A movie that tries to do to real estate what Fatal Attraction did to adultery. It fails - the script isn't half as convincing or the suspense nearly as taut, but the aim is the same. [28 Sept 1990]

Watching a merely adequate thriller is like eating an ungarnished hot dog - it goes down all right, but where's the spice and what's the point? Narrow Margin combines a solid cast with workmanlike direction and a decent if undistinguished script. Add it up and...you guessed it...all dog and no garnish. [24 Sep 1990]

Things you will not find in State Of Grace: a script that makes a modicum of psychological sense; a performance that isn't either desperately overwrought or numbly underplayed; and anything resembling grace. [18 Sep 1990]

White Hunter, Black Heart is a beautifully made elaboration of a thesis that has thankfully lost its antithesis to time. [15 Sep 1990]

To his credit, writer-director Richard Stanley, a South African native now living in England, brings his own bloody specialties to the banquet, and Hardware, although neither original nor especially thought-provoking, does serve its intended purpose by sending the hungry horror film fan away from the table satiated and nauseated. Compliments to the chefs. [12 Oct 1990]

Postcards From The Edge, is long on witty one-liners but woefully short on coherent structure. [13 Sep 1990, p.C5]

No so-called serious gangster film has ever been more fun, or less dangerous, or more intrinsically feminist, than GoodFellas. Even "I Married the Mob" was scarier.

The Killer goes on too long and never properly stitches together into the plot its strands of suspense and romance, but it never lacks for ballistic racket. A few scenes in recent movies have seen the firepower under which that whitewashed church disintegrates at movie's end; a few, but not many. [12 July 1991]

There are lively, compelling scenes, particularly in the first hour - Raimi has an indubitable talent for camp mayhem - but the picture escalates into absurdity and the last half hour, essentially a chase sequence, is marred by suprisingly cheesy special effects. [24 Aug. 1990]

This is a miniature classic, a pulp tragedy. [29 Sep 1990]

No, this isn't the Care Bears. But it is a compelling yarn, in a Grimm sort of way, a throwback to a time when storytellers felt freer to tap the emotional currents that run deep and often dark in all children, and when the stories themselves formed a moral maze that trusted the kids to find their own way home.

This is an exhilarating picture, the kind that strips away smug complacencies and exposes raw nerves to a bright light. [14 Sep 1990, p.C4]

What My Blue Heaven has going for it: one funny premise and two earthly delights, in the comic persons of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. What My Blue Heaven does not have going for it: anything remotely resembling a cohesive script. [22 Aug 1990, p.C4]

What's shocking about The Exorcist III is that it's a civilized albeit undemanding entertainment, more Hitchcock than Hellraiser. [20 Aug 1990]

There are some laughs here and the cast is accomplished, but this patchwork comedy is a tad threadbare. The bottom-line school of filmmaking. [18 Aug 1990]

The problem with the taboo-busters is that they feel calculated - in the past, Lynch's creepiness seemed casual and natural - and they take Wild at Heart so high it can't come down; the picture repeatedly jacks itself into frenzy only to crash into lethargy.

Air America, starring Mel Gibson's big blue eyes and Robert Downey, Jr.'s big brown biceps, is bland and toothless. [15 Aug 1990]

The Two Jakes itself is less tragic than petulant, mired in a self-pitying remembrance of things past. [10 Aug 1990]

Once the riffs are over and put into place, Mo' Better Blues is approximately one-third fabulous, one-third boring, and one-third infuriating. [06 Aug 1990]

There is a dearth of novelty in Young Guns II, but screenwriter Fusco proceeds as if the material were not familiar and seems to be having a hell of a time exposing it to an audience of teen-agers who wouldn't know John Ford from Ford Fairlane. [03 Aug 1990]

Pakula has staged Presumed Innocent with gravity - reverence, almost - and makes the most of the darkly elegaic images provided by cinematographer Gordon Willis. The careful, classical stateliness of the movie, with every picture planned and in its place, is in sharp ironic contrast to the legal chaos it exposes. [27 July 1990]

The Unbelievable Truth is just that - epistemology served up with pop panache and a comic twist. [27 Jul 1990]

Not nearly that bad, hardly that good - just an amiable, good-natured, fun-loving flick with moments of low comedy that will be remembered for . . . well, hours, maybe. [20 July 1990]

A rip-off of The Birds, but not as scary. [21 July 1990]

It's an unpredictable, mesmerizing journey nearly every shady second of the way.

