Robert Altman's Kansas City is a hollow period piece, a costume melodrama that's all jazzed up without a story to tell. [16 Aug 1996, p.4]

In returning to what is basically the same premise, Carpenter gives us an update as well as a sequel. [09 Aug 1996, p.5]

I'm not sure what kids are going to make of Matilda and its perception of an adult world crawling with menacing, malevolent despots. They'll probably love it - and the film's resourceful, resilient star. Parents, on the other hand, might be squirming in their seats from DeVito's unrelenting send-up of the crass and the cruel. [02 Aug 1996, p.05]

The formula in Chain Reaction is familiar, but at least it has been entrusted to a proven technician. [2 Aug 1996, p.03]

Manny & Lo, wonderfully photographed (by Krueger's brother, Tom) and full of telling detail, is a wry, intelligent picture with a sweet, but hardly saccharine, story to tell. [06 Sep 1996, p.03]

The Frighteners approaches the mysteries of near-death and out-of-body experiences with a script that is - even by this summer's prevailing standard of dumbness - out of its mind. [19 July 1996, p.03]

As silly as Multiplicity is, there is an adult sensibility at work here. The movie gets some of its biggest laughs when the clones, one after the other, proceed to break rule number one: No clone nooky. There's nothing explicit about the sexual shenanigans, but the duplicates' respective dalliances with the missus serve as the basis for much of the comedy. [17 July 1996, p.E04]

Whatever its flaws, however, this gorgeously colored and darkly hued Hunchback remains a towering and bold addition to the Disney canon. [21 June 1996, p.03]

As The Cable Guy progresses, its psycho-comedic tone gets sicker and its plot more predictable, until, by the end, we may as well be watching Ray Liotta as The Cop From Hell or Marky Mark as The Boyfriend From Hell. It's strictly generic, by the book, and downright exhausting. [14 June 1996, p.03]

The borrowings from other movies, going all the way back to the car chase in 1968's Bullitt, are heavy. But Bay has three leads to lend weight and dimension to characters who are hardly original and flatly written.

Wincer shoots the whole thing - which is dressed up with cherry-red vintage fighter planes and boxy Pan Am Clippers and offers a few sequences in Thai lagoons of gloriously shocking turquoise - in a manner that renders even surefire stuff (collapsing rope bridges, horseback rides through crowded Manhattan streets) ho-hum. Kids of a certain age may be distracted by the bright colors and broad acting - the film is, at least, devoid of any gratuitously nasty violence - but most audience members who find their way into the theater will wonder when the Ghost Who Walks is going to walk off into the sunset. It ain't soon enough. [7 June 1996, p.03]

Intelligent, scary (scorpions! lots of scorpions!) and full of the possibilities of scientific fact taken to far-reaching (but credible) extremes, The Arrival delivers more bang for the buck than its high-profile multiplex-mates. [31 May 1996, p.3]

If you can accept Dennis Quaid as a post-Arthurian knight and a dragon who looks like Sean Connery as well as talking like him, there is a certain loopy charm to their adventures. But the rest of Dragonheart, with evil kings and distressed damsels, is such a warmed-over borrowing from better fantasies that it undermines the film's modest strength. [31 May 1996, p.05]

Unfortunately, Mission: Impossible - which assembles a new Impossible Missions Force and plops it down in Kiev, Prague, London and Langley, Va. - doesn't have the momentum or suspense of De Palma's best pictures. It moves, awkwardly at times, from one elaborate set-piece to the next. [22 May 1996, p.E01]

While Flipper doesn't exactly arrive dead in the water, the latest installment in that saga of America's most beloved bottlenose could be dubbed Flopper. [17 May 1996, p.03]

If Fleming had played everything as a black comedy with a satirical send-up of high school life - like Heathers - he might have had something. But The Craft has no consistency and certainly no art as it drifts into an unprepossessing display of special-effects magic. [03 May 1996, p.08]

Mulholland Falls deserves more a tip of the hat than an enthusiastic greeting. [26 Apr 1996, p.03]

The MST3K folks have gone all-out and found a movie in actual color to lampoon: This Island Earth, a 1954 Universal sci-fier with a no-star cast, low-tech special effects and a logic-defying plot. It's a perfect vehicle for Mike, Servo and Crow to go after - and following a brief prologue that brings MST3K novices up to date, that's exactly what they do. [19 Apr 1996, p.03]

A cheesily entertaining effort that recalls the irreverent '50s comedies of Jerry Lewis. [12 Apr 1996, p.03]

Admittedly, it is redundant to make a comedy about the Celtics because their current team is a joke. But it is also deeply satisfying. [19 Apr 1996, p.03]

It's a crudely entertaining argument for redeploying the U.S. military into our schools. [19 Apr 1996, p.05]

Shines with weird, whimsical invention.

The movie trades in familiar virtual realities. Yet as realized by the gifted director Mamoru Oshii, who imagines cityscapes melting into circuit boards, Ghost in the Shell is where virtual reality meets superrealism. [9 May 1996, p.C4]

Sgt. Bilko, from the late, great Phil Silvers sitcom about an incorrigible con artist scamming the daylights out of the U.S. Army, has been turned into a not-very-funny film vehicle, just as The Flintstones was transformed into a not-very-funny film vehicle, and The Beverly Hillbillies, and Dragnet before them. [29 Mar 1996, p.05]

Where does Ed, which is about a baseball-playing chimp and his human sidekick, fit in the pantheon of simian cinema? Way, way down there - on a level with toe lint. [15 Mar 1996, p.5]

Baird is a highly regarded editor of action films, and his debut as a director shows a sharp eye for the tensions and angles in individual scenes. But his grasp of pace is less certain, and it exposes the movie's more outlandish developments. [15 Mar 1996, p.03]

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.

Stay home and watch Friends. It's cheaper, funnier and mercifully shorter. [8 March 1996, p.08]