If this installment is just slightly less laborious than Karate Kid II or III, it's not from Mark Lee's surprise-free script or Christopher Cain's placid direction, but because young Swank really might be a find. Early on, she's such a convincingly testy teen that parents may flinch, but she does seem to blossom before your eyes.

Alex Murray is the conscience of A Good Man in Africa, but to the credit of both Connery and Beresford, he's anything but self-pleased or smug, and neither is the film, which has some of the spirit of an old-fashioned romp. [02 Sep 1994]

As a piece of drama, What Happened Was . . . isn't any great shakes; it's essentially an actors' workshop exercise that exists primarily as a showcase for its cast. And because Noonan and, especially, Sillas are so good, it triumphs. [06 Oct 1994, p.F10]

Arizona Dream is the quintessential Nuart movie. It’s a dazzling, daring slice of cockamamie tragicomic Americana envisioned with magic realism by a major, distinctive European filmmaker, the former Yugoslavia’s Emir Kusturica.

As violent scene follows violent scene, it is possible to notice how phony even the film's painstakingly constructed macho dialogue starts to sound. And Fresh's willingness to use legitimate social problems as nothing more than an excuse for cheap thrills gets increasingly off-putting. Fresh and his father may be able to push those chess pieces around at breakneck speed, but audiences will want to be treated with more respect.

Paradoxically, it is Shawshank's zealousness in trying to cast a rosy glow over the prison experience that makes us feel we're doing harder time than the folks inside. [23 Sept 1994]

Killing Zoe is a raucous, arty little neo-film-noir that comes equipped with a bucket of blood to splatter the halls of convention. It’s not terribly good but you keep expecting it to take off in unexpected directions.

Natural Born Killers is both audacious and astonishing, a vision of a charnel house apocalypse that comes close to defying description. [26 Aug 1994, p.1]

The whole question of sex blurring deserves an infinitely better film than “It’s Pat.”

It is sad, truly sad, to have to report that Color of Night is a disappointment in almost every respect.

The comic pizazz and bawdy dazzle of this film's vision of gaudy drag performers trekking across the Australian outback certainly has a boisterous, addictive way about it. [10 Aug 1994]

Airheads, directed by Michael Lehmann and scripted by Rich Wilkes, is far from great. But it sure is ripe. It's bursting with bad ideas, half-good ideas, good and bad actors yelling and mugging. Like a lot of youth comedies, it's frenetic where it should be inspired.

The Little Rascals is such an emphatically well-shaped, well-crafted picture that you wish you could have enjoyed it more than you did.

A look at the intertwined lives of a father and his three live-at-home daughters, this is more than anything a personal-scaled film, funny, emotional and compassionate toward the human comedy, Taiwan-style.

Even though It Could Happen to You has its tenderized, good citizenship side, it's been written (by Jane Anderson) and directed (by Andrew Bergman) with an embracing cheer. It's blissfully uncynical.

The problem overall is not so much that the humor, especially in the parent-tryout situations, is forced, but that it simply is not there at all. So little is going on in this mildest of fantasies that it is hard to even guess what kinds of emotional effects were aimed at in the first place.

Not particularly nuanced or fine-tuned, The Client, like its source material, is both gimmicky and involving, a fast-moving comic-book version of a comic-book novel. And while Schumacher has not been known as an actor's director, The Client is beefed up by a pair of satisfying star performances.

As the perfectionist creator of bravura set pieces, Cameron is still the leader of the pack. [14 Jul 1994 Pg. F1]

Russell is unusual among first-time directors in his ability to mold and shape performance. [28 Jul 1994 Pg. F2]

The sap in this movie rises almost as high as the Angels. It's a special kind of kiddie sentimentality: fantastical and self-congratulatory.

It's most successful when it is being off-center, a state of grace it doesn't quite have the nerve to maintain. [6 July 1994, Calendar, p. F-1]

If ever a film looked exactly the way you hoped and imagined it would, The Shadow is it. But if ever a film made you wince whenever its actors opened their mouths, The Shadow is that as well.

That’s Entertainment! III is the sunniest of memento mori, a showy tribute to the flabbergasting musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that emphasizes both how delightful the genre was and how inescapably extinct it’s become.

First-time director Andrew Scheinman -- one of the partners in Castle Rock Entertainment -- may have too much of the Billy in himself to bring out the true roisterousness of baseball. He manages the movie with too soft a touch. The film's injected pathos isn't true to what most adults respond to in the sport -- let alone children. [29 Jun 1994, p.F5]

Impressive but uninviting, Wyatt Earp is easier to admire from a distance than pull up a chair and enjoy close-up. A self-conscious attempt at epic filmmaking that feels orchestrated as much as directed, it has noticeable virtues but chooses not to wear them lightly. And at three hours plus, it finally encourages audiences to feel as trail weary and exhausted as any of its characters. [24 Jun 1994, p.1]

Kiddies longing for a Mac attack this summer won’t be enlivened by the tepid shenanigans and mushy maunderings of Getting Even With Dad.

Even with its flaws, this latest Disney animated feature once again delivers what its audience wants.

De Bont and his team have turned in a visually sophisticated piece of mayhem that makes the implausible plausible and keeps the thrills coming. [10Jun1994 Pg. F1]