The plot is a mishmash of murder, cute pets, lost luggage, compulsive gambling and domestic disharmony, and has holes in it you could pilot a yacht through. [10 March 1992]

John Carpenter, unable to decide what kind of movie he wants, alternates between his thriller-hardware mode (Escape from New York) and his touchy-feelie mode (Starman). The result is that adults may fall asleep in their seats during the dreary chase sequences, while children are going to holler "Ick!" and escape to the candy counters during the mushy stuff. [28 Feb 1992]

Wayne's World has been engineered to amuse people who are mirror images of its heroes, but it goes wickedly wrong: It's so dumb it talks down to the stupid.

Director John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October) is a dab hand at combining stunning scenery, fast-paced action and sharp dialogue and the film easily transcends the weaknesses of its plot. [07 Feb 1992]

The plot-turns are mounting by the minute, but they're not making a lick of sense. In fact, they're smacking of desperation, the sort of desperation that incites a writer to pull "taut" so tightly that all logic snaps, the sort that drives the movie on and on and on in search of a convincing third act and a resolving climax. [10 Feb 1992]

Despite its hastily tacked-on resolution, Mississippi Masala is still a lesson well delivered - flecked with humour and never pedantic. [28 Feb 1992]

Fried Green Tomatoes was obviously cooked up with the best of intentions but, like the dish to which it refers, it's rudimentary eats - not quite junk food, but not quite nourishing, either. [03 Jan 1992]

Juice takes a black director, a black cast and a black theme - ghetto youths come of age - and turns the whole exercise into a white-bread,middle-of-the-road film. You root for it to rise to the challenge, to be better than it is, but it sticks to the straight course - polished enough yet steadfastly predictable, just another sentimental slice of mean-street life. [22 Jan 1992]

Suspense picture veteran Curtis Hanson (he directed The Bedroom Window and Bad Influence and wrote The Silent Partner) disguises the contrivances with energy and admirable performances, and the audience squeals and cheers on cue. [13 Jan 1992]

Bolstered by a solid premise, this film starts out impressively enough - it looks to be a worthy character study. But it soon stops dead, wheels spinning badly, and then, hungry for momentum, lurches off in a completely cockeyed direction. [16 Oct 1992]

Paradoxically cerebral and primal, reasonable and anti-rational, life- affirming and nihilistic, Naked Lunch is a sensual and intellectual feast. It will not be a meal to everyone's taste, but in its bizarre class, there is nothing classier. [10 Jan 1992]

Daughters of the Dust is hypnotic, flowing with the trance-like rhythms of a poem that is beautifully written yet deliberately arcane. It's the cinematic equivalent of the voices you hear in the fiction of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, but without the connecting narrative thread that most novels possess and most movies imitate. The result is a difficult work, yet a haunting one. [29 May 1992]

The cast is equally strong (especially McDonnell), but the vast subject and the shifting settings force Kasdan all over the map. [10 Jan 1992]

Director Barbra Streisand does justice to the popular book until the two-thirds mark of the film, whereupon the script abruptly changes from a psychic history to a gauzy romance. A Prince of a movie, until the end. [27 Dec 1991]

Alas, the perfect Steve Martin vehicle will probably never be the perfect film, no matter how endearing the silver-haired actor makes himself. And so it is with Father of the Bride; good, but by no means great. [20 Dec 1991, p.C3]

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

It's a shame that Levinson's pace is so stately and that his staid directorial choices fall short of the risky work undertaken by his actors and scriptwriter. Bugsy's life cheated his own genius; this movie cheats the genius who would embody that life. [13 Dec 1991]

Blowing up bad guys, swearing, and lots of cliches makes the The Last Boy Scout a must to miss. [16 Dec 1991]

Spielberg hooks us again with state-of-the-art craft, the director taps into powerful myths, both primal and pop, and makes them seem new. He allows grownups to return to childhood, but manages to catch fish in all generational waters.

The important thing about Star Trek VI is that it is a good production of a better-than-average script. There are countless chuckle-lines, and the story takes several interesting twists and turns.

