthy of better, as is Australian director Simon Wincer, best known for his Emmy-winning direction of the miniseries Lonesome Dove.

Exhilarating and frustrating at the same time... the Coens' skill is such that you're not averse to following them anywhere, but every once in a while you can't help wishing they weren't so dead set against throwing the rest of us at least a hint of what's on their minds. [21 Aug 1991]

This is Short's picture, and though he can do no wrong in it, he is not in a position to carry the whole thing. His fans will dutifully trek to it, laughing at his skill and wondering when Hollywood will finally do him justice. It's a hell of a good question.

Double Impact offers two Jean-Claude Van Dammes for the price of one, and for fans of the Belgian-born martial arts star, it delivers the goods. It’s a solid, fast-moving action-adventure set largely in Hong Kong, which is dynamically photographed by Richard Kline.

Doc Hollywood draws its energy almost exclusively from cliche. The cornball rowdiness is partially redeemed by the good cast.

Return to the Blue Lagoon, which was produced and directed by reliable TV veteran William A. Graham, who should know better, might make it with junior high audiences. The Fiji locales are gorgeous and the Basil Pouledouris score unashamedly lush.

Wildly entertaining, deeply humanitarian and fundamentally educational film.

Hartley has such a spare, controlled touch in this film that this landscape seems both realistic and fantastic. [16 Aug 1991]

It's a risky movie, and an uneven one. But the impulses behind it are darker and stronger than in most of his previous comedies. Good or bad--and Life Stinks definitely has a weak, undeveloped side--I liked it.

So much for the plot; what's important is Maddin's witty, knowing evocation of vintage movie kitsch. [11 Dec 1991, p.F11]

If people here feel trapped, despairing of a way out, it is Singleton's gift to make us empathize with their hopelessness, and make us wonder, along with them, how long this must go on.

It's a movie that's almost all style, all technique. It doesn't seem to be inhabited by people, thoughts or feelings, but by great coruscating patterns of light crashing over and over us, repeatedly--almost, but not quite, drowning out a constant buzz of cliches.

Regarding Henry is a breath of stale air, an unconvincing rehabilitation of 1960s values for a 1990s audience that is bound and determined to take the easy way out whenever possible. Which is really too bad, because there are signs along the way that this could have been a less manipulative, more genuine exploration of what really matters in life instead of the slick Hollywood shuffle it turned out to be.

Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.

More elaborate than the original, but just as shrewdly put together, it cleverly combines the most successful elements of its predecessor with a number of new twists (would you believe a kinder, gentler Terminator?) to produce on e hell of a wild ride, a Twilight of the Gods that takes no prisoners and leaves audiences desperate for mercy. [3 July 1991, Calendar, p.F-1]

The only thing about The Naked Gun that won't make you laugh is the film itself...To mix a metaphor in appropriate style, the filmmakers have really beaten a dead horse into the ground with this one.

Kevin Costner very definitely isn't Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and his noticeable awkwardness in that rebel's role underlines the problems this muddled, fitfully effective version of a most durable English legend has in deciding which face it wants to present to the world at large. While the makers of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves may have set out to bury the poor old duffer of Sherwood Forest in a welter of trendy banter, they have ended up burying themselves as well.

The funny sequences and dumb jokes in City Slickers are so much more entertaining than the male-bonding blather that you wonder what the filmmakers had in mind. Did they think they would cheat audiences if they didn't also throw in the tears and the hugs? In comedy, the only cheat for audiences is not being funny. [7 June 1991, p.F-1]

This is a movie whose morality is as banal as its humor--and that's saying something. Basically, it's standard post '80s high-concept drivel, yet another marketing hook in search of comedy, tension, characters, atmosphere, compelling narrative drive--everything we used to see in movies before the hooks and the ad campaigns swallowed them up.

[Lee's] work is less strident here, more controlled, less in-your-face explosive than for instance “Do the Right Thing,” but for all of that, no less penetrating, no less troubling. Given his passion, there’s no way it could be otherwise.

A spirited and amusing comedy that posits the engaging notion that the stars of TV soap operas have lives as screwed up and crazy as the characters they play, if not more so.

