The movie is, from start to finish, a hoot... Both a savvy satire of smalltown boosterism and an affectionate salute to the performing spirit. [10 Feb 1987, p.66]

Courtney Love's performance as stripper Althea Leasure is an amazement. Funny, unfettered and almost scarily alive in front of a camera, she's the definition of a "natural."

It's gorgeous. It's epic. It's spectacular. But two hours later, it also proves to be emotionally impenetrable.

With Rachel Portman's music tugging too hard for tears, the movie sometimes comes dangerously close to being the soap opera McPherson worked so hard to disguise.

What sets Jerry Maguire above any other romantic comedy this year is Crowe's writing. He captures the venal, high-stakes world of pro sports with deadly wit and an ex-journalist's sense of detail.

What makes you giggle your way through much of the movie isn't the jokes--Jonathan Gems's script is surprisingly feeble, and Burton's comic timing is often flat-- but the sheer, oddball chutzpah of it all. [23 Dec 1996]

But the tale has been squeezed to fit the mold of director John Hughes, which for long stretches makes it feel as much like the third "Home Alone" as the second "Dalmations."

Miller's strength, and his weakness, has always been his tendency to see things in black and white, which is what makes "The Crucible" moving, and also suspect. I recommend Hytner's movie highly, but a part of me resists a work that makes the audience feel as noble in our moral certainty as the characters it invites us to deplore. Some part of its power seems borrowed from the thing it hates.

Thanks to fine acting and its vividly unconventional protagonist, it pumps fresh blood into a conventional formula.

Succeeds stunningly on its own terms.

There are few movies around that take such huge risks: this is high-wire filmmaking, without a net of irony.

Slick and violent and reasonably tense, Ransom holds your attention without being the least bit interesting. [11Nov1996 Pg. 74]

Alternately enrapturing and exhausting, brilliant and glib, this is a "Romeo and Juliet" more for the eyes than the ears. [4 Nov 1996, pg.73]

Howard Franklin's Larger Than Life is so bad that even the elephant seems embarrassed. [11 Nov 1996, p.78]

Leon Gast's remarkable film -- which is intercut with terrific recent interviews with eyewitnesses Norman Mailer and George Plimpton -- is about much more than one stupendous fight.

Director Doug Liman has an impressive eye for detail and an even better ear for dialogue, producing a perceptive and delightfully funny take on the buddy movie.

Rent the devastating "The Boys of St. Vincent" to see how slick and hollow Sleepers is, how little it reveals about the real nature and effect of child abuse. [28 October 1996, p. 74]

Like the march itself--which is only briefly glimpsed--Get On the Bus' is conceived as a challenge to black men to take accountability for their lives. A sermon wrapped in a road movie, at its best it can stir the soul.

The demands of the historical epic form seem to hobble Jordan's imagination. He's a director who's at his best when he can follow the dark logic of his own subconscious.

Though some of the violence is nastier than it needs to be and the obligatory climactic melee, complete with choppers, skidding trucks and explosions, overstays its welcome, The Long Kiss Goodnight stays fun because it plays its heroine's split personality for laughs, not trauma.

"Ghost" comes on strong -- there's a crash-bang orchestral score, some romantic dialogue by William Goldman and many calendar shots of the savanna by Vilmos Zsigmond -- but it's hardly an epic. Kilmer's Irish accent is a flickering bulb, and Douglas, with his graying, stringy hair and beard, hams it up like a pirate with scurvy. That said, Goldman's screenplay is sharp and often unexpectedly funny. The lions are fabulously smart and evil, always one step ahead of the macho men's intricate plots to gun them down. And the man-against-beast fight scenes are twist-in-your-seat scary. Suffice it to say you haven't lived until you've dropped your rifle and a lion is chasing you up a tree. "Ghost" is no "Jaws," but it's got plenty of teeth. [21 Oct 1996, p.91]

This movie is so unself-consciously wholesome it's almost Gumpian.

The results are wondrous, wrenching and crazily funny to behold.

We're here for catty one-liners, movie-star camaraderie and fur-flying vengeance, and, in spite of a regrettable wimpiness that creeps in toward the end, that's what we get.

No better children's film has appeared all year, but my bet is it'll be the grown-ups, not the kids, who come away with a lump in the throat.

Brando's performance is enormous fun, but it's not just a joke. He's hilarious and gently mesmerizing at once, and director John Frankenheimer savvily adjusts the tone of his movie to fit Brando's daft brilliance...Let's face it -- this is one nutty movie. It's not exactly "good," but I sure had a good time.

The good news about the amiable but only partly satisfying Tin Cup is that it frees Kevin Costner from playing a monument and restores to us the loose, sparkling comic actor he used to be. [19 August 1996, p.66]

Kansas City can be regarded as a jazz tone poem on themes of race, politics, money and the movies themselves.