As box-office packages go, My Girl may well become a big hit. The wrapping is colourful, even charming in spots, and that circle of black ribbon is a gravely clever touch. Get closer, though, and it's like those Christmas presents stacked around the department store tree - apparently real but really empty. [28 Nov 1991]

The humour is based entirely on inversion which worked in your cartoons, and even on the TV show, but it's not enough to hold up a movie, even with the helping hand provided by a disembodied hand. [22 Nov 1991]

With the help of an impeccable cast and with a style steeped in the past, Soderbergh has placed the persona of Kafka under a lens, and the soul he discovers is his own. [31 Jan. 1992]

Unless you are a Connery fan - or a special effects fan, or perhaps a broadsword-fighting fan - the profoundly silly plot sinks this film beyond redemption. [04 Nov 1991]

Life is Sweet is sweet indeed - and comic and quirky and, on those occasions when the tone deftly shifts, just a little sad... Leigh's work, and the quotidian life it depicts, is sometimes slim but never insubstantial, occasionally sweet but never a sugary confection. And always worth celebrating. [24 Jan. 1992]

My Own Private Idaho achieves more than most movies dream of attempting. The Shakespearian allusions aside, Van Sant has essentially remade "Of Mice and Men" for the nineties, with Mike as the "mouse," Scott as the "man." It is the mouse who roars.

Scrape off its grimy exterior, and it too is a fairy tale, but one with ambitions of realism, one that tries to co-exist in our world, one that pretends to be something it isn't. Frankie & Johnny ends up lost in limboland, stumbling onto a whole new genre - call it kitchen-sink unrealism. [11 Oct 1991]

Just enough laughs to make up for predictable plot. [1 Oct 1991]

This extraordinary film, a stiletto-edged domestic melodrama that, at different times, evokes the work of Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the other, unrelated Penn (Arthur, director of Bonnie and Clyde), is harrowingly honest in content yet lyrically elegiac in style. [21 Sep 1991]

Partly a scintillating performance documentary, partly a comic romp through a rough-and-tumble culture, The Commitments has the charismatic energy of the music it salutes - this is blues that cheers you up, soul with a whole lot of heart. [16 Aug 1991]

The cinematic equivalent of a "good read" - pick it up and you can't put it down; put it down and it's gone forever.

The overall mood of Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man may be one of good-natured idiocy, but it's hard to fault a movie for being stupid when stupidity is its one and only raison d'etre. [23 Aug 1991]

This hip morality tale is by no means perfect - it's not the masterpiece "Miller's Crossing" was - but it is stylish, intelligent, witty and more than slightly creepy.

Gag is short-lived in predictable plot In this empty confection. Martin Short reprises every character he's ever played, while Danny Glover's detective is straight out of Lethal Weapon. [09 Aug 1991]

Hartley manages to spin grim-sounding material into an uplifting - and funny - story dealing with love, responsibility, the dynamics of family life and, yes, trust. [09 Aug 1991]

Mel Brooks manages some richly funny scenes that are spoiled by excessive gags. [27 July 1991]

Wonderfully theatrical in conceit and frequently beautiful to look at, Archangel is nevertheless choppy and listless in pace, and has little of the surrealist zing of the earlier film (Tales from the Gimli Hospital). [03 Sep 1990]

AT the end of the preview screening of Regarding Henry earlier this week, I sat with one tear welling in the corner of my left eye and a nagging feeling of annoyance at having been so shamelessly manipulated. [10 July 1991]

It's unclear as to how we are supposed to feel about these monologuists, the majority of whom are twentysomething; nothing is how I felt about them, but perhaps I was tired. [27 Sept. 1991]

A great movie... A pop epiphany, marking that commercially creative point where the power of Hollywood meets the purity of myth.

If there were an ounce of pretension in this, it would be unbearable. But it is clear that nobody in the film takes it seriously, and that everyone is having fun, and you just can't help having fun with them. [28 June 1991]

Between the swash and the buckle, Reynolds comes up completely dry - the connecting scenes lack any rhythm or pace. And Costner looks every bit as uncomfortable as he sounds - the British actors, especially Rickman, blow him off the screen. [24 June 1991]

Crystal is funny in City Slickers but the film is flat and makes the desert feel as cramped and airless as a basement nightclub. [7 June 1991]

It's a con, a movie that tries to lure unsuspecting teen-age audiences into the theatres with the promise of offensiveness, stupidity and puerility - which, after all, are almost traditions in summer teen entertainment - and then ambushes them with a clumsy, unfunny movie that, rather than revel in its own potential for bad taste, attempts to cram messages about growing up and being responsible down the teenage gullet.

The flames sure look real, but everything else in Backdraft, director Ron Howard's inflatable ode to firefighters, seems about as genuine as a plastic log in an electric hearth. Howard's particular type of schmaltz works well enough in small dabs on comic canvases (Splash, Cocoon, even Parenthood), but pumped up to heroic proportions, the sentimentality is just plain silly - in this case, cheap melodrama on a two-hour jag.

