Winkler is so interested in making Merrill admirable that he neglects to make him interesting. That's true of the movie too. In the ethics department, it's commendable. In the drama department, it's bland. [15 Mar 1991, p.F1]

Produced and directed by Mark DiSalle, an alumnus of the Van Damme movies Kickboxer and Bloodsport, The Perfect Weapon moves well, and its many action and martial sequences are crisply staged. But unless you are a die-hard martial-arts fan, be prepared to be thoroughly bored by such a strictly by-the-numbers plot.

Movies about political corruption generally bog down in moralistic quicksands. Few American films have the courage to take their cynicism to the limit, and True Colors is no exception. This Capra-corny reliance on the ultimate sagacity of The People doesn’t jibe with the film’s fine edge of avarice. Tim is righteousness incarnate, and Spader can’t seem to pull a performance out of all that goodness. He is uncomfortably upstanding in the role. He looks as though he would rather swap roles with Cusack.

Reunion is a beautiful elegy to friendship in all its complexities and seeming contradictions and its astonishing emotional capacity to endure.

Rifkin has spun a pitch-black fable of show business at its sleaziest and most ephemeral.

Like the movies its modeled after, it's shallow, frequently silly. But there's something about the mix--maybe something about Parillaud as the screechy, dangerous Nikita--that may make the movie a powerful engine of wish-fulfillment. [12 Apr 1991, Calendar, p.F-10]

Bad as the overall design remains, individual scenes keep sparking alive, partly because the dialogue, or delivery, seems fresh, and improvisatory; partly because Van Peebles, in his directorial debut, figures out unusual or athletic camera designs for every scene. It's obvious he has talent, equally obvious there's no way this story can work right, no matter how strenuous the staging.

It's one hell of a ride and a real, roaring rock movie. [01 Mar 1991]

The sequel is every bit as amusing as the original, though probably grislier. [08 Mar 1991, p.F16]

Maybe the whole project should have been junked from the get-go.

Martin Sheen, in his directing debut, shows enormous empathy for his actors, each of whom emerges as a fully rounded character. [15 Mar 1991, p.F20]

Hopkins' insinuating performance puts him right up there with the screen's great bogymen. [13 February 1991, Calendar, p.F-1}

Everything that might have set Sleeping With the Enemy apart and made it memorable--textured central characters, psychological depth or a shred of believability--has been swept aside in the rush to make the movie a luxury item, sleekly gorgeous, blankly watchable, not unlike its star Julia Roberts.

The Neverending Story 2 is a story you may want desperately to end. Soon. [11 Feb 1991, p.F10]

Popcorn is such fun for lovers of schlock (intended or otherwise) that it hardly matters where it is set.

Most of the rest of this Hamlet effective or lovely as parts of it may be, just keeps sawing at the air in a drafty hall and pouring all its light on Mel Gibson and his angelic stubble. [18 Jan 1991]

London's Fang was, fundamentally, a loner and a killer; the movie Fang is a big, friendly dog, temporarily derailed into the fight game by snarling villains. That makes this White Fang, rather oversunny, overaffirmative, primarily a movie for children. But I liked it anyway, despite the softened tone, the coincidences, despite Hawke's constantly gaping mouth.

Depardieu and MacDowell seem to share an uncommon honesty and generosity of spirit. So as the sexual tension between their characters grows, their scenes together are charmingly open and uncompetitive. The sense is that if these two ever become lovers, it will be because they have first become friends. On that startling note, in today's climate of explicit, loveless love, the film floats to its heady conclusion. [11 Jan 1991, p.6]

Being able to kick people in the head, at least while they’re standing up, is no negligible talent--though Lionheart is a pretty negligible movie. It has that grotesquely off-scale exaggeration of many post-'80s action movies.

Not even Seth's elegance and worldly warmth, nor his short speech about the virtues of his country's culture, is enough to give balance to the film's nearly two-hour portrayal of harassment, inequality and suppression. [11 Jan 1991, p.F1]

Warlock is supposedly about the battle between Good and Evil, but movies about the battle between Heckle and Jeckle have more terror or profundity. [17 Jan 1991, p.F12]

Though definitely one of the best American movies of the year--a work of high ensemble talent and intelligence, gorgeously mounted and crafted, artistically audacious in ways that most American movies don't even attempt--it's still a disappointment… It's not the capstone we might have wanted Coppola to make. [23 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.9]

Allen may consider Alice to be a minor jest before his next Big One, but there are pleasures in its small-time ambitions that sometime elude him on his more ambitious projects.

It would be lying not to say that some of the moviemakers here aren't working at the top of their craft, or that the movie won't reach audiences. On its own terms, Kindergarten Cop is nearly fool-proof: the last word in glib, shallow, soulless, spuriously warm-hearted commercialism. [21 Dec 1990, p.1]

A blob of good intentions. Good intentions do not a good movie make. 

