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]