Though the music is helping market the movie, it's really an omnipresent backdrop to the two intersecting stories. Audibly and visibly, Kansas City nearly equals Ed Wood for period verisimilitude. Yet it's also character-driven, in particular by the women stars. [16 Aug 1996, p.4D]

Even our bony host the Crypt Keeper, who never met a pun he didn't like, might declare Bordello just plain whore-ible. [16 Aug 1996, p.4D]

The movie meanders without a rudimentary sense of the dramatic, yet it remains intermittently interesting thanks to a surprisingly voluminous cast of usual suspects from the world of independent cinema. [14 Aug 1996 Pg.09.D]

For director/co-writer John Carpenter, it's a chance for career renewal. For eyepatched lead and co-writer Kurt Russell, it's a fitfully amusing lark, a harmlessly retro career move and a second audition for any future Rooster Cogburn parts. [09 Aug 1996, p.3D]

Emma is the peak of the recent Austen pack and a star-maker, too -- an antidote to a summer in which even good movies have subordinated writing and characters to special effects. [02 Aug 1996, Pg.01.D]

Not for kids, silly. The little devils will devour this deviously delicious assault on abusive authority figures like the cake gobbled by the story's gluttonous schoolboy. [02 Aug 1996, p.1D]

The movie is so uninvolving that it inspires renewed respect for Broken Arrow, which was equally stupid but excitingly filmed. Though its sound effects will shake up your marrow, you can experience the same effect by plunking $ 100 worth of change into a rumbling bed at the nearest seedy motel. [2 Aug 1996]

A handsome but riotously cluttered melodrama with maybe 145 subplots, it's the latest and least in a soulless string of preordained multiplex hits from the John Grisham warehouse. [24Jul1996 Pg. 10.B]

A movie that rudely flings feces at the breakfast table isn't for everyone.

It's a mess with sporadic flashes of creativity. Someone should have gone back to the drawing board. [19 July 1996, p.13D]

But when material is this fragile, virtually every scene is obligated to click for the result to become something special. Ultimately, this walking and talking comes perilously close to becoming a gab-fest treadmill. [26 Jul 1996, Pg.04.D]

My hope is that if they do a sequel, they focus on No. 4. Love the way he carries pizza wedges in his wallet [17 July 1996]

A rousing state-of-the-art cartoon capped by an aerial-combat climax that, to its credit, isn't anti-climactic. [2 July 1996, p.D1]

Phenomenon is a fantasy about super-intelligence that works best if you can switch off your brain. Those who can will reach weepy nirvana. Those who can't will find this sticky-sweet wallow a bit, well, dumb. [03 Jul 1996 Pg.01.D]

But it does mine Murphy's gifts, and the payoff is both nutty and funny. Sometimes even touching, too. [28Jun1996 Pg.01.D]

[A] socially conscious sprawler... Sayles' latest never bores during its 21/4-hour unreeling. But neither does it soar, despite finessing a complex flashback narrative set in 1957 and present-day. [21 June 1996, p.3D]

The middling result, diverting while it lasts but too silly to recommend, is merely this week's funhouse action pic. [21 Jun 1996 Pg.01.D]

Filmmakers of Bernardo Bertolucci's magnitude don't often take on sexual coming-of-age movies, but judging from the pleasures of Stealing Beauty, maybe more of them should. [14 Jun 1996 Pg.04.D]

Poor Ben Stiller can't distill the darkness, slapstick and fantasy into a consistent directorial tone, but the leads' expert give-and-take make the movie far from unbearable. [14 June 1996, p.1D]

Buried under an avalanche of action. (1996 June 7, pg. D1)

Friedberg, who previously made Nielsen's golfing video and rental car commercials, knows only the low road -- and gets lost anyway. [24 May 1996, Pg.04.D]

Stylish, brisk but lacking in human dimension despite an attractive cast. [22 May 1996, p. D1]

A summer crowd-pleaser worthy of its wind.

Coy to a fault, the movie collapses under its own weight with 90 minutes to go, despite Robby Muller's impressive black-and-white photography, which puts the film on a higher artistic plane than other equally unbearable movies. [16 May 1996, Pg.06.D]

Who, though, would assume rambunctious humor would be served up as well? Dickens meets the Beverly Hillbillies, and the movie is handsome, too. [10 May 1996, p.4D]

A cool and clinical reportorial remembrance whose very title reminds us who Solanas was. [3 May 1996, p. 10D]

Potty humor to spare. [26 July 1996, p. D4]

Though its romantic-comedy triangle borrows heavily from Cyrano de Bergerac, the film has more in common with Three's Company. A shame, since Dogs boasts more than a few stray pleasures. [26Apr1996, Pg. 04.D]