Admittedly, Home Alone is a tough act to follow, but the Columbus-Hughes aura will probably need vigorous polishing after Only the Lonely. [25 May 1991]

But there's still Murray, who drives the idea further than it has any right to go. He energizes the loony schtick of the opening scenes. [17 May 1991]

One is inclined to say Stone Cold is unadulterated trash with no pretensions to art - which means that, judged by the criteria of simple- minded action movies, it is not half bad; it delivers its formulaic goods on time and on budget. [17 May 1991]

The weak plot means that the picture is governed totally by its gadgetry, the equivalent of those James Bond sequels that limp awkwardly from one showoff sequence to the next. [10 May 1991]

Blake Edwards' latest comedy about a man who comes back in a woman's body has some laughs, but it lacks his usual style, wit and humanity. Switch suffers from glitch. [16 May 1991]

If the viewer squirms with embarrassment, it's not over how Petrie has directed his camera or his excellent young cast - it's his heavy-handed material that's beyond redemption, and since he co-wrote that material he has a lot to answer for. [26 Apr 1991]

Even the neatness here is borrowed. A Kiss Before Dying isn't a remake; it's a rehash. [27 Apr 1991]

After years of inadvertently making us laugh, Sylvester Stallone actually does a picture designed to be funny. It isn't, not very, but, yo, give the man credit for going with the flow. [01 May 1991]

Despite the efforts of the talented director, Alan Rudolph (The Moderns, Choose Me), and his experienced cast, Mortal Thoughts is a formulaic TV-sized feature conceived to cash in, and put a feminist spin on, some of the emotions stirred up by Fatal Attraction; unfortunately, it seldom gets intense enough to stir up any emotion. [19 Apr 1991]

Poison, low-budget but with all-human actors, is dark and funny and has something very powerful to say about society and how it applies irrational stigmas to those who do not conform to an often arbitrary status quo. [12 July 1991]

This picture will linger, stuck in those corners of the mind you may not care to visit, where the stranger you meet lies in the bed beside you, or stares back from the mirror before you, and where the comfort offered is nothing but cold. [14 June 1991]

It's so much like Home Alone, it's the unofficial sequel, Home Alone II: Out on His Own. Career Opportunities shows us what happens when the Macaulay Culkin character grows up. It's not a pretty sight. [1 Apr 1991]

It's an undemanding yet bright delight. [16 Mar 1991]

Guilty by Suspicion is a morality play innocent of moralism and manipulation. It's what almost nobody thinks Hollywood is: decent. [15 Mar 1991]

Strip away the transparent moral shading, erase the buddy-picture twist, and True Colors is nothing more than a watered-down mix of Wall Street and The Candidate, a sentimental variation on a sentimental model. [15 Mar 1991]

Always stylish and occasionally thrilling and never thoughtful.

The Doors is excessive, unsubtle, emotionally brutal and stylistically sadistic, but that's exactly right for the dark side of the sixties Morrison and his band embodied. [01 Mar 1991]

The cast, including the Sheen clan, brings more grace to this material than it deserves, but that only seems to highlight the problem - it's like putting leather-binding on a Hubert Humphrey monologue. [22 Mar 1991]

The plot is squeezed dry in this bloody Valentine from Hollywood and becomes annoyingly predictable. Thriller stumbles on its own success

Varying the pace, altering the tone, Ruben definitely keeps us off balance. Not as good as it could be, a far sight better than it might have been, this is a movie that puts the lie to the computer's stern dictum: garbage in, passable entertainment out. [08 Feb 1991]

The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]

Housebroken and prettified, this boxed version of White Fang comes ready for prime-time - safe enough for the living room, docile enough for the couch. But don't let your guard down: it just might gum you to sleep. [25 Jan 1991]

Like Pretty Woman, Green Card doesn't aim high - comedy, sentimentality, sex and pathos are sufficient for its scheme of fantasy things - but with the exception of MacDowell, it achieves its modest aims unerringly. [11 Jan 1991, p.C1]

More than merely another bad movie, it's the most depressing development yet in Coppola's career. It's a would-be cash cow bred cynically to excrete money, the arty answer to "Child's Play 2" or "Back to the Future III."

