Bill Cosford

What were charming once -- the clumsiness of Uys' style and the crudeness of his effects -- now seem quite tired: After all, he had the budget this time, and he has had six years to learn how to do things. It's as if Uys never quite understood what made The Gods Must Be Crazy so enchanting. [13 Apr 1990, p.G5]

Better Off Dead has the body of a tired teen comedy but the soul of an inspired student film; it's the first movie in a long time to interrupt itself periodically with flights of animated fancy. At one point, romantic foreshadowing is accomplished by a "clay-mation" sequence featuring cheeseburgers in love. At another, a lovesick teen draws a cartoon picture of his faithless girlfriend, and the drawing tells him to get lost. [17 Oct 1985, p.B6]

No Small Affair, while no big movie, confirms that it is possible to tell a story about a kid in love without depending on the French-tutor contrivance or the girls'-locker- room giggle. [09 Nov 1984, p.C10]

Giles Walker's direction is TV-slick and the performances predictably smooth. But there is nothing here you haven't seen many, many times before. [12 Nov 1993, p.G18]

The script remains the big problem, however -- all its roots are showing, and they are very old. In Lucy's day, a story like this would end with restoration of the comfy stereotypes -- Dad would get his job back at the plant, enhanced by his new appreciation for what Mom has gone through, and Mom would forsake her business success, more sure than ever that her place is at the sink. That's just what happens in Mr. Mom. In Hollywood, time stands still. [27 Aug 1983, p.5]

Certainly, Lassiter is painless and periodically amusing. And it's so much bigger than TV. [22 Feb 1984, p.B6]

The whole thing means to come down to big, round tears and mass sniffles, but though Spielberg invokes as many golden-era cliches as he can recall, he never gets the romance really working. It's tough being compared to Spielberg, and perhaps unfair if you happen to be Spielberg, but this is easily his least substantial film to date. Some tears, yes. No sparks. [22 Dec. 1989, p.G5]

It's a ridiculous story to be sure, filled with holes and not remotely plausible, but director Mark L. Lester knows enough to keep the speed up, and the dumb stuff is flattened by action. It's the kind of movie in which the audience waits happily for the little heroine to be cornered by villains, all to cheer at the inevitable roast. Lester, at least, is stylish enough to get away with it. [12 May 1984, p.C1]

The movie is best when it sends up the whole culture of child stars and commercials -- "I wanna grow artistically," says one well-paid brat. "I wanna work with Michelle Pfeiffer." But it loses its edge, and soon Life With Mikey is awfully close to the thing it sets out to lampoon. [4 June 1993, p.G5]

Williams is wonderful. But though you can see Williams straining and heaving at the traces, working against the confines of a script he could have rewritten between scenes, he makes a character out of it anyway. [18 May 1990, p.G5]

As is usual for this durable genre, victim and villain are well matched. Though House on Sorority Row does not have a single screeching-cat red herring, and though power tools are not employed, it does have a classic of low camp, a scene in which a girl who has just been nearly brained by a falling corpse repairs immediately and alone to her bedroom, where she changes into a baby-doll nightie and stands with her back to an open window. [23 Feb 1983, p.B4]

Honkytonk Man is Clint Eastwood's long, long ramble through the American Southwest in search of period, in search of character, in search of self-control. As a director, at least, he never finds the latter -- among the many things wrong with his latest film is that he apparently could not bring himself to slice away any of the flab. [22 Dec 1982, p.D18]

As played by the sublimely dazed Keanu Reeves (Ted) and Alex Winter (Bill), the boys are appealing at first, but their witlessness wears thin quickly. So, too, the movie. Ignorance may indeed be a happy state, but you wouldn't want to live there, and even this short visit seems much, much too long. The film acknowledges its empty-headedness early, when the boys meet Sock-rates. [20 Feb 1989, p.C-6]

The running character of a dim-bulb scientist of Indian or Pakistani extraction, who is prone to malapropisms, badly accented English and Carson-esque wink-and-giggle innuendo, might not seem offensive in a better film. Here it seems designed only for cheap laughs. The laughs come. They are cheap. [09 May 1986, p.D5]

A thoroughly wholesome, if not particularly entertaining, experience. [17 Jul 1992, p.G5]

It's not much, Boiling Point. But it's not what you expect, either. At this time of year, when the big news is Indecent Proposal, that's saying something. [19 Apr 1993, p.C5]

It's a handsome period piece and a decent character drama, and it has that Newman performance. But it never has enough bang for the buck, and that's too bad. [20 Oct 1989, p.G11]