So what was rich, journalistic and precisely observed is now overstated, under-textured and cartooned, in playwright/screenwriter Michael Cristofer’s witless screenplay. Certainly Wolfe’s canvas might lend itself to a broad approach, but broad like “Dr. Strangelove,” not broad like the Three Stooges.

Schepisi may have made the first truly and intelligently uplifting spy movie. His style here is magisterial yet playful: The melancholy grandeur of Russia, on view at last for the whole world to see, has turned him into an eye-popping enthusiast.

As well-meaning and "sensitive" as Awakenings is, it never rises much above the level of a grade-A tear-jerker. It achieves most of its effects by tenderizing raw material into something marshmallowy. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]

Perhaps the most original movie fantasy creation of the year: an icon of tenderness and artistic alienation that clings, stickum-like, to your mind's eye and the softest, most woundable parts of your mass-culture heart. [7 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Even as an Eastwood vehicle -- an appropriate term for a movie about a cutthroat car-theft ring -- the film is a warmed-over compost. [07 Dec 1990, p.F10]

Diamond-hard and mesmerizing… Bening and Cusack are perfection at what they are doing, she twinkly as any rhinestone, he dangerously passive; it's hardly their fault that Huston is the motor of the piece and so ferociously seductive that one cannot look away from her. [5 Dec 1990]

Well-nigh flawless, with scarcely a moment's lull. [18 Dec 1990, p.F1]

As compelling as Misery often is, I can't say that I really enjoyed it a whole lot. It's too flat-footed and vise-like. Reiner doesn't provide the kind of nasty, sophisticated finesse that might have lifted the film out of pulpdom and into more Hitchcockian terrain. [30 Nov 1990, p.F1]

With Eating the ever-idiosyncratic independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom continues his intimate, spontaneous, witty but always compassionate observations of compulsive, neurotic human behavior--and reveals his ongoing fascination with women.

Its stars, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, are on screen virtually all of the time, and they're always worth watching. But the film puts such a premium on tastefulness that it never threatens to become exciting. [23 Nov 1990]

Virtually everything about the film is derivative--even the design for the eerie setting for the climactic struggle recalls the interiors of the more exotic old movie palaces--but its makers can't be accused of cutting corners. No doubt about it, those who ask only for pure action will be getting their money's worth.

Other than Shaw's turn, which gets dampened in the determinedly frolicsome finale, there's little to like in Three Men and a Little Lady. Selleck is charming. Danson, aided by latex and a Carmen Miranda outfit, has two funny scenes. Travis has a lovely smile, which she overuses.

In Rocky V, the fifth and presumably last episode of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa saga, the writer-star once again contrives a way to make his hulking, sad-eyed gladiator the underdog. And we get whiffs of funkiness and humanity stirring around for the first time since the original Rocky. [16 Nov 1990, p.1]

With its exhilarating action sequences, Walt Disney Pictures' The Rescuers Down Under challenges the adventure films of Spielberg and Lucas and confirms the special power of animation to present extravagant fantasies on screen.

A clear-eyed vision. Authentic as an Edward Curtis photograph, lyrical as a George Catlin oil or a Karl Bodmer landscape, this is a film with a pure ring to it. It's impossible to call it anything but epic [9 Nov 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

If Medak had been able to delineate the twinship of crime and show biz, he might have moved the film's frights into a higher realm. Instead, he's come up with a classy freak show.

It's an all-out horror film--handsomely produced but morbid and not in the least amusing to watch.

My Twentieth Century (Times-rated Mature for sex, complex style and themes) remains on the whole buoyant and beguiling--and is surely among the most distinctive films to arrive this year.

Really effective horror films make us participants in the horror. Jacob's Ladder doesn't draw us in in that way. It's a movie about interior states that's all on the outside. [30 Oct 1990, p.1]

It's a tortuous, unsatisfying movie, but it's not like any other film I've ever seen about an artist, and it has sequences of blinding intensity.

It's a mixed bag; parts of it are awful. But it has, and needs, only one major defense: It's full of Grade-A rock 'n' roll, rousingly well performed. It moves, it swings, it jumps and vibrates. It's a musical. [05 Nov 1990, p.F10]

This picture, which looks far, far better than it is, is so clunky that you can't be sure just how funny writer John Esposito, in adapting an early King short story, and director Ralph S. Singleton intended it to be.

While this "Night" hasn't the chilling, almost cinema-verite credibility of the original, it is certainly a well-sustained entertainment, with one foolish or unlucky incident triggering another. Like the original, this R-rated production is definitely not for children. [19 Oct 1990, p.F1]

Searingly well-acted.

