Basic Instinct (1992)

If you can get past the fact the sweaty suited detectives are all males indistinguishable from each other and the women are all deviants whose perverse sexual desires the men must sigh and resignedly sate, then this is for most of its runtime a solid thriller with Michael Douglas doing a good job playing Michael Douglas playing a detective, and Sharon Stone channelling Vertigo's Kim Novak to play the cop's prime murder suspect-with-benefits, a mystery novelist whose bed-partners end up dead by ice-pick.

★★★☆☆

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Orlando (1992)

With her title character untethered by time and experiencing life in different male and female forms, Virginia Wolff in 1928 in her book Orlando: A Biography may have debuted the concept of the multiverse, not DC Comics in 1961; Sally Potter's adaptation of Wolff's book is full of painterly detail across the various times and locations, amuses with its sly humour, and lead Tilda Swinton transfixes as Orlando, staring out from the movie like a figure from a series of Romantic paintings come alive.

★★★★★

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Patriot Games (1992)

Tom Clancy's brick is given the Hollywood treatment with Harrison Ford stepping into the role previously played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October, CIA agent and future PotUS Jack Ryan, a family man, patriot, and all-round impossibly good guy who here becomes the target of an IRA revenge plot that greatly endangers the lives of his beautifully expressive wife (Anne Archer) and daughter.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Batman Returns (1992)

Michael Keaton has settled into his role as Batman and is steelier, less neurotic, less Mr Mom and more able to move and flex in his batsuit than he was in the 1989 Tim Burton movie and instead of the uninvolving battle he had with the Joker in the original (a remote battle - were they ever in the same shot together?) he gets to be really up close and personal with his terrifically creepy foes in this sequel - Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is split, damaged and slinky and Danny DeVito's the Penguin is a hideous, bloated monster.

★★★☆☆

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White Men Can't Jump (1992)

A mismatched pair of grifters good at shooting hoops takes advantage of racial stereotypes to hustle money from streetball players who assume Woody Harrelson's ex-basketballer, Billy Hoyle, a white man, can't play, in this shrill, shouty and strangely very popular sports comedy drama from 1992.

★★☆☆☆

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Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Francis Ford Coppola's ludicrous, outrageous Dracula story is buoyed by Gary Oldman's gleefully grotesque portrayal of the 400 year old count who floats around with a disembodied shadow and an ability to transform into green mist or a writhing mass of rats, and the movie's Giallo horror stylings help present a world so reminiscent of the book that this really does feel like it is Bram Stoker's Dracula and not just another camp monster cliche.

★★★★☆

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Husbands and Wives (1992)

From their apartments to their workplaces, and in cafes and at parties, a foursome of New Yorkers talk neurotically about sex, fidelity and marriage, men and women, but this is not Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, but Gabe and Judy, Sally and Jack, two couples in Woody Allen's hilarious 1992 comedy, who are all rocked by the latter pair's decision to separate.

★★★★★

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Death Becomes Her (1992)

Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep and Bruce Willis ham it up in this gothic black comedy about anti-ageing, but really the movie is just a thin excuse to showcase special effects that wowed in the day.

★★★☆☆

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Army of Darkness (1992)

This third movie of the Evil Dead series looks like it was a hoot to make with the big-chinned hero, Ash Williams, this time battling the stop-animated demons of the Necronomicon in 14th Century England, a task he undertakes with a cocky swagger but the movie, while great fun, doesn't quite live up to the deranged originals set in that creepy cabin in the woods.

★★★☆☆

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Single White Female (1992)

This in many ways unremarkable b-movie about a roommate who gradually takes over an apartment owner's life, adopting her fashion tastes and hairstyle, insinuating herself into her relationships and eventually tipping over the edge and going plain batshit crazy, unexpectedly resonated with audiences in 1992 and became a huge success - probably due in good part to the performance of its star: the inner city New York apartment in The Ansonia building that everybody wishes they could one day own, psycho roomie or not.

★★★★☆

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Alien 3 (1992)

The gunmetal-blue quiet of space that marked the first two Alien movies is switched for the brown bluster of a prisoner-run refinery in this third movie directed by David Fincher and that change is the movie's fundamental flaw - rather than an unseen, unfathomable, latent horror suddenly, noisily bursting out of space's deep dark and quiet, here the alien burns around Thunderdome at breakneck speed, noisy, more lit up and visible and more understood than ever before, and it is killing not mercenaries or astronaut scientists but a noisy, repellent bunch of grubby convicts that it is hard to care about.

★★☆☆☆

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