Delightfully inventive, consistently funny, clever but not slick, brisk yet never antic, Quick Change is the perfect cinematic date - a summer film for all seasons, the kind of sharp-edged picture that gives lightweight a good name. [14 Jul 1990, p.C3]

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

Not surprisingly, the menage breaks down in the first few frames, depriving us on two counts - we get neither the smart-aleck naivete of yesterday nor the self-conscious slickness of today. [6 July 1990]

The deployment of the hardware may be extraordinary, but it doesn't overshadow the human dimension of this summer sequel. [4 July 1990]

Days of Thunder relies on charm, loud noise and a few racing sequences to print money with Cocky's visage on the bills: there can be no suspense because there can be no possibility Cocky will lose. [29 Jun 1990, p.C1]

For fans of violent but clever action films, RoboCop 2 may be the sultry season's best bet: you get the gore of Total Recall and the satiric smarts of Gremlins 2 The New Batch in one high-tech package held together by modest B-movie strings. [22 June 1990]

It's awfully hard to think of Alan Alda as an auteur. There's just nothing remotely distinctive about his feature work, except perhaps a sitcom softness at the centre - forgettably sweet to those who like that sort of thing, forgettably saccharine to those who don't, but forgettable in either case. [22 Jun 1990]

A superior sequel to an amusing original. A new batch of slapstick and satire. [16 Jun 1990]

The first 48 HRS. was similiarly nasty and violent, and it too was emptier than the inside of an efficient bell jar, but it was funny. Eight years later, director Walter Hill can find nothing to laugh about - the violence in this appalling picture is played out in a mirthlessly misanthropic vacuum. [8 Jun 1990, p.C1]

Guilty of gross mellerdrammer & innocent of sophistication... Guilty of being dumber than WWF wrestling & innocent of hypocrisy about its cartoon violence.

If nothing else (and there isn't much else), Part III rises above the wholesale clutter of its immediate predecessor, then contents itself with settling into an easy commercial groove. What remains is amiable kid's stuff, as sweetly forgettable as an orange Popsicle on a summer's day. [25 May 1990, p.C4]

Once it is said that the helicopters are good and the movie is bad, there isn't much left to say about Fire Birds. [26 May 1990]

Cadillac Man starts slowly, makes a sharp right turn, accelerates hard, then coasts to a limp finish. The verdict: not a bad run. Stacked up against the typical field of Hollywood comedies, this one places a respectable second - definitely short of the top rank, but a mile ahead of the mirthless pack. [18 May 1990]

Obviously a great respecter of rules, John Badham directs with a metronome, here some glossy action, there some witless banter, dispensing the two like different colored Smarties popped from the box. The bird in Bird On A Wire is a turkey. [19 May 1990]

In terms of psychology, it's an abysmal failure, too real to be symbolic, too symbolic to be realistic. [25 May 1990]

This omnibus of four tales is cheerful, campy, garish, ghoulish and gross. That means it's a success on its own unambitious B-movie terms. [05 May 1990]

Edel's Last Exit generates visceral voltage, but the nation illuminated is the pre-unification West Germany of a mere moment ago, not the United States of 40 years gone by. [04 May 1990]

When animal passion turns into animal stupidity. [1 May 1990]

If Lumet is travelling familiar ground here, the journey is still worthy because the ground is still muddy. And, as always, he travels it bravely - his Q's are many and far-reaching, his A's few and unsparing. [27 Apr 1990]

MIAMI BLUES gleefully presides over the happy marriage of two solid but usually separate traditions in U.S. movies: film noir, with its emphasis on the sleazy and the powerless, and screwball comedy, with its celebration of the romantically eccentric. As darkly unpredictable as The Third Man and as bouncingly comic as Pretty Woman, Miami Blues deserves all the rave reviews it's going to get and all the tons of money it's going to make. [20 Apr 1990]

Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is a taut little suspense yarn. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is an engaging blend of character deftly revealed and plot-twists nicely unravelled. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa succeeds. And then . . . [14 May 1990]

Technically, the picture is a mess, but the ineptitudes in the editing and cinematography actually add to the charm, and the Bushman family is wondrous to watch. The Gods Must Be Crazy II is an old dog sans new tricks, but the friendly mutt's familiar repertoire is varied enough to fill a few hours with undemanding fun. [13 Apr 1990]

Based on an allegedly true story, this is a dark comedy that begins with a charmingly light touch.... Alas, it's when the tale stays murderous, amateur night dragging into amateur day, that the picture loses both its energy and its edge. [09 Apr 1990]

In Drowning by Numbers, there is a strange character called Smut, a precocious boy genius fascinated by sex and obsessed with death: his avocation is the compulsive cataloguing of dead animals. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover feels as if it could been made by that child. [31 March 1990]

Cry-Baby is snifflingly nice. By going too far with its teardrop motif, it does the soggily unthinkable: it waters John Waters down. [6 Apr 1990]

The mutations never stop. But that won't upset those 8-year-olds; changing so rapidly themselves, kids love tales of metamorphosis, the more the merrier. For them, caught in the commercial grip of the latest craze, it matters only that their cute little mutants have taken the giant step onto the big screen. That's probably all they need; that's definitely all they're given. [30 Mar 1990]

The intelligence and wit of this glass-slipper heart-of-gold fantasy are shocking.