A film with an intriguing premise and likable performances but not much excitement. [13 Oct 1990, p.F13]

If Avalon doesn't succeed in its family-of-man approach, it triumphs on a more theatrical level, as a family-of-actors movie. What Avalon is really about is the magic of performing. [18 Oct 1990, p.F1]

The performances of Close and Silver are flawless, but it is Irons' portrait that remains behind, an enigmatic after-image… Reversal of Fortune is a delectable tour through facets of the lives of the rich and famous that Robin Leach wouldn't touch with a forked stick. [17 Oct 1990]

The pulpiness is less homage than rip-off. There are no tricks up this film's frayed sleeve… Fatalism plus a lot of heavy breathing, and a flash of skin--it's a winning formula, all right. These movies are like Harlequin Romances for slumming highbrows [12 Oct 1990]

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael isn't truly terrible, it's truly confused. It's as though director Jim Abrahams wanted to do heartfelt comedy-drama but couldn't quite shake off the wicked edge of his alma mater, ZAZ: Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, the dementos behind "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun."

In the air Memphis Belle is unstoppable, giving us--earthbound and safe--a clear-eyed look at the nuts and bolts of bravery.

It’s an attempt at fantasy so plodding that by its end it feels as though we’d walked the 20 years back to Belushi’s past, then hacked our way out of it again.

Heart may be what the movie needs most, but a bit of clarity wouldn't hurt either. Even here in gangsterland, where random characters are cherished and non sequiturs are considered wisecracks, there is a difference between complications and impenetrability, and this plot is a bloody thicket.. [5 Oct 1990, Calendar, p.F-10]

This handsome 20th Century Fox release is a smart piece of hard-action filmmaking. [08 Oct 1990, p.F4]

Henry and June is so gentle it almost floats away--but it’s a movie that can’t just be dismissed. It may be a failure but it’s a one-of-a-kind-failure.

If you ignore the script--a good strategy for most recent major studio movies--there’s a lot of talent here. But Cimino’s Hours, instead of getting desperate, gets desperately pretty.

A great compliment to Campion is that the movie never seems less than genuine; it’s consciously anti-commercial. And when “An Angel at My Table” does steer toward a happy ending (this is a film about self-discovery and triumph, after all), even then it strives for gentle epiphany.

Abel Ferrara, director of King of New York, is a virtuoso of grunge. He may not have all the equipment necessary to make a great movie -- he's not real big on narrative, logic, believability, human empathy -- but he sure knows how to shoot the cinematic works. In technical terms, King of New York is his most stylish job yet. In emotional terms, it's as aggressively wacked out as such earlier opuses as "Ms. 45" and "Fear City."

Schlesinger doesn’t really have the low-down skills to pump up the pulp. He’s so concerned not to relinquish his credentials as a “serious” director that the film, instead of seeming serious, seems mostly silly--not scary enough to function as a crackerjack thriller and not complex enough to work as a psychological drama.

Like Sonny’s moving pictures in his mind, Bogdanovich sees things we can’t; when we can join him--in moments of family and connectedness--Texasville is touching. Most other times it’s the darndest mess you ever saw.

Narrow Margin is nothing if not a hard-edge train thriller and to swathe it in so much atmospheric murk that audiences are going to suspect the premature arrival of cataracts seems counterproductive, at the very least.

Unfortunately, what director Joanou makes of all these promising elements is thudding pretentiousness.

A good, solid, admirable, deeply felt movie.

Is this a bad movie? Is the sky blue? Short of repeating all 237 or so of its incredibly limp jokes there's no way to convey how completely Repossessed goes awry. On and on they come, endlessly: like a blizzard of stale pork rinds. [17 Sep 1990, p.F2]

Hardware isn’t long on ideas, emotions or character; it degenerates into a mindless slaughterhouse crescendo.

These and wickedly funny backstage snapshots of moviemaking are the good times of Postcards, but even they can't hide its emotional starvation. [12 Sep 1990, p.1]

GoodFellas is "Raging Bull" squared. [20 September 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Sentimentality and violence have gone hand-in-hand from the beginning of the movies, but seldom have they been carried to such extremes and played against each other with such effectiveness as in writer-director John Woo’s The Killer (Nuart), an example of the highly addictive, supercharged, go-for-broke Hong Kong cinema at its most deliberately outrageous.

Opera, while undeniably entertaining, winds up overwhelming its suspense with morbidity. [13 Jun 1990, p.F6]

What many American movies do well these days -- action, violence, hell-for-leather street spectacle -- Darkman does better. That may be praise enough. [24 Aug. 1990, p.F10]

Director James Foley and his co-screenwriter Robert Redlin have pulled Thompson's story out of film noir shadows and set it unflinchingly in the desert's orange-red glare.

