Pleasantly modest, endearingly etched and briskly set to a pounding beat.

It's the first film I know of in which we get to see all five of the top-billed actors vomit

Mostly very good. It's exactly the big fix of Saturday-matinee adventure, blazing special effects, inside humor and sly self-references for which its fans have been lusting.

With Biggerstaff's breathless narration explaining every detail of the action, Cashback seems aimed at an audience that would rather be told a story than shown a movie.

Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?

It is strangely paced (especially in the beginning), always confusing to follow, and extremely awkward as a romance.

It's mostly quite enjoyable. Director Joe Johnson's many action sequences are lively and engaging, the location photography (mostly Morocco) is breathtaking, and both the horse and Sharif (in his biggest Hollywood role in years) are adorable.

The story is so compelling and the movie is such a pleasure to the eyes and ears.

Trespass has no story drive; its principals are cardboard caricatures and its production values are as cheap and amateurish as a bad home video. [26 Dec 1992]

There's simply nobody beneath the derisive attitude worth caring about.

Director Thomas Schlamme ("Miss Firecracker," "Crazy From the Heart") also does a better than average job of evoking the romance of his San Francisco locations; giving his mystery-comedy a Hitchcockian "feel"; and getting likable performances from Brenda Fricker as Charlie's mother, Anthony LaPaglia as his cop best-friend, and Nancy Travis as the maybe-murderess. [30 July 1993]

A canny but hollow pastiche.

So slight that it barely qualifies as a movie, 10 Items or Less squeaks by on the charm of its leads.

tTere are two things going for Melinda and Melinda: Woody's not in it and Radha Mitchell is.

A one-note farce that struggles just to remain on key.

A frequently amusing and consistently outrageous but ultimately tiresome farce.

There's no conviction among these self-involved folks who sidestep commitment with a quip and a grin.

Get Smart is action movie and spoof and, though it's often a little unbalanced, the ultimate result is a harmlessly entertaining picture.

The concerts themselves are only exciting when Young is at center stage. Although a balding millionaire in his 60s, he retains the ragged energy of a rock 'n' roll road warrior. Not so with the other members, particularly Stills.

A welcome return to the courtship, cuddling and sweet nothings of yesteryear.

It's by far the most violent, most clinical and most sumptuously atmospheric.

Often unsettlingly funny, though it ultimately recedes into a dark womb of despair.

Barely substantial enough for a feature but just light and tasty enough to satisfy.

Underworld opera of the bravura kind, this is driven, like most Hong Kong action, more by emotion than logic.

Fierce People is no ordinary dud. This seedy soap opera is the most outlandish, campy romp through the mud since "Showgirls."

For all its unevenness, Bobby is a powerful, poignant movie and its ending -- played over a long excerpt of one of RFK's most compassionate speeches, voiced with none of the cliches of political rhetoric -- was, for me, the movie year's single most devastating sequence.

The film plays like a Hollywood-influenced Japanese samurai movie, though nothing as subtle as Kurosawa's best, and with white subtitles that often are hard to read against the white of the Gobi.

At best, it's an inspired piece of free-association pop art held together by sheer momentum, at worst a noisy mess of juvenile nonsense passing itself off as a movie.