A Shock to the System is a beautiful, subtle satire of corporate America, providing a fresh slant on the visceral nastiness hovering beneath the glossy surface. The tension in the film is superb, swelling and receding with just the right degrees of intensity and the plot has enough unanticipated twists to provide thrills right until the end. [13 Oct 1990]

Director Kathryn Bigelow, who earlier proved in the vampire movie Near Dark that she has a thing for denim, leather and blood, is merely the overture to the violent shocks and severe sexual confusions (dozens of them) that give Blue Steel its dissonant, disruptive power. [16 Mar 1990]

Hook's cast is admirably adept at getting across what little boys are made of. [22 Mar 1990]

Because of its patently commercial instincts, this is basically a black knock-off of a popular genre. Yet, despite those instincts, and despite the sophomoric moralizing, the movie has zest. The edges are sharp; it holds our attention by holding on to the vestiges of its unique black perspective. In that sense, House Party doesn't so much sell out as buy in - there are worse faults. [11 May 1990]

Spader, the actor who rose to prominence in sex, lies and videotape, is excellent at delineating the erosion of Michael's conventionally celestial ethics, while Lowe, the actor who rose to prominence in the home version of sex, lies and videotape, is equally good at delineating the solidity of Alex's unconventionally sulphuric sadism. Sadistic or not, Alex knows how to give good time. So does Bad Influence. [12 Mar 1990]

As a film, The Handmaid's Tale, effectively compressed in Pinter's terse screenplay and heightened by Schldondorff's Teutonic thriller techniques, both subtracts from and adds to Atwood's novel, while scrupulously preserving its interior paradox. [09 Mar 1990]

Cinema Paradiso converts you to the credo that art can indeed be holy.

Sad to say, poor old Nightbreed fails even as failure - it's bad, but it's not memorably bad. The odor it emits is less the stench of an eternal hell than the stink of a passing purgatory. If nothing is forgiven by the time you've done your time in the theatre, all is certainly forgotten. [20 Feb 1990]

A brutal and brutally stupid thriller about brutal and brutally stupid people,[16 Feb 1990]

The madness of Madhouse simply eludes me. [16 Feb 1990]

The bad news is that Stella is an unintentionally hilarious mess, handily summed up by what Haskell sees as "the lowest level" of the woman's film - "(It) fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. [2 Feb 1990]

Tremors is never earth-shattering, but always competent. Modest in intention, fine in execution, it just wants to make a body smile, to stick a happy face on the monster movie. There are worse faults. [20 Jan 1990]

Rising above its flaws, Internal Affairs converts a genre flick into a generic study, an examination of the mean streets that even the healthiest mind travels, those dark alleys where our force is sometimes overworked and always understaffed, the places where we, too, must police ourselves. [13 Jan 1990]

McNaughton's film, which has been described as "too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd," is an exercise in revulsion by an often skilled filmmaker. [8 Oct 1990]

To report that Always will make you cry is not esthetically saying much; slicing up onions has the same effect. Leslie Halliwell's one-word summation of the forties version applies to Spielberg's update for the nineties: "icky." [26 Dec. 1989]

We're back on the buddy-cops beat again, with Stallone emerging as a Dapper Dan this time. Sporting cerebral specs topped by an immaculate coif, he gets to wear Armani suits and speak an occasional complete sentence. Sly looks fine in the duds but seems to find those sentences a bit taxing. Guess he's just out of practice. [28 Dec 1989]

Never the most subtle of directors Oliver Stone brings a jackhammer brutality to Born on the Fourth that the material no longer needs. [22 Dec 1989, p.C1]

A movie in which TV show host Bob Eubanks tells a joke at once anti-semitic and homophobic, a movie in which a town turns into a vermin-ridden, crime- crazed black hole - this is the happiest surprise of the holiday season? What gives? [22 Dec 1989]

Done up strictly for laughs, this might have been fine. But the picture actually starts taking itself seriously, and that spells instant yawns. [16 Dec 1989]

If Blaze is not historically or psychologically reliable, it is a reliable good time. This is a meaningless movie, but there's no arguing with Ron Shelton's skills as a frothy screwball romantic: in Blaze, nobody gets burned. [14 Dec 1989]

Seidelman isn't that exclusive - any cliche will do, the cruder the better. [8 Dec 1989]

Given Part II's quality, the final sequence, a series of clips from next summer's Part III, may be a major miscalculation. "To be concluded," reads the final title. Sounds more like a threat than a promise. [22 Nov 1989, p.C9]

