Wuhl is occasionally touching, and his blank-faced disbelief can be very funny; he has the addled look of a shell-shocked aesthete. But for the most part Marvin's funk doesn't bring out Wuhl's sharpest talents; he needs a role with more spring and less vacant staring-off-into-the-distance. And Primus needs a project that will sustain his gift for transforming a group of disparate actors into a spirited jamboree. [21 Aug 1992, p.F11]

It's one more example of minuscule ideas inflated to preposterous proportions: An Attack of the 50-Foot Marketing Hook. [17 Jul 1992, p.F10]

But the erotic potential of animation has never been realized and Cool World doesn't even try. [11 Jul 1992]

It may be standard-issue stuff, but it looks great and it almost makes you nostalgic for the days when stuntmen reigned supreme and mayhem and computers never knew how much they had in common.

If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]

The Danish director, whose film Pelle the Conqueror won the best foreign-language film Oscar, has turned out a thoughtful and accomplished piece of filmmaking, skillfully acted and beautifully put together with a kind of discreet elegance that the biggest budget (roughly $10 million) in Swedish film history made possible.

With its perspectives on love, aging and solitude, "Prelude to a Kiss" still offers a good deal more than the usual smiles of a summer's day. [10 Jul 1992, p.F14]

A film that is more listless than funny and could surely use some of the energy that animated both Art Buchwald and Paramount Pictures in the lawsuit surrounding authorship of [Eddie Murphy]'s 1988 "Coming to America." [01 Jul 1992]

Though amusing enough to avoid absolutely drowning in schmaltz, it's sad to see a film with potential lose its way in the late innings.

A cut above the average thriller. For one thing, it's put together with enough professionalism to make you almost (but not quite) forget the implausibilities that films like this are inevitably prone to. And for another, its concern with cops getting out of line seems hardly far-fetched after what the world saw happening to Rodney G. King.

Batman Returns, the most eagerly awaited and aggressively hyped film of the summer, is, for better and worse, very much the product of director Tim Burton's morose imagination. His dark, melancholy vision is undeniably something to see, but it is a claustrophobic conception, not an expansive one, oppressive rather than exhilarating, and it strangles almost all the enjoyment out of this movie without half trying.

Despite a high-powered cast and a zany/trendy concept, hardly anyone’s home in Housesitter. The result is much ado about too little, an occasionally amusing screwball farce made by people whose screws are barely loose at all.

No one who sees the last half-hour of this movie will ever forget it--though quite a few may want to.

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

Graced with a clever script, a cast that will make you smile until you ache, and a snappy sense of pace, this summer '92 hit is the funniest by-the-numbers comedy in who knows how long.

It's strong as can be in terms of production values and panoramic photography (as befits its $70-million budget) and weak as watery tea when it comes to little things like dialogue and character development. [22 May 1992]

Although Alien 3 is stylish--and ambitious--the movie doesn't have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom.

There are a lot of funny ideas in Encino Man that don't come off because the director, Les Mayfield, and his screenwriter, Shawn Schepps, don't seem to have made up their minds how smart they want to be. A scene like Link freaking out during a visit to the La Brea tar pits museum should count for a lot more than it does here.

Von Trier is undeniably talented, but Zentropa, which won the 1991 Jury Prize at Cannes, comes across mostly as an exercise in pseudo-profundity. It’s got more metaphors than it knows what to do with.

The latest, and, one fears, not the last episode in the kiss-kiss-bang-bang saga of L.A. police Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is even more of a comic strip than its immediate predecessor. [15 May 1992]

For most of the way, One False Move is taut and sure-footed.

Poison Ivy suffers from a basic dramatic hitch. We in the audience are so far ahead of the people on the screen that there are no surprises, just the inevitable sound of the inevitable shoe dropping.

It’s hard to think of a less satisfying creature feature in recent memory than the simply terrible Split Second, which by the end not only has allowed few glimpses of the beast in question but hasn’t even explained where the big guy came from or what kind of animus, supernatural or otherwise, is responsible for its strange m.o. It’s a monstrous cheat.

It’s possible to enjoy White Sands from moment to moment because the actors are avid and the New Mexico locations are delicately beautiful. Still, there’s something disconcerting about this anything-for-effect style of filmmaking. It doesn’t add up to anything satisfying.

It's hard to remember when actors have stepped into such a no-win situation and mustered up such panache: Turturro may be on a sinking ship, but he manages to drown brilliantly.

Director Charles Martin Smith and the four credited writers go for all-out zaniness, naturally, but it comes off like lowest-level Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-Proft -- less Jay Ward than failed Mad magazine. [17 Apr 1992, p.F28]

The script by Bean and Tolkin is potentially more interesting than what’s been made of it.

Newsies becomes a string of set-pieces, some of which work, some of which don't, all barreling full-speed ahead toward its Teddy Roosevelt deus ex machina. [10 Apr 1992]