BATMAN
***
USA
Batman versus The Joker.
   Gotham City is a hypnotic setting and Burton's approach to the material is pleasingly - and expectedly - dark, but Keaton is miscast.
dir: Tim Burton
ph: Roger Pratt
pd: Anton Furst
cast: Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger

BLACK RAIN
***
Japan
Shohei Imamura's account of one family's suffering in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing is filmed in the classical style of 1950s Japanese cinema, all grieving violins and silvery monochrome. It's fascinating to see a Japanese filmmaker tackle this topic so confrontingly and with such ambition, but the picture is jarringly prone to melodramatics.
wr/dir: Shohei Imamura
cast: Yoshiko Tanaka, Kazuo Kitamura, Etsuko Ichihara, Shoichi Ozawa, Norihei Miki, Keisuke Ishida, Hisako Hara, Masato Yamada

CINEMA PARADISO
****
France/Italy
A borderline maudlin yet irresistible celebration of cinema framed through a child's coming of age.
wr/dir: Giuseppe Tornatore
cast: Jacques Perrin, Philippe Noiret, Salvatore Cascio, Mario Leonardi

THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER
***½
France/Netherlands
Greenaway's most popular film, it's particularly intriguing for its political implications. Some ideas are needlessly repeated and cluttered, but there is a ferocity at the film's core that keeps things compelling.
dir: Peter Greenaway
ph: Sacha Vierny
cast: Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Alan Howard,  Tim Roth

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
*****
USA
A documentary filmmaker woos an attractive producer, while an ophthalmologist tries to get rid of his mistress.
   Two loosely interlinked stories, one relatively comic, one pointedly grim, and both doused in existentialist questioning and a stifled incredulousness at the outrageous and all-pervading injustice that haunts Woody Allen's worldview. Because it's more ambitious and unwieldy than anything Allen has delivered, responses seem to mostly fall in two categories: polite, dismissive fascination; shell-shocked 'masterpiece' claims. Me, I have no words.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
ph: Sven Nykvyst
cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Martin Landau, Alan Alda, Anjelica Huston, Claire Bloom, Joanna Gleason, Jenny Nichols, Jerry Orbach, Sam Waterston, Bill Bernstein, Stephanie Roth, Gregg Edelman, Frances Conroy, Daryl Hannah

DEAD POETS SOCIETY
*½
USA
An eccentric teacher becomes an inspirational figure.
   A hollow, artificial, cliché-driven cheese package.
dir: Peter Weir
cast: Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke

DO THE RIGHT THING
***½
USA
Tensions between black and white rise in Brooklyn on a hot day.
   A tense, passionate, self-consciously confronting exposé of day-to-day racism that grows shrill towards the end.
wr/dir: Spike Lee
cast: Dannie Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee

DRIVING MISS DAISY
**
USA
An aging bitch forms an unlikely friendship with her black chauffeur.
   Strong lead performances can't save this slow, manipulative non-drama. It has enough plot to support perhaps a tenth of its length.
dir: Bruce Beresford
cast: Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman, Dan Aykroyd, Patti LuPone

DRUGSTORE COWBOY
***½
USA
A flawed but convincing tragi-comic account of drug addicts. The ending though, is a copout.
dir: Gus Van Sant
cast: Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James Remar, James Le Gros, Heather Graham

ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY
***
USA
In 1949, a Jewish Holocaust-survivor is involved with three women, his wife, his lover and his former wife whom he thought dead.
   A dignified but overlong and generally uninvolving period piece.
dir: Paul Mazursky
cast: Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin, Margaret Sophie Stein

FIELD OF DREAMS
***
USA
A farmer hears a voice that inspires him to build a baseball ground.
   A familiarly life-affirming baseball movie with a message. Its popularity has mysteriously endured over the years.
dir: Phil Alden Robinson
cast: Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, Timothy Busfield, Ray Liotta, Burt Lancaster, Gaby Hoffman

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE
**½
USA
A sequel too tired even to follow its formula.

JESUS OF MONTREAL
****½
Canada/France
A group of actors stage a religious play and are beset by controversy.
   A sophisticated, passionately mounted attack on religious commercialism.
wr/dir: Denys Arcand
cast: Lothaire Bluteau, Catherine Wilkening, Johanne-Marie Tremblay, Rémy Girard, Robert Lepage, Denys Arcand

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN
****
West Germany
The lives of striking workers in Brooklyn in the 1950s.
   A grim, gritty, uncompromising adaptation of a notorious novel.
dir: Uli Edel
wr: Desmond Nakano
ph: Stefan Czapsky
cast: Stephen Lang, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Burt Young, Peter Dobson, Christopher Murney, Jerry Orbach, Alexis Arquette

LICENCE TO KILL
***
UK
An efficient Bond addition, certainly among the more successful of the decade.

