Final Analysis is overwrought, overwritten, overscored pseudo-Hitchcockian drivel. With more twists than Lombard Street has curves, this San Francisco-set psychological thriller is the biggest disappointment of the new year. [8 Feb 1992, p.3D]

There are occasional missteps. The movie's pacing is uneven. The scandal is overblown...But the performances are excellent, and the sentiment is honed to ugly perfection.

Had the writing matched their performances, Fried Green Tomatoes would be this year's Driving Miss Daisy. As it is, it's an absorbing period mystery and a hapless social comedy. Half of it works. [24 Jan 1992, p.28

Spike Lee's cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson demonstrates he has the juice to be a top-notch director with Juice. His directorial debut commands respect. What it needs is a deeper story to match its fine acting and visual panache. [17 Jan 1992, p.5]

Aside from a few nifty computer-generated "trip" sequences and a foul-mouthed nun (Amanda Plummer) who advises her torturer to turn the other cheek before flattening him, Freejack has little to recommend it. [18 Jan 1982, p.1D]

Silver wrote The Hand that Rocks the Cradle as a graduate thesis at the University of Southern California film school, and the movie's derivative nature shows it. The Hand that Rocks the Cradle has the viciousness of The Stepfather. DeMornay's live-in nursemaid recalls Michael Keaton's malicious tenant in Pacific Heights. The entire picture stinks of Fatal Attraction, a movie that begins as an ethical exploration and ends as a mad slasher movie. [10 Jan 1992, p.5]

Prince of Tides brims with earnest emotion, but it's packed as tight as a can of sardines. There's no room for the actors to breathe, to relax, to reflect on the events around them...Despite numerous flaws, this is an unusual and special movie, a throwback to an era when big pictures were made about little people in the throes of everyday crisis. [25 Dec 1991, p.1D]

Stone's riveting three-hour movie freely mixes black and white and color documentary footage with pseudo-documentary and dramatic footage, so the line between real and fabrication is constantly blurred. [20 Dec 1991, p.7]

Levinson's Bugsy is painted against a vast tableau as sprawling as his Avalon and Rain Man. Bugsy is his most sophisticated film to date, a celebration of an outlaw's scheme to turn sand into gold; not for profit, but for love of a woman called Flamingo. [20 Dec 1991, p.24]

What ultimately is so distressing about The Last Boy Scout is that, despite its loathsome attitude, it is an outstanding action thriller. It sets its sights a hair above the gutter and hits bullseye every time. [13 Dec 1991, p.5]

Hook is so enormous, so cumbersome, that it resembles a complex machine inching its way across the resplendent three-moon Neverland landscape. It's a brilliant technical achievement, but it hasn't much of a soul. [11 Dec. 1991, p.3D]

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is one of the finest installments in the saga. [6 Dec. 1991, p.5]

My Girl isn't a must-see, it isn't as lyrical or as deeply moving as it should be, but it is a rare family film. It addresses serious subjects with honesty and earnestness. And it has a heroine worth crying for. [29 Nov 1991, p.5]

Beauty and the Beast flows effortlessly, its images sweeping past with unprecedented fluidity. [22 Nov 1991, p.6]

It's all art direction and no content. There's nothing for Morticia and Gomez to do. [22 Nov 1991, p.7]

Leigh's characters merely act in a goofy and irritating fashion until their dramatic pay-off scenes. This uneven style cheats fine actors out of the chance to shade their roles rather than rely upon black-and-white emotions. [6 Mar. 1992, p.10]

Romances such as Frankie's and Johnny's work better in the artificial environment of the stage than the "real" world of movies. The couple's bond seems phony from the start. [11 Oct 1991, p.7]

Ricochet isn't worthy of Lithgow's or Washington's talents. But having committed to the movie, these actors have gotten what they deserved. [05 Oct 1991, p.3D]

Perhaps the NCAA should investigate how Necessary Roughness ever made it to the big screen. The movie-making team that fielded this fiasco would receive more sanctions than the universities of Florida, Oklahoma and Houston combined. [27 Sept 1991, p.13]

The Commitments is a noisy, gritty, foul-mouthed movie with strong Irish sentiments and accents as pungent as stout. [13 Sep 1991, p.20]

Even an ear-splitting sound track of gunfire, explosions, rock 'n' roll and revving engines can't drown out one noise that should deeply disturb film fans the sound of Butch and Sundance spinning in their Bolivian graves. [27 Aug 1991, p.3D]

Caton-Jones' North Sea sensibilities seem askew for Doc Hollywood. He's operating from movie memories, and movies rarely have been kind to Southerners. With Doc Hollywood, which already is exaggerated, he overplays its hand. [02 Aug 1991, p.19]

Return To The Blue Lagoon is as pretty as a travel brochure and just as thin on substance and entertainment value. [02 Aug 1991, p.13]

Whatever raffish charm Reeves and Swayze exhibit is lost in the superficial gloss of Iliff's screenplay and Bigelow's direction. [12 July 1991, p.7]

Take away the quality look of this movie and the sensitive performance of Ford (he makes Phil Donahue look brutish), and there's a plot shamelessly tugging at heartstrings. It comes complete with a beagle puppy and a freckle-faced child, raising the saccharine level. [10 July 1991, p.1D]

Like Top Secret and other less inspired efforts made by Zucker, brother Jerry Zucker and pal Jim Abrahams, The Naked Gun 2 is consistently amusing without being outright funny. [28 June 1991, p.6]

Reynolds can't sustain the movie's pacing, nor can he blend the disparate elements of this sweeping epic. Yet, there are touches that make Robin Hood enormously entertaining. The battles with flaming arrows, catapults and a forest city of catwalks and tree houses under siege are masterfully recorded. [14 June 1991, p.6]

Enormously engaging. [7 June 1991, p.7]