Even Willis seems a bit bewildered at times, as if asking himself how he managed to get into such a mess. [24 May 1991]

The point of this film seems to be that wholesomeness is a sign of maturity, and it partially cancels out the performers. Juliet Stevenson breaks through anyway. She has a charged core, like Judy Davis, and she makes you root for her passage to happiness. [8 May 1991, p.6]

Drop Dead Fred is an erratic stab at making madness sensible, a slapstick nightmare that goes too sane, that tries too hard to be both good and rotten.

It’s not the gem it wants to be, but it’s good in comparison to many of the sensation-hungry pictures around it; it’s not just a movie only a mother could love.

By being so provocatively candid about what for her is small stuff, Madonna understands that the reality of the film, the fact that she has in truth revealed very little of herself, really won't be noticed. What we get is exactly what she wants us to see, nothing more, and, certainly nothing less. [10 May 1991, p.F1]

An empty-headed movie: one more gargantuan, excessive, over-the-top action thriller with one more superhero -- this time ex-linebacker Brian "The Boz" Bosworth -- battling dozens of deranged villains single-handedly while trucks, motorcycles and cars crash all around him. [20 May 1991, p.F6]

Even more feeble than the 1987 original.

The craftsmanship that went into the making of this film has to have been formidable, yet a key part of its enjoyment is its throwaway, unpretentious charm.

In the end, Switch isn’t a top-grade Edwards movie--though it shares with his best, a sparkling directorial panache and charm, a charge of risque humanism, a wizardly delight in body language.

This man whose family was almost entirely wiped out must feel like he's the recipient of a great cosmic joke, with his survival as the punch line. Europa Europa does justice to the joke.

Material like this might have worked if the moviemakers had played it completely crazy and over-the-top, if they'd made it a true satire of the American upper class facing its worst nightmare. But the tone of Toy Soldiers suggests its makers might have tried to turn Animal House into a triumph of the spirit story, too. [26 Apr 1991, p.F10]

For those of us who don’t fancy ourselves connoisseurs of badness, A Kiss Before Dying is less than delectable. It’s a real botch-a-thon, and it gets worse as it goes along.

To say that Oscar, Sylvester Stallone’s latest attempt to become king of comedy, is funnier than might be expected (which it is) is really not saying that much.

Throughout the film Rudolph is working hard to put this thing over, mixing in slow-motion and shock cuts. But his heart is not really in it. His technique is both too good and not enough for this material, and it doesn't sit right. He's trying to glamorize dread. [19 Apr 1991, p.F1]

An elegant farce written and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. At first, frankly, The Object of Beauty is not as much fun as you might expect it to be, but ends up having more to offer both the audience and Tina and Jake than either we or they suspect. [12 April 1991, p.F1]

But it entertained me more than Seagal's first three movies. There's more verbal energy and atmosphere, more humor: in-your-face, scabrous, wise-guy macho humor.

Haynes says the theme of his movie is deviance, which seems right. It's also clear that the poison of the title is, partially, society's attitudes toward the three deviant characters -- whom it beats up, imprisons, hunts down. That's what makes the reaction to Poison so ironic. The foes of the movie -- and the people who want to take down the NEA because of it -- seem bent on proving that its paranoia isn't a fantasy. [03 Apr 1991, p.F1]

An intermittently funny if unsteady mixture of first-rate Brooks Angst, and set-ups that never quite pay off. [22 Mar 1991, p.F6]

At its best, it's about madness disguised as utter rationalism, utter dispassion, noblesse oblige. As such, in odd moments, it chills through to the bone and beyond.

What makes the film worth seeing anyway is the brazen richness of the production. It's as if the filmmakers, closed off from making even a suggestively sensual experience, threw their energies into the colors and textures of their people's lives. [06 Mar 1991, p.F7]

There are worse people to be locked inside a movie with than these two, but they’re not given anything to do . You don’t want to hear about how they can’t relate to their fathers; you don’t want to hear about their fantasies of ditching the Midwest and jetting to L.A.