THE BLACK CAULDRON
**½
USA
Aoung boy fights forces of evil.
A refreshingly dark but cheap-looking Disney feature with some irritating character and voice work.
dir: Ted Berman, Richard Rich
voices of: Grant Bardsley, Susan Sheridan, Freddie Jones, John Hurt, Nigel Hawthorne, Arthur Malet, John Byner

BRAZIL
***½
USA
In a bleak futuristic setting, an idealistic civil servant is destroyed by the system.
A bleak, pessimistic sci-fi satire, with moments of nightmarish brilliance alternating with self-indulgent stretches.
dir: Terry Gilliam
cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert de Niro, Michael Palin, Kim Greist

THE COLOR PURPLE
***
USA
In the South at the turn of the century, a shy black girl is married off to a brute and separated from a sister she dearly loves.
A shamelessly manipulative and cloyingly sentimental Alice Walker adaptation that manages to accumulate some power as it goes along, chiefly due to Goldberg's performance.
dir: Steven Spielberg
cast: Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Margaret Avery, Oprah Winfrey, Willard Pugh, Akosua Busia

INSIGNIFICANCE
***½
UK
One night in 1953, a professor, an actress, a senator and a baseball player meet in a hotel room in New York City. 
An occasionally slow and self-indulgent but generally fascinating and thought-provoking talk piece, with four unnamed characters that very closely resemble Einstein, Monroe, McCarthy and DiMaggio.
dir: Nicolas Roeg
cast: Gary Busey, Tony Curtis, Theresa Russell, Michael Emil

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN
***½
USA
A flamboyant homosexual shares a South American prison cell with a political activist.
A well-acted prison drama, far more intelligent engaging than most others. It's adapted from a novel that consisted entirely of dialogue.
dir: Hector Babenco
cast: William Hurt, Raul Julia, Sonia Braga

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE
****
UK
Two gay lovers in London - one from a Pakistani heritage, the other a former neo-Nazi - take over an uncle's laundrette.
A gritty, stylish and affecting examination of working class minorities in Britain. It uncovers insight in places ordinarily steeped in stereotype.
dir: Stephen Frears
wr: Hanif Kureishi
cast: Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke, Shirley Anne Field, Rita Wolf

MY LIFE AS A DOG
***½
Sweden
In 1950s Sweden, a 12-year-old boy is sent to live with his relatives in the country.
From the days before Lasse believed his own Oscar ad campaigns. Though slight and somewhat derivative, this quirky, charming and sugar-free coming of age tale remains its maker's best work.
dir: Lasse Hallström
cast: Anton Glanzelius, Manfred Serner, Anki Lidén, Tomas von Bromssen, Melinda Kinnaman, Ing-Marie Carlsson

OUT OF AFRICA
**½
USA
In 1914 Karen Blixen goes to Africa for a marriage of convenience and falls in love with a hunter.
A long, heavy going romance set in an Africa that feels about as alive and exotic as a postcard.
dir: Sydney Pollack
cast: Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer

PRIZZI'S HONOR
****
USA
Though unevenly paced (across a 2-hour-plus running time), this unorthodox comedy - about hired killers for the mob who fall in love - is quite consistently entertaining, anchored as it is by a trio of bewitchingly off-kilter performances and a witty score that quotes a selection of Italian operas.
dir: John Huston
wr: Richard Condon, Janet Roach
m: Alex North
cast: Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Anjelica Huston, Robert Loggia, William Hickey, John Randolph

THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO
*****
USA
In the 1930s, an actor walks out of the movie screen and falls in love with his star-struck fan.
   An essentially slight but thoroughly enchanting fantasy that capitalises on Mia Farrow's gawky, idiosyncratic charm. Maybe the most successful in a string of successful Woody Allen experiments.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
cast: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Dianne Wiest, Van Johnson

