An uncynical sequel that actually deserves its assured success.

The film is a lavish, linear, way-too-long (3 hr. 21 min.) storybook of Malcolm's career, the movie equivalent of an authorized biography, a cautious primer for black pride.

Coppola brings the old spook story alive -- well, undead -- as a luscious, infernal romance.

Most of the movie is Actors Acting: gifted guys (Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Chris Penn) running nattering riffs on familiar lout themes. [16 Nov 1992]

After an agonizing first half-hour designed to empty the theater, Lynch unleashes his patented perfervid style, puts the familiar dwarfs and feebs on display and elicits a nicely horrifying turn from Lee. [7 Sept 1992]

Unforgiven questions the rules of a macho genre, summing up and maybe atoning for the flinty violence that made Eastwood famous. [10 Aug 1992]

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui's frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total. Somebody should have given her a garlic necklace -- or a Miltown -- and told her to chill out.

The fable of four Englishwomen on a Portofino holiday gives moviegoers a vacation in rapture.

If the people responsible for A League of Their Own had tried just a little harder to avoid easy laughs and easy sentiment, they might have made something like a great movie. As it is, they have made a good movie, amiable and ingratiating.

Batman Returns could mark a happy beginning for Hollywood -- not because it might make a mint but because it dispenses with realism and aspires to animation, to the freedom of idea and image found in the best feature-length cartoons.

Somehow it works, in part because of the way director Howard keeps his crowded frames abustle with activity, in part because of the sheer indomitability with which his leading characters are endowed by the actors and by writer Dolman, but mostly because the movie takes enlivening chances with its material.

Michael Tolkin's script abounds in such cynical wisdom, but it never loses an appreciation for the grace with which these snakes consume their victims. [13 April 1992]

This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe to wow the yokels.

Nothing makes a moviegoer feel more isolated than sitting stony-faced through a comedy that makes the rest of the audience laugh and cheer. Am I blind? Or are they seeing things?

Well, it's sorta funny, and most genial: for all their ranking on parents and drooling over hot babes, Wayne and Garth are innocent kids wasting time creatively.

The movie is way too colorful - cute, in a repulsive way, with its crawly special effects - and tame compared with its source.

If sometimes this loose and anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities - generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither smug nor sentimental.

At heart, though, the story is about the deep, complex, poignant love a man has for his daughter: it's the Lolita syndrome without the lust but with every bit of the doting possessiveness. [30 Dec 1991, p.71]

Through his art and passion, Stone makes JFK plausible, and turns his thesis of a coup d'etat into fodder for renewed debate.

Bening gives a remarkable performance, proposing the intriguing possibility that a kept woman can also be a liberated woman. In any case, she shares her fears and vulnerability only in a few private moments with the camera, never with the besotted Bugsy. But good as she and everyone else in Bugsy is (mention must be made of Harvey Keitel, Elliott Gould and Ben Kingsley as assorted thugs and mugs), the picture belongs, in every sense of the word, to Beatty.

The voluptuousness of visual detail offers proof, if any more were needed after The Little Mermaid, that the Disney studio has relocated the pure magic of the Pinocchio-Dumbo years.

What plot it has is borrowed, improbably, from Henry IV, and whenever anyone manages to speak an entire paragraph, it is usually a Shakespearean paraphrase. But this is a desperate imposition on an essentially inert film. [28 Oct 1991]

The film offers no message, no solutions, only a great time at the movies.

Yet despite all that boring talk, Dead Again is a hit, the late-blooming rose of a movie summer that was mostly mulch. [23 Sept 1991, p.73]

[The Coens] are therefore entitled to patience, respect and, yes, perhaps a special gratitude for this movie, which never once compromises its fundamentally unpromising yet courageously aspiring nature. [26 Aug 1991]

Another fond sketch of losers from the down-scale version of Woody Allen.

Remarkable. [22 July 1991]

A humongous, visionary parable that intermittently enthralls and ultimately disappoints. [8 July 1991, p.55]