Alice Tate seems at first to be no more than a grimly sweet nothing, but she evolves into a giddily sweet something. So does her movie. [25 Jan 1991]

Kindergarten Cop is fast, loud and obvious, but there are unexpectedly delicate touches. [21 Dec 1990, p.C10]

Funny, heartbreaking and, yes, uplifting, The Long Walk Home takes the audience into a past that is always threatening to become the present; that it was made makes the future seem a little less threatening. [09 Feb 1991]

Fred Schepisi's sensuously staged film version of John le Carre's spy thriller, is energetic but thoughtful, a virtually perfect adapatation of a virtually perfect novel. [18 Dec 1990]

Marshall elicits performances from Williams and De Niro that are exceptional. Awakenings is a small, simple movie about a large, complex issue, the waste of human opportunity. [19 Dec 1990, p.C1]

It's undemanding good fun, even when the script turns sentimental. [14 Dec 1990]

A classic... Edward Scissorhands is a sharp salute to the oddball in all of us.

Indeed, as the film unreels to its extraordinary climax - a scene that will make your skin crawl - Frears has the larger target right in his sights and, bang, pulls the thematic trigger, taking no prisoners.

Cyrano De Bergerac, the latest cinematic adaptation of the Edmond Rostand classic, is a lavishly appointed film, a decidedly handsome film, a film that wears its money on its sleeve, a film whose beauty is skin deep. The movie always moves, but it's never moving. [30 Nov 1990]

It does what it desires to do - it suspensefully squeezes the sweat out of the pores - but the salty stench it leaves behind in the persona of Annie Wilkes is a residue that transcends its intentions. [30 Nov 1990]

It's hard to say how much the talking-head segments are based on the actors' real-life eating experiences, but they save the film by displaying a depth of emotion, candour and ironic good humour that - unlike many of the scenes in Eating - appears to be genuinely felt. [12 Jul 1991]

Cerebral without being dry, delicate without being dull, Mr. And Mrs. Bridge is a rarity: a drama of manners that breathes esthetic life into airless parlours, without either sentimentalizing the occupants or hyping the atmosphere. [21 Dec 1980]

Predator 2, an alien-monster movie that is racist and violent, not to mention atrociously acted and ham-handedly directed, has everything going for it a bad movie needs to be dismissed with a quip. But this is too ugly to be funny about. [23 Nov 1990]

The follow-up to Three Men and a Baby offers more of the same. Mixed in among the cliches and stereotypes, there's a genial chuckle or two to be found Laughs that are strictly low-cal. [24 Nov 1990]

Rocky V, for all its faults, is not awful. It is inferior to the charmingly naive, Cinderella-in-sweat-pants opener of 14 years ago, but it's far superior to every other overdetermined installment. [21 Nov 1990, p.C1]

Seen from any chronological vantage, this isn't a superior flick - think of it more as great radio with average pictures. [16 Nov 1990]

The treatment of the Sioux is not only sympathetic, it's ethnographically exact. Neither Noble Savages nor Red Injuns, the natives in Dances With Wolves are differentiated human beings about to undergo cultural genocide.

Piously posing as providing a public service, The Krays is little more than an artsy simulacrum of America's Most Wanted. [25 Jan 1991]

His first visit was bad, this is worse. [09 Nov 1990]

Jacob's Ladder is a cheat - but a talented, disturbing, beguiling cheat. We don't know we've been truly had until it's finally over, when the screen fades and the lights rise and we wake up with a start, deliciously unnerved. [2 Nov 1990, p.D3]

For all its merits - a lush canvas, a first-rate cast, a thoughtful director examining a theme directly relevant to his own checkered career - Vincent & Theo doesn't quite measure up. [16 Nov 1990]

Savini seems to lose his grip in the second half, and what began as exhilaratingly horrendous settles into comfortable predictability. [24 Oct 1990]

White Palace starts out raw and realistic, fraught with danger, but soon metamorphoses into a soft and sugary romance. A gulp of vinegar and a Kool-Aid chaser. [19 Oct 1990]

Despite some fine performances, what should be a crystalline epic is a sloppy and sentimental tale of family life. Sterling performances in a leaden script. [05 Oct 1990]

Mesmerizing.

Major surgery has been known to take less time and give more pleasure than this forgettable flick. [13 Oct 1990]

Humanistic and anti-war, Memphis Belle is predictably uplifting, as is the wont of producer Puttnam, but not at the expense of good sense. These were fine kids, this exciting and intelligent film says, and it wasn't their fault society couldn't find anything better for them to do than kill or be killed. Memphis Belle is a dance of life tapped out on a tombstone. [12 Oct 1990]

Mr. Destiny is a sedated puppy of a movie - meant to be all warm and cuddly, it just lies there like a furry lump, waiting for an invigorating spark that never comes. You almost feel sorry for the inert thing - it wants so much to be loved, and does so little to earn it. [16 Oct 1990]

A masterpiece, but of a unique kind... A gorgeously filmed, supremely well-acted, intricately written film noir about now.