Toy Soldiers (1991)

Die Hard in 1988 launched a genre - the non-War, modern and corporate The Great Escape - and was followed by a rush of similar action adventures centred on an everyman hero taking on a team of hostage-takers from within a hostage situation, this one taking place in a private boys school where Sean Austin plays a rebellious teenaged "John McClane" leading a schoolyard group of  fellow "prisoners" who plot their escape under the watch of machine-gun wielding "Germans", and it is corny, teenage, 90s-cult film fun.

★★★☆☆

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Doc Hollywood (1991)

The appeal of this comedy escaped me when I was in high school and all around me were lauding its praises, and now, having watched it again in 2023, I feel vindicated - again left cold, not amused by a city doctor's court-ordered stint in a rural backwater where he prattles with only personality-free hicks and embarks on a brittle romance. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Sitter (1991)

Despite its oh-so-laboured set-up and oh-so-laboured dialogue, this uncinematic 90-minute flick is good movie-night-in fun for psycho thriller fans, featuring a babysitter who reveals, on her first night on the job minding a kid in a swanky hotel, that she is a rank nutter prepared to cosh any number of hotel guests over the head to continue revelling in her delusions!

★★★☆☆

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Not Without My Daughter (1991)

Sally Field is Betty Mahmoody, the real woman who turned her experience being abducted with her daughter by her husband into a best-selling novel adapted here into a gripping movie with Alfred Mollina playing the Iranian doctor who tricks his American family into a one-way trip to Iran.

★★★☆☆

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Dead Again (1991)

Kenneth Branagh's vanity project - he directs and self-consciously stars - concerns a mute amnesiac (Emma Thompson) who doesn't remember who she is but inexplicably remembers, in black-and-white scenes that recall Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, a historical murder case involving a piano composer and his wife; it turns out these past characters have found each other in the present day, which is the convoluted and really quite ridiculous supernatural means by which these present-day characters - Emma Thompson's mute amnesiac and her carer, Branagh's detective - come to know about and investigate and are able to reveal that historical murder mystery's obvious culprit.

★★☆☆☆

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Afraid of the Dark (1991)

This always intriguing London-based psychological drama, which starts off being a mystery thriller about a series of escalating attacks committed against the members of a community of blind women, turns up not to be about what you think it is - which is a shame because when the movie inverts suddenly halfway through, making you feel like you've finally had the bandages removed after an eye operation, part of you wishes the first half of the story continued --- although the second half, centred on Lucas, a young boy with a worrying imagination, is equally creepy and compelling.

★★★☆☆

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Shadows and Fog (1991)

Woody Allen's star-studded comedy (even Madonna appears), filmed in black and white and filled with visuals recalling Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, had critics calling it an homage to German Expressionist cinema, but to what end is not clear: when John Cusack's brothel patron sighs, with Nietzschean bleakness, "There's no point to anything," he seems less to be musing on existence than reviewing the film itself, especially after so much of the comedy proves only intermittently amusing and the plot - in which Allen's Kleinman is enlisted, Kafkaesque-style, into a disorganised vigilante street gang hunting a serial killer - feels like just another Woody Allen contrivance; the late turn to weighty talk of God and man and his volitional and unvolitional or natural and unnatural impulses lands as a sudden lofty flourish atop prolonged tedium.

★★☆☆☆

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Point Break (1991)

In Kathryn Bigelow's cult action classic, Keanu Reeves' special agent, Johnny Utah (just Ted with his hair slicked back, partnered with an older, gnarlier Ted (Gary Busey)) is tasked with infiltrating a gang of surfie bank robbers, thrill-seekers of wildly various acting abilities, and before long, California, the waves, the babes, the bonfires, not to mention the shaggy blonde tresses of Patrick Swayze's Bodhi, the charismatic gang leader, prove so intoxicating, Johnny's wooden FBI facade starts to drop, revealing his, well, just as wooden inner adrenalin junkie.

★★★★☆

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Barton Fink (1991)

After auterial success in New York, a playwright is snapped up by a film studio to work as a writer of a wrestling movie in Hollywood, but in this world of lucrative contracts, deadlines, and hothead studio bosses, the writer starts to question what's in his head, who it belongs to, how to get it out or keep it in and keep it unsullied, and whether anyone is interested, and it is perhaps this last question that the Coen brothers themselves might have thought longer about in relation to their unsympathetic Fink in their mean-spirited story full of motor-mouths.

★★★☆☆

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Cape Fear (1991)

Because another auteur, Francis Ford Coppola, released his Bram Stoker's Dracula just a year later, I've always had this fanciful notion that Gary Oldman's Count is Scorsese's hideous, half-melted Max Cady, the monstrous-on-a-mythological-scale psychotic rapist, first played in 1962 by Robert Mitchum but immortalised here by Robert de Niro in 1991 and in my mind forever to rise, psychotic eyes first, from the depths of Cape Fear, that terrifyingly named nexus of his revenge plot against Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden, the lawyer who wronged him and whose unfortunate family members, Jessica Lange as Bowden's wife and Juliette Lewis in the performance of her career as the terrified but electrified daughter, Danielle, unfortunate pawns in Cady's game of bloodlust.

★★★★☆

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JFK (1991)

As New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, Kevin Costner is required to deliver only short and grammatically simple lines and he delivers them all the same wooden way with upward inflection as though everything is a question, but his woodenness suits the machine-gunned details of the JFK investigation, presented here in the first of Oliver Stone's three President movies (so far), this one an epic three-and-a-half hour conspiracy theory, some of the details of which you have the advantage over Jim Garrison of being able to shoot out of the water with a quick Wiki search on your phone while you are watching.

★★★☆☆

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Sleeping With The Enemy (1991)

A victim of an abusive partner fakes her own death and flees his creepy towel- and kitchen pantry-tidying ways, but we know he will catch up with her one day, living her new life in an easy, folksy South where the new hunk next door probably just hasn't revealed his own particular brand of woman-hate yet, in this 1989 thriller that bookends a long dull romance with scenes of sanitised spousal abuse - watch Murdered By My Boyfriend for the stomach-churning no-holds-barred reality of these controlling, deadly relationships.

★★☆☆☆

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The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991)

Fresh from saving the Queen from remote-controlled assassins in the 1988 The Naked Gun original, Frank Drebin, the bungling police lieutenant of Police Squad!, returns in this sequel to uncover an energy industry plot to discredit a renewable energy scientist by replacing the scientist with a doppelganger.

★★★☆☆

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Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

Once a dazzling blockbuster movie event, this Robin Hood movie now only dazzles with its mediocrity, featuring an American-accented Robin Hood engaging in slow-action sword and archery fights...even the "arrow cam" which wowed in 1991 is no longer impressive, and while his award-winning performance is still the best thing in it, the late Alan Rickman, you suspect, portrayed his Sheriff of Nottingham the way he did - sardonic, leering - to entertain himself as much as others, given how tedious a movie-making experience this now appears, one that looks just like actors mucking around in front of cameras.

★★☆☆☆

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Terminator 2 Judgment Day (1991)

In this second movie of the ever-growing Terminator series, Schwarzenegger reprises his role of assassin robot from the future only this time he is fighting with, not against, the Connors: tortured and muscly Sarah and her son John, future leader in the war against the machines but here a petulant live-action Bart Simpson rascal, are being hunted by an all-new liquid metal Skynet threat, and the chase is a ripping action story only slightly marred by the movie's persistently flat affect and some inconsistency in the liquid metal robot's functions.

★★★★☆

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