Fire in the Sky doesn't look like it had an expensive budget, but it uses what special effects it has to good effect, and the scenes of Travis on the space ship are genuinely scary. You stop asking, ''But did this really happen?'' -- not a bad question, actually -- and start imagining what it might have been like. [13 Mar 1993, p.C3]

The new Robert De Niro film with Bill Murray, Mad Dog and Glory, is just off-balance enough that it may throw audiences off, too. It is not a romantic comedy by a director who can't do that particular dance, but a strange hybrid between comedy and drama. [5 Mar 1993, p.C1]

Yet for all its faults and limitations, Swing Kids is not necessarily easy to forget. [05 Mar 1993]

A few times every year, Hollywood makes a mistake, violates formula and actually makes a great picture. Falling Down is one of the great mistakes of 1993, a film too good and too original to win any Oscars but one bound to be remembered in years to come as a true and ironic statement about life in our time. [26 Feb 1993, p.D1]

Army of Darkness has good moments and shows traces of wit right up to the end, though these moments wind up coming fewer and farther between. [19 Feb 1993, Daily Datebook, p.D1]

If you went by the coming attractions and the advertisements, you might expect a predictable romance pitched on the level of a TV sitcom. But Untamed Heart is a movie of rare sweetness. [12 Feb 1993, p.D1]

The new Vanishing fails on its own terms -- it gradually adopts the conventions of a silly monster movie and loses the emotional impact of a psychological thriller in the process. But what makes this failed effort perplexing is the existence of the earlier film and its successful design. [05 Feb 1993, p.D4]

Unfortunately, the best jokes in Loaded Weapon were in the coming attractions. What's left amounts to just a lot of flailing around in search of a handful of half-hearted laughs. [5 Feb 1993, p.D5]

What sounded like an embarrassing blunder -- the romantic pairing of Richard Gere and Jodie Foster -- turns out to be surprisingly entertaining and persuasive.

Sniper is the Tom Berenger film that'll be forgotten by this time next week. [30 Jan 1993, p.C3]

Aspen Extreme is an extremely slow-moving story about romance, buddies and skiing in the famous Colorado town. With a pleasant cast of mostly unknowns, except for Finola Hughes (''General Hospital's'' Anna Devane), it almost saves itself with spectacular downhill action scenes. A big almost. [23 Jan 1993, p.C3]

It's the versatile Miranda Richardson (the terrorist in ''The Crying Game,'' the repressed housewife in ''Enchanted April'') who gets the juiciest scene. Shattered by the news of the affair, and by the tragedy it precipitates, she beats her face with a knotted towel, and then vents her rage on her foolish husband...It's one more triumph for an actress who has no trouble channeling a kind of supernatural intensity in her work. If anyone's looking for the perfect Lady Macbeth, they needn't look any further. [22 Jan 1993, p.D1]

It's one of the most violent, shocking and bitterly funny movies ever released. In terms of body count and graphic violence, it rivals ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer'' or, going back several years, Sam Peckinpah's grisly ''Straw Dogs.'' But that's half the story: Man Bites Dog also has method in its mayhem. By spoofing the trashy ''reality TV'' phenomenon -- a soul-numbing entertainment form that's found even greater popularity in Europe than the United States -- the film exposes the desensitizing effects of television violence, and questions the extent to which the media not only feeds the public hunger for violence, but ultimately creates it. [15 Jan 1993, p.C9]

Although the film doesn't live up to complexities of the human issues -- nor the awesome tragedy -- that must have been faced in real life, what you feel watching it is a mixture of horror, moral self-examination, a tinge of inspiration, and -- let's face it on these winter nights -- you feel cold. [15 Jan 1993, p.C1]

This is the picture the Belgian actor has been waiting for, the step up in class that has seemed inevitable since his breakthrough in ''Bloodsport'' six years ago. ''Nowhere to Run'' is not just a boy movie. Women can enjoy it, too, and Van Damme's boyish good looks and gentlemanly manner -- gentlemanly, except when he's smashing heads -- won't hurt. [16 Jan 1993, p.C3]

Beneath all that baloney and bombast, there's a lovely, inspiring story in Lorenzo's Oil. [15 Jan 1993, p.C1]

If Hoffa is supposed to be an intimate portrait of the labor leader, it never gets much beyond painting a murky picture of a one-note Johnny who seems more like a stock Jack Nicholson character. [25 Dec 1992]

As for Williams, he's a warm actor in an oddly cold movie, and his presence certainly doesn't make things worse. But Toys doesn't call for anything new from him. [18 Dec 1992, p.C1]

Slick, overly deliberate and brimming with hammy performances...directed by Rob Reiner with glistening, uninspired competence. [11 Dec 1992]

A wish that there were more Michael Caines and fewer Muppets kept cropping up during The Muppet Christmas Carol, a movie whose mechanical cuteness becomes a too-complicated veil -- and a smothering one -- for the classic Charles Dickens story. [11 Dec 1992, p.C1]

The Distinguished Gentleman isn't much of a movie - it's a mess, in fact. [04 Dec 1992]

It's a movie filled with surprises, including one outright kick in the head that qualifies as one of the biggest movie moments of 1992. [18 Dec 1992]

There's no pretending this is a perfect movie. Yet I doubt I could have enjoyed it more if it were. [25 Nov 1992, p.E1]

Beautiful, romantic and frantically funny. In its brief, often frenetic 85-minute running time it manages to be a riot of entertainment, embracing the best of old-fashioned merriment as well as savvy, up-to-the-minute contemporary humor, thanks in large part to an extraordinary performance by Robin Williams. [25 Nov 1992, p.E1]

Not only more crazy than “Reservoir Dogs,'' but it also feels more real. [1 Jan 1993, Daily Notebook, p.D1]

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a lovingly made, gorgeously realized, meticulously crafted failure. It has big names, a big budget, big sets, a big, thundering score and even big hair. But it doesn't do it. It doesn't excite or fascinate but just lies there on the screen. [13 Nov 1992, p. C1]

Passenger 57 is silly but fun -- an action movie accidentally saved by its glorious stupidity. It will make people shake their heads, roll their eyes and laugh at the screen, but it will keep their attention, because the movie has a crazy kind of life. [06 Nov 1992, p.C1]

Jennifer 8 is an empty-headed thriller, uninspired, by the numbers, the kind of movie that gets made not because anybody wants to make it but because of a perceived market out there for this kind of picture. People do like thrillers, but they don't like long, boring, vapid thrillers, and Jennifer 8, which opens today, is definitely in the latter category. [6 Nov 1992, p.C1]