With Men at Work actor-writer-director Emilio Estevez has turned out a pleasant, knockabout comedy for himself and brother Charlie Sheen. While it may not be the funniest picture you'll see all year, it is fresh, inventive and has very few moments when it's not generating laughs. [27 Aug 1990, p.F10]

Unlike many “adult” moviemakers, Henson believed his core audience capable of appreciating wit, irony, topical humor, idealism, intense emotion and bemused reflections on real life and all its complexity. All these, and more, are present in The Witches.

In the end, even in the howling high frequencies and the nihilistic night, this R-rated movie misses its best shot. It doesn't talk hard enough. [22 Aug 1990, p.5]

When director Herbert Ross is away from his dance numbers, he lets the pace sag frightfully. A lot of good talent on both sides of the camera goes down with this PG-13-rated ship. [20 Aug 1990, p.6]

The Exorcist III doesn't completely work but offers much more than countless, less ambitious films. [20 Aug 1990, p.F6]

Taking Care of Business is a curious achievement: a laughless comedy starring Belushi and Grodin, two actors who are almost always funny.

The drawback to Lynch's pile-it-on method is that it is reductive. One reason Wild at Heart, for all its amazements, isn't quite as stunning as "Blue Velvet" is because it seems less the working out of a single fixed obsession than an entire smear of obsessions. [12 Aug 1990, Calendar, p.29]

Air America is far from a disgrace, but it's so rare to see a film with this much panoramic verve that you want it to deliver the real goods and not this cargo-load of tinkertoy war-is-heck ironies. [10 Aug 1990]

A lovingly assembled cast in a brilliantly detailed production, with special notice to Vilmos Zsigmond's haunting cinematography, which seems somehow to have captured the light as it was, pre-smog. [10 Aug 1990]

If Flatliners is anything at all, it's watchable: aflame with Jan de Bont cinematography, deep-focus decor, an attractive cast. The movie's problem, like many others recently, is that it isn't any deeper, dramatically or psychologically, than its own trailer. It is the trailer: the long version.

Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues about a talented jazz trumpet player willing to sacrifice every relationship to his music, is by turns seductive, engaging and, finally, maddening.

Young Guns II generates more sheer visual excitement than any Western since Peckinpah and Leone were in their last '70s prime.

They've jacked this loud, lame shrieker of a movie up to the highest decibels, both aural and visual, and rammed it in our faces with almost numbing aplomb.

Intelligent, complex and enthralling, Presumed Innocent is one of those rare films where all the players seem to be in a state of grace, where the working of the machinery never shows and after it's over, one runs and reruns its intricacies with a profound sense of satisfaction.

As an antic romantic comedy it's fresh and actually gets somewhere. [17 Aug 1990]

The role is nothing more than an elaborate comic turn, but he invests it with such sly knowingness and reserves of feeling that he gives this dinky joke-book movie a soul. Brando is doing here what a lot of famous actors probably wish they could do to the roles that made them famous (or, in Brando’s case, famous again). He’s using the gravity of his performance in “The Godfather” for comic effect, bringing out the absurdity that was always just under the surface of the role.

The reactionary empty-headedness of this R-rated movie gets to you, spoiling whatever comic-strip enjoyment it might have had. In the “Rambo” movies, you’d have to be almost as much of a lunkhead as Rambo to take their “politics” seriously. But “Navy SEALS,” directed by Lewis Teague, isn’t scaled to be a cartoon; it’s more like a hypercharged military training film.

Arachnophobia manages to be genuinely frightening without being '80s-style revolting. Marshall has gauged his pattern of frights and laughs carefully, to let the audience giggle at its own jumpiness, and his cast, which includes a sprinkling of the best-known American character actors, is a clue to his affection for the form. [18 July 1990, p.F1]

In all his athletic scenes, leaping through doors, leaping between uptown and downtown trains, leaping on an assortment of villains, Swayze is just fine. It's the movie's big cosmic questions that throw him; for these he's reduced to a look of total stupefaction--not the movie's finest moments. [13 July 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

The comedy of Quick Change is city-dweller humor, honed to a fine edge and site-specific to New York because the Big Apple is more or less on its knees, civility-wise. All it needs is a lethally funny comedy like this to give it the coup de grace. [13 Jul 1990, p.1]

It's camp noir, but the director, Renny Harlin, doesn't allow the jokes, feeble as they are, to take hold. He slam-bangs the action as if he was prepping "Die Hard 2," so that even Clay's self-infatuated strut and bleary leer don't have time to register. The film is pointlessly souped up. [11 Jul 1990, p.1]

Writer Dennis Marks and producer/directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera can't seem to decide whether they're making a with-it musical for teen-agers or re-creating the ingenuous humor of a '60s TV show, and don't do either very well.

This is the most cheerfully preposterous film of a jaw-dropping summer, which is not to say it's not fun, it's simply orchestrated Looney Tunes.