Everything Terms of Endearment's detractors accused Terms of being: a synthetic, manipulative tragi-comedy with performances more appropriate to a proscenium arch - or to a drag show - than to the wide screen. And yet, there are moments in the movie of high comedy and sequences of searing truth. At its worst, Steel Magnolias is vastly inferior to Designing Women; at its best, it brings to mind (but never equals) Tennessee Williams. [20 Nov 1989]

Forman's treatment is another matter entirely - infinitely more subtle and, using the intrinsic bias of film, far more naturalistic. [18 Nov 1989]

As it stands, Murphy has put his idols and friends in front of a camera, given them a watered down version of The Sting and hoped they'd make the best of it. They don't. [23 Nov 1989, p.C12]

Dad, showcasing Jack Lemmon in a rubber wrinkle mask (he looks like an elderly E.T.), would no doubt have won more Emmy awards for Goldberg had it aired on the tube, but on screen, it's a tearjerking embarrassment.

Clever and confident use of limited resources in an unfamiliar medium. Kenneth Branagh has made the right choice nine out of 10 times, and the tenth is easily forgiven because of the youthful ardor of that bright face and that bright talent. [10 Nov 1989]

Honorable, instructive, courageous: Fat Man and Little Boy, the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., is admirable in every respect save one - it's a lousy movie. [20 Oct 1989]

Flagrantly flawed but never less than fascinating film that does indeed blend the funny Woody and the serious Woody.

Plot ain't where it's at here. An Innocent Man is guilty as charged and innocent as hell. [06 Oct 1989]

Black Rain is really an extended exercise in pure style, a pretty picture in constant motion painted by a very commercial artist. In fact, the style is so uncontaminated by substance that everything here - plot, character, theme - gets subordinated to the glitzy sights and ambient sounds. [22 Sep 1989]

Thoughtful, if predictable, movie: set against the Soweto Uprising of 1976 (but shot in and around Harare, Zimbabwe), the picture proffers two families, one white and headed by schoolteacher Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), the other black and headed by Ben's gardener, Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona). Both are devastated by apartheid, but to different degrees and for different reasons. [22 Sept 1989]

Sea Of Love has got a lot of things going for it: it's got two strong lead performances; it's got some down-and-dirty dialogue and a few sexy scenes and a couple of yuks and a nifty title tune. What it ain't got is plot, and thus suspense, and thus thrills. [15 Sep 1989]

The ads give this a Lamborghini label, but under the hood, it's just a clunker that putzes along like a suburban sedan. [26 Aug 1989]

Joe Pytka does display an occasional nice touch with mood and atmosphere - at its infrequent best, the humor here is almost wry. But his editing is as jumpy as a mare in heat. [19 Aug 1989]

A searing tale effectively told. And superbly acted. [18 Aug 1989]

Once again, Candy does his slob-with-a-heart-of-gold number. He's good at it. He can be a funny fellow. He can even carry a mediocre picture all by his lonesome, squeezing a lot out of a little. What he can't do is squeeze that much out of this little. [16 Aug 1989]

Parenthood is a charming, amusing piece of work. It doesn't say anything new - Howard clings as tightly to tradition as Norman Rockwell - but it says the old things with enough wit and eloquence to keep them going for another generation. [2 Aug 1989, p.C7]

Hanks doesn't quite manage a miracle this time, but thanks to a competent (if sometimes scatter-brained) script and a co-star who looks like a cross between Orson Welles and a spawn of the devil and who produces saliva like OPEC produces oil, Turner and Hooch ends up an amusing diversion that sprays gags - messy gags, wise-ass gags - as often as Hooch sprays the furniture with his excess spittle. Which is very often indeed. [28 July 1989]

The laughs just keep rolling as 'Weird Al' makes a movie. Overheard from a still-convulsing woman after a recent screening of Weird Al Yankovic's UHF: "I'm sorry, but that's funny." I'm sorry, but she's right. Yuks you feel obliged to apologize for are yuks nonetheless. And UHF prompts a lot of apologies.

Shag bounces through elements of farce and satire, music and romance without straining too hard and with a few more laughs than one would expect from a picture that seems patched together from such a wide variety of genre films. Like a perfect Southern belle, Shag is smarter and funnier than you expect it to be, but never smarter and funnier than it has to be.[21 July 1989]

Can't find it in your vast collection of Fleming first editions? Not to worry. Seems the producers - a.k.a. the Cubby Broccoli Cottage Industry - have run plumb out of titles. And everything else too. [14 July 1989]

The comedy is warm and witty and wafer-thin, as easy on the palate as a raspberry sorbet on a summer afternoon.

Lee has forged a work of art in the classic sense -- art that delights and instructs.

In short, Batman is terrific - funny, smart and sensitive too, the perfect cinematic date.

The cheery result is enough to renew one's faith in Uncle Walt and the boys - a family picture that transcends the cliche, a light-bright romp where the sentiment isn't cheap and where the action isn't childish. Now there's a novelty item for you. [27 June 1989]