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]