Man Bites Dog defines audacity. An assured, seductive chamber of horrors, it marries nightmare with humor and then abruptly takes the laughter away. Intentionally disturbing, it is close to the last word about the nature of violence on film, a troubling, often funny vision of what the movies have done to our souls.

Alive does everything it ought to except the one thing you really want with a story like this, and that is transcend its material. A once-in-a-lifetime situation, filled with incidents that almost defy belief, calls for more of a once-in-a-lifetime movie, and that is beyond this film’s powers.

This dingy, drab, pointless little movie -- a would-be shamrock shocker about four teen-agers menaced by the Irish super-scamp while renovating a North Dakota farmhouse -- is made without flair or imagination, seemingly enervated by its own bad taste and low intentions. [11 Jan 1993, p.F3]

Where most movies lie, Lorenzo's Oil tells the truth and pays the price. In a genre rife with romantic sentimentality, this film won't trifle with its integrity and ends up not artificially uplifting but heart-rending and exhausting. Based on a true story, it shows how dreadfully hard you have to fight to make a difference, and how grueling it can be to save even a single human life.

It is a laconic, enigmatic piece of work, displaying the grace with spoken language that marked "Glengarry Glen Ross" but troublesome in terms of structure and character development.

Trespass has its bloody ups and teeth-rattling downs, but it also has a clutch of humorous in-your-face performances and a core theme that explosively carries it along: When the factory breaks down, the rats will kill each other for the gold.

But it's essentially a tour de force for Pacino, and he sustains us through the slow passages by working with a closed-in intensity that turns each scene into a kind of mini-movie complete with its own ticking time bomb. [23Dec1992 Pg. 1]

The film's plot...is more contrived than creditable, motivations are not always clear, and some characters, for instance Kiefer Sutherland as a praise the lord and pass the ammunition Marine, are not very convincingly acted. [11 Dec 1992]

Somewhere along the way -- 'round about the Ghost of Christmas Past stuff -- the magic has fallen out of the story. The treacly score by Miles Goodman, with songs by Paul Williams, doesn't help. The Muppets are at their best when they're anarchic, without all this soggy whimsy. [11 Dec 1992, p.F12]

While the result is inevitably middle of the road, it still manages to be the funniest picture Murphy has made in quite some time. [04 Dec 1992]

This offbeat emotional thriller is an unusually satisfying film, intricately constructed, surely directed and splendidly acted. [25 Nov 1992]

The Bodyguard isn't a good movie, but it's often enjoyably bad, and that's no small achievement. So many talented people had a hand in it, starting with director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, that you stare at the screen in a state of rapt bewilderment. Just about everything that can go wrong with this film does, and yet it's compulsively watchable. (So is a train wreck.) [25 Nov 1992, p.F1]

Aladdin is a film of wonders. To see it is to be the smallest child, open-mouthed at the screen's sense of magic, as well as the most knowing adult, eager to laugh at some surprisingly sly humor.

It's a film enthralled by its own lower depths… Although Bad Lieutenant is structured as a redemptive thriller, it functions primarily as a freak show with religioso overtones. [30 Dec 1992, Calendar, p.F-7]

Whatever was unforced and funny in the first film has become exaggerated here, whatever was slightly sentimental has been laid on with a trowel. The result, with some exceptions, plays like an over-elaborate parody of the first film, reminding us why we enjoyed it without being able to duplicate its appeal.

Coppola decided that he really wasn't making a horror film after all, but rather a love story, a comic burlesque, a costume drama, a piece of erotica, whatever. But no matter what else you do with it, a Dracula that cannot manage to be more scary than silly is as pitilessly doomed as that elegant old Transylvanian himself. [13 Nov 1992]

Love Potion 9 isn't truly terrible, like the recent "Frozen Assets." It even provokes some laughs, but it suffers from terminal mildness.

The problem with Passenger 57 is that in fact the flight does not turn out to be all that interesting. Neither in the air nor in a pointless stopover on the ground does anything happen that arouses more than an entry-level of excitement. [06 Nov 1992, p.F1]

Jennifer 8 is smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it’s also too hemmed-in by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player’s skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes--because it’s in the exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

Part Valentine, part memory lane, “Intervista” may not qualify as a great film, but it is the kind of film only a great filmmaker could create.

The Lover is easy to watch and even easier to forget. A pleasant enough piece of commercial sensuality from French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, its selling point is its very pretty, clothing-optional sex scenes. Their effectiveness, however, is undercut by an air of self-congratulatory pomposity that the film is way too insubstantial to support.

A movie that wants to be hard-hitting and gritty but lacks the stomach for the job, it meanders through what should be a lean and focused narrative and ends up more of a letdown than anything else.

Dr. Giggles is one horror comedy that actually is laugh-out-loud funny, a fast and frequently hilarious collision of gore and gags, and a tour de force of smart, sophisticated exploitation filmmaking. It’s an exciting feature directorial debut for Manny Coto.

Candyman, the latest Clive Barker shocker, is his worst to date: an ambitious would-be morality play/thriller of the supernatural involving racism and mythology that seems merely pretentious and preposterous as it drowns in gallons of blood and guts. [16 Oct 1992, p.F6]

A somewhat diverting but finally disappointing thriller, it is characterized by a premise even Pat Buchanan could love: If you so much as think about straying from the marital straight and narrow, all heck is sure to break loose.

Loving and well-intentioned though this film is, it never convinces you that its subject matter merits this kind of idealized, worshipful attention. [09 Oct 1992]

Everything about the movie is overscaled, overbrutal, overbroad, full of holes. Yet there's something cheerful and wacky about it; it's a light-hearted blood bath.

If 1492 is dramatically inert, it is just the opposite visually. Its director is Ridley Scott, a wizard at re-creating the look of other realities, and he's done a remarkable job here, filling the screen with ravishing sequences from both the Old World and the New that are dazzling and intoxicating.