The cast looks sound enough—John Goodman as Fred Flintstone, Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma, Rick Moranis and Rosie O'Donnell as the Rubbles—but the script, cobbled together by a crowd of writers, gives them nothing but a handful of limp gags.

It's a dull, poky picture, which provides an unwelcome showcase for MacLaine's increasingly insufferable cute-gorgon shtick and no showcase at all for Cage's tremendous comic talents.

In this smutty kiddie farce he's a clownish action toy, and he grows wearying, fast.

The picture turns into a kind of stylized morality play about the right and the wrong ways for Irishmen to respond to distorted portraits of their character, and it's terrifically effective.

The result is an unorthodox blend of courtroom drama and old-style weepie, and somehow it comes off. [23 Dec 1993]

More like the Pelican Long-and-Drawn-Out: well over two hours of plots, subplots and super-subdialogue.

Few American movies since the silent era have had anything approaching this picture's narrative boldness, visual audacity, and emotional directness. [20 Dec 1993, p.129]

The action goes beyond conventional excitement to achieve a tragic grandeur.

The whole enterprise is designed to skirt the traditional traps of the music movie; instead of a laborious bio-pic, we get a sly, quick-witted meditation on a character always likely to elude our grasp.

But the picture as a whole isn't in the class of "Tootsie" and "Some Like It Hot," mostly because its premise is sentimental, not cynical.

Penn, with curled hair and wire-rims, makes a brilliant, slippery high-end shyster; his modulated hysteria is amazing. So is Brian De Palma’s direction. Few films actually made in the disco era can match the kinetic allure of this 1993 production, which has a bluesy undertow all its own.

This Merchant-Ivory production strains so hard to portray dignified restraint that it almost seizes up with good manners.

Although the plot comes to rely on a particularly outlandish series of coincidences, it’s a credit to Kloves’s skill that you can almost put this out of your mind and enjoy his long, suspended scenes, brimming with lust or the need to lash out.

The story worms further into the guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly modern: its surrealism. [29 Nov 1993, p.148]

The correspondences he wants us to see from up there start to look contrived, illusory. [27 Sept 1993, p.98]

What could have been a narrow, cultish little picture, a mere retro-trip, fans out into a broader study of longing and belonging. [4 Oct 1993, p.214]

Less fruitful is the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer as May's older cousin, the mysterious Countess Olenska, with whom Archer falls hopelessly in love. With her silly blond curls, Pfeiffer looks more plaintive than the dark exotic of Wharton's imagination.

It's a pleasure to find a thriller fulfilling its duties with such gusto: the emotions ring solid, the script finds time to relax into backchat, and for once the stunts look like acts of desperation rather than shows of prowess.

Both Eastwood's performance and the movie itself have the quality of meat-and-potatoes genre-picture entertainment: nothing fancy, nothing unusual.

The supporting cast provides centripetal force; too bad the center cannot hold.

The result is sweet and moody, and richly photographed by Sven Nykvist, but you can't help feeling shortchanged; Hanks and Ryan have quick wits, and funny faces to match—they should be striking sparks off each other, not mooching around waiting for something to happen.

For all its technical sophistication, this movie is as blaring and unambiguous as a picture book for the very young.

With this intricate web of personal and family connections, and the brave maneuvering in the face of the overseers’ commands, Gerima is doing nothing less than reconstituting and affirming the full humanity of the enslaved.

Van Peebles tells the story with ferocious vigor and unsparing brutality, entering Jesse’s haunted memory and dramatizing the farsighted schemes and improvisational daring on which the men's survival depends.

Barkin and DiCaprio are sensational. Every time De Niro threatens to take over the picture, they snatch our attention right back, and always with something casual: a look or a gesture that conveys how thoroughly this mother and son understand each other.

The movie is hardly in a position to chastise Gage for his empty soul when its own style is one of numbing, desolate slickness.

From the start, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., an independent film made on a very low budget (reportedly a hundred and thirty thousand dollars), is a polyphonic work of multiple voices and consciousnesses.

Even diehard fans may long for something to hold the tacky flourishes together—a plot, or maybe even a guide that's more lucid than the Necronomicon.