A disastrous follow-up to Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, one of the seminal movies of a generation. [28 Sep 1990, p.7]

Narrow Margin cares more about characters than pyrotechnics or double-digit body counts. Its emphasis is on relationships, dramatic situations and settings, and how these combine to create a deeply satisfying yarn. [21 Sep 1990, p.6]

State of Grace is smooth and persuasive but ultimately as senseless as the lives it shows. [05 Oct 1990, p.7]

Death Warrant holds more interest than many of its genre. [21 Sep 1990, p.7]

Eastwood is absolutely the wrong actor to play Huston, called John Wilson in White Hunter, Black Heart. Eastwood is tense and tightly coiled, while Huston was gleefully bombastic. [12 Oct 1990, p.7]

Hardware runs more precisely, it crawls aimlessly as the robot, pieced together from household appliances, attempts to slice, dice, drill and saw Jill to death. There's no tension, no suspense, no climax. [14 Sep 1990, p.7]

Darkman is a spectacularly ill-conceived combination of Batman and The Phantom of the Opera. [24 Aug. 1990, p.6]

Foley's screenplay and direction constantly require viewers to re-evaluate the trio and their relationship with one another. This works as long as the dialogue is tolerable, which isn't long enough. [07 Sep 1990, p.6]

It's appropriate that Men at Work's writer, director and co-star, Emilio Estevez, has cast himself as a garbage collector. His new movie is trash. [25 Aug 1990, p.1D]

The Witches is a delectably creepy movie guaranteed to keep night lights burning bright.

Taking Care of Business is the funniest movie Charles Grodin, Jim Belushi and director Arthur Hiller have made in years. [17 Aug 1990]

Mo' Better Blues is not only about artistry unfulfilled. It is artistry unfulfilled. It is perfection without a meaningful plot. It lopes along, pleasantly, never reaching fruition. [03 Aug 1990, p.18]

How much you enjoy Presumed Innocent depends on whether you read Scott Turow's exhilarating legal thriller about a prosecutor charged with murdering a colleague who was briefly his lover. If you haven't, director Alan J. Pakula's adaptation will leave you dazzled and drained long before the final twist. If you have, you'll appreciate Pakula's faithful, though overly restrained, approach to Turow's 1987 novel that sold 1-million hardback copies and spent 44 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. [27 July 1990, p.6]

A well-intentioned but negligible story elevated to the charming through elegant performance and direction. It probably wouldn't work with any other players, but it gets high marks here. [27 July 1990, p.7]

The SEALs remain as elusive in the movie as they are in real life. They don't offer much information about the secret force, nor do they show us what it's like to be in it. The script sounds as if it has been declassified with all the juicy stuff taken out for security reasons...What it's left with is a series of explosive action scenes, music videos and scant dialogue tied loosely together around a weak plot. [20 July 1990, p.6]

Arachnophobia is a movie spun as carefully as a cobweb, and a whole lot more likeable than you'd expect from a film about creepy crawlers chomping on townsfolks. Credit first-time director Frank Marshall for the success as he expertly wrangles cast and spiders into an entertaining, three-star movie that moves so swiftly along that there's barely a minute to catch your breath. [20 July 1990, p.18]

But the movie is more than just a rehashing of the tried and true jokes. All the old charm is still there, but there's also a whole new setting and a whole new look. [6 July 1990, p.6]

RoboCop 2 moves fast and looks great. How much you like it depends on your tolerance for machine-gun mayhem. [22 June 1990, p.6]

Alda's accomplishment is to bring humorous reality to this predictable but charming movie about a young woman named Betsy Hopper (Molly Ringwald), who has been encouraged to lead an independent life by her parents until it comes time for her traditional wedding.

Like its predecessor, Gremlins 2 is a fun, roller-coaster ride of fiendish pranks and spilled gremlin innards. [15 Jun 1990, p.6]

Fire Birds is Top Gun without wings. Without personality. Without sex appeal. Nicholas Cage is no Tom Cruise. Sean Young is no Kelly McGillis.

Cadillac Man's beginning and ending are superb. (The hearse sequence is classic.) But the movie, like most of the salesmen's waists, sags heavily at its midpoint. [18 May 1990, p.6]

Action director John Badham has made the ultimate smash-and-crash chase movie. It's practically brain dead. It uses a hackneyed premise to string together as many stunts as possible, all the while borrowing from Badham's, Gibson's and Hawn's movies. [18 May 1990, p.7]

Q & A marks Lumet's return to stride after Family Business, Running on Empty and The Morning After. When he deals with New York, cops and corruption, he can't be surpassed. [27 Apr 1990, p.6]

Miami Blues is reminiscent of Demme's Married to the Mob and Something Wild. It has a superb sense of place. It savages Middle American tackiness. Regrettably, Miami Blues is even more mainstream and less developed than Married to the Mob. Its characters' lapses of logic and the holes in Armitage's script require a forgiving audience. The blood-letting at its conclusion necessitates a strong stomach. [20 Apr 1990, p.19]

If only lead actors Johnny Depp and Amy Locane could sustain the perverse pleasures Waters envisions. [6 Apr 1990, p.7]

Kids will probably enjoy all the nonsense, and even attending adults have one consolation: There are worse things to sit through. Just rent Howard the Duck if you don't believe it. [31 Mar 1990, p.1D]

Let's face it: Caine could do a lambada movie and it'd be worth seeing. His work in the new suspense thriller A Shock to the System carries us past the movie's bad direction and muddled script. [24 Mar 1990, p.2D]