THE LITTLE MERMAID
***½
USA
A young mermaid falls in love with a human prince.
   A return to form in a sense - more in terms of promise than achievement. The animation is first-rate, even when the plot turns maudlin.
dir: John Musker, Ron Clements
voices of: Jodi Benson, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, Kenneth Mars, Jason Marin, Rene Auberjonois

MISS FIRECRACKER
***
USA
A plucky small-town girl enters a local beauty contest in an effort to win respect.
   It's sad to watch Holly Hunter's formidable efforts betrayed by tuneless direction. Schlamme misses exceptionally easy targets, e.g. small-town beauty pageants.
dir: Thomas Schlamme
cast: Holly Hunter, Mary Steenburgen, Tim Robbins, Alfre Woodard, Scott Glenn

MYSTERY TRAIN
****
USA
Three groups of people - mostly foreigners - spend a night in three separate rooms in a crummy Memphis hotel.
   Offbeat, amusing tales of deadpan existentialism, memorably incorporating Memphis as a photogenically decaying post-urban wasteland.
wr/dir: Jim Jarmusch
cast: Masatoshi Nagase, Youki Kudoh,  Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Cinque Lee, Nicoletta Braschi, Elizabeth Bracco, Rick Aviles, Steve Buscemi, Vondie Curtis Hall

NEW YORK STORIES
***½
USA
A three-part anthology: in "Life Lessons" an aging painter has trouble holding onto his attractive protégé, in "Life Without Zoe" a rich girl lives in a hotel while her parents are working around the world, in "Oedipus Wrecks" an aging banker cannot find love because he is is still dominated by his mother.
   Scorsese's instalment is heavy and suffocating, Coppola's cutesy and embarrassing, but Allen's comes on as an offbeat revelation that makes you forget the preceding failures.
dir: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen
wr: Richard Price, Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Woody Allen
cast: Nick Nolte, Rosanna Arquette, Heather McComb, Talia Shire, Giancarlo Gianini, Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Julie Kavner, Mae Questel

PARENTHOOD
***½
The trials and tribulations of a family of three generations.
   Sentimental and preachy it may be, but also infectiously warm and buzzing with weathered insight.
dir: Ron Howard
wr: Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel
cast: Steve Martin, Tom Hulce, Rick Moranis, Dianne Wiest, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Martha Plimpton, Keanu Reeves

PARENTS
***
USA
An initially promising low-budget slasher comedy of an outwardly chirpy 1950s family of cannibals that isn't exactly sure where to take its gruesome concept.
dir: Bob Balaban
ph: Ernest Day, Robin Vidgeon
cast: Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Bryan Madorsky, Sandy Dennis, Juno Mills Cockell, Kathryn Grody

SAY ANYTHING...
***
USA
A down-to-earth teenager dates these class brain, much to her father's distress.
   A mature, believable if not particularly revelatory teen romance. Though certainly much loved.
wr/dir: Cameron Crowe
cast: John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney, Lili Taylor, Joan Cusack

SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE
****½
USA
A witty, original, incisive study of sex and relationships. Soderbergh's debut, it was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
wr/dir: Steven Soderbergh
cast: James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo

SPEAKING PARTS
**½
USA
A screenwriter and a hotel maid are in love with an actor who is also a part time gigolo.
   Intriguing in parts, but mostly hollow.
dir: Atom Egoyan
cast: Michael McManus, Arsinée Kanijan, Gabrielle Rose

SWEETIE
***
A childish, extroverted woman moves in with her quiet, repressive sister.
   So pretentious and alienating at the outset that it's difficult to catch up to it as it eventually - subtly - materialises into an eccentric and rather affecting family drama. There's a lot of talent here but too much of it is wasted on clumsy symbolism and prodding the actors towards quirky, stylised mugging that is meant to be ingratiating but comes off instead as wooden and irritating.
dir: Jane Campion
wr: Jane Campion, Gerard Lee
ph: Sally Bongers
cast: Genevieve Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry, Michael Lake, Andre Pataczek

TROP BELLE POUR TOI!
***½
France
A car salesman with an attractive wife falls for his plain secretary.
   A stylised, stylishly crafted comedy.
dir: Bertrand Blier
cast: Gérard Depardieu, Josiane Balasko, Carole Bouquet

TWIN PEAKS
***½
USA
The pilot to Lynch's cult TV series actually received a cinema release overseas and is every bit the eerie, vaguely unsettling enigma you'd expect.

THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH
****
USA
An ex-convict returns to his home town.
   Hal Hartley's unmistakably odd, bizarrely ingratiating style was set from his debut. It proved the first of four consecutive minor classics, emblematic of the rise of the American indie.
wr/dir: Hal Hartley
cast: Adrienne Shelly, Robert Burke, Christopher Cooke, Julia McNeal

THE WAR OF THE ROSES
***
USA
A middle-aged couple goes through un-Orthodox divorce proceedings. Evil, subversive and often very funny farce ensues.
dir: Danny DeVito
cast: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, Marianne Sägebrecht

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY
***
USA
Harry and Sally struggle to not have sex for many years.
   Arguably the archetype behind every 1990s romantic comedy - except this was shortly before Ryan grew cutesy.
dir: Rob Reiner
cast: Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Carrie Fisher, Bruno Kirby