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II
**
USA
That inflatable-looking symbol of a nation's hurt, Vietnam vet John Rambo is sent back to the long-abandoned battlefields in search of American MIA's, who may or may not be - and inevitably they will be - still held captive by them sneaky, underhanded Viet-Congs. In a solemn effort to compensate for his sissy breakdown at the end of First Blood, Sylvester Stallone surmounts insurmountable odds to massacre a small army of scrawny pseudo-commies, expose a bunch of American army officials for the thin-blooded traitors they always were and deliver a frozen-faced homily about the liberals' betrayal of the American soldier. He gets to fight again the war that ten years earlier left his country defeated and humiliated, only this time he gets to win it.
   Strikingly pretty Julia Nickson plays a Vietnamese rebel who speaks in unevenly broken English, sympathises with the Yanks and wins Rambo's affections moments before she is graphically slaughtered - if allowed to live, you see, she might have made Rambo horny and distracted him from his Mission.
   In an orgasmic (and entirely redundant) sequence right before he takes on the head traitor for a final showdown, Stallone puffs up to vent his rage and ejaculate a barrage of bullets onto the headquarters' perfectly innocent-looking kitchen set-up.
   By all accounts a labour of love on Stallone's part, it's too clumsy and repetitive to satisfy on the level of visceral action entertainment. It's far more repugnant however for the more earnest things it tries to do, such as its steroid-assisted revisioning of recent history to fit in line with America's image as the world's indestructible moral policeman. The only way it can be enjoyed - and predominantly continues to be enjoyed by the discerning viewer is as a comedy.
   On a side note, it's worth pointing out that the cinematography is credited to the same man who lensed "Black Narcissus" (1947) and "The Red Shoes" (1948).
dir: George P. Cosmatos
wr: Sylvester Stallone, James Cameron
ph: Jack Cardiff
cast: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Julia Nickson, Steven Berkoff, Martin Kove

RAN
*****
Japan
A violent, spectacular adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear" with a warlord and three sons in place of the king and his three daughters.
   It's probably the least Westernized of Kurosawa's pictures. Mounted in the style of the Japanese Noh theatre, a fair chunk of the opening hour - consisting mostly of interminably long takes shot from a distance - may seem stilted to a Western viewer. And the subtitles certainly don't make it sound like a Shakespeare adaptation. But the rhythm gradually grows from foreign-seeming to hypnotic and even before the first bloody battle comes about, the dramatic sweep of the story catches up with you and dumbfounds you.
   Tatsuya Nakadai's parched, ghost-like face wipes out all memories of preceding and subsequent Lears. As the supremely evil daughter-in-law (a kind of amalgam of Goneril, Regan and Lady Macbeth), Mieko Harada chews up and spits out everything and everyone that comes near her. It's one of the fiercest, greatest performances of the decade. Her tantrums anticipate Lucy Liu's in "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" (2003).
dir/ed: Akira Kurosawa
ph: Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saitô, Masaharu Ueda
m: Tôru Takemitsu
cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Mieko Harada, Peter, Masayuki Yui, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Hisashi Igawa

A ROOM WITH A VIEW
****
UK
A young English woman experiences a sexual awakening during a trip to Florence.
A witty, elegant and enormously successful period comedy adapted from an E. M. Forster novel. More vigorous and generally more appealing than the subsequent Merchant-Ivory collaborations.
dir: James Ivory
wr: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Julian Sands, Daniel Day-Lewis, Simon Callow, Judi Dench

WHEN FATHER WAS AWAY ON BUSINESS
***½
Yugoslavia
Kusturica won his first Palme d'or a few years before he developed a taste for vibrant, beguiling, meticulously choreographed chaos. This particular dramedy takes place in Tito's Yugoslavia in 1952 and revolves around a political imprisonment as seen through a six-year-old's eyes. There is a satirical edge to some of what happens, but generally the picture is more nostalgic than caustic. It goes on too long (like most pieces with autobiographical elements) but the sleep-walking, soccer-mad young hero goes through enough awkward life lessons to keep you in good spirits.
dir: Emir Kusturica
cast: Moreno D'E Bartolli, Miki Manojlovic, Mirjana Karanovic, Mustafa Nadarevic, Mira Furlan

WITNESS
***½
USA
An Amish boy witnesses a murder and a city cop protects him.
A strange, intriguing exploration of a culture clash, in the guise of a thriller.
dir: Peter Weir
cast: Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Jose Sommer, Lukas Haas, Danny Glover