Although we see many strange things happen (and some of them are seen through wondrous-looking special effects), we never have a clue as to what's really going on, and why. [24 June 1985, p.B6]

There are plot holes here wide enough to steer a 747 through, and dialogue leaden enough to stall a B-52. [12 Nov 1992, p.F3]

At several points, Strange Brew is so unhinged that it works -- when it looks as if Hosehead the skunk/dog will be late for Oktoberfest, he jumps into the air and flies there -- but as Bob and Doug seem to concede in the film's opening, they are simply not interesting enough to carry a movie. Neither is anyone else involved, and there you are: small beer. [29 Aug 1983, p.C6]

The sole mystery is the apparent collapse of Carpenter's skills as a storyteller. Prince of Darkness is shapeless and almost utterly lacking in rhythm, as if it had been slashed and then badly reassembled, like a Carpenter victim. [28 Oct 1987, p.D8]

This might well have been a more exciting movie if it had been made as a flat-out potboiler with a tough guy in Selleck's role. But Selleck's very weakness -- he is so relaxed and easy- going that we never quite believe he could be in trouble -- makes the movie hard to hate, too. [14 Dec 1984, p.E18]

There's a delightfully promising premise behind Halloween III -- something's wrong with the kids' masks -- but somehow Wallace gets sidetracked, and the movie wanders away. [30 Oct 1982, p.D5]

The entire Nightmare on Elm Street oeuvre has been hailed by critics as a fascinating exercise in id projection and Freudian cant, which helps explain why criticism is in low regard. A better reason to see Dream Warriors, if indeed there is one, is that it's really pretty gross and neat. [06 Mar 1987, p.D2]

Lester's film is so clearly about getting even rather than about troubled youth or any other societal problem that it seems, like Death Wish II and a hundred others, a waste of that energy. [16 Nov 1982, p.B4]

It's a dreadful bore. [23 July 1993, p.G5]

There's a lightheartedness to the film that belies its genre, however. As one of the dimmer of the dwindling party says, after the body count has reached three, "You gotta look on the bright side of things." April Fool's Day eventually does, but the mild satisfaction of its climactic twist does not redeem the tedium of the first 88 minutes. [29 Mar 1986, p.B4]

Its situation and its sight gags are marvelous, recalling the best of Spielberg's 1941. But like that movie, The Money Pit is disconnected; pieces seem missing, and subplots seem to have been abandoned in a rush. [28 Mar 1986, p.D5]

Ricochet would be utterly unremarkable (in the small universe of violent and atmospheric cop dramas that make no sense) were it not for the cast, which includes some A players. [07 Oct 1991, p.C1]

The original was good enough so that a residue of curiosity about the Freelings remains; we want to know what happened next. But a sequel is a sequel is a sequel, and this amiable movie is very much a II. [23 May 1986, p.D1]

From time to time, the film is funny in a cheap sort of way. The rest of it's like the characters -- older than you'd think, older than it has to be. [28 Sep 1990, p.G5]

The movie runs short of material and loses its comic edge about halfway through, but it's still just jumpy enough to keep you interested -- though the rap-video parodies are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. [15 Mar 1993, p.C6]

George Burns gets to play both sides of the cosmic fence in Oh God! You Devil, which is actually Oh God! III, and it's this device alone that saves the film, which might otherwise be unbearably cute. [12 Nov 1984, p.C1]

When it's working Blind Date is frenzied and very funny. It's a return to form for Blake Edwards, who has made a good many bad movies over the past 10 years. And in Willis and Basinger there is the kind of team that, back in the good old days, would have launched a series -- not sitcom/sitdram, but big-screen. [27 Mar 1987, p.D1]

Class Act is a comedy. A deeply flawed one, too: The last half-hour is a mess, as the sly gags of the early going give way to a seemingly endless and perfectly artless chase sequence. [05 Jun 1992, p.E5]

Heartburn doesn't have enough good inside semi-fiction to be of much interest to the Washington cognoscenti, and it's not enough of a movie to stay in the memory of the outside-the-beltway crowd more than an hour or two. What it is is a chance to see our two most celebrated actors at work for a while between films. [25 July 1986, p.D1]

The movie isn't really about America and Japan at all; it's about set-ups for gags. [14 Mar 1986, p.D2]

The performances are standard brat-pack; you could rotate the casts of anything from Risky Business to About Last Night . . . into the picture and it would stay exactly the same. [6 Nov 1987, p.D1]

Jennifer 8 is handsome, dark and menacing, as you'd figure a big-budget whodunit about a serial killer ought to be, but it's also clean out of control. It's one of those thrillers in which the real suspense is over how long it will be before you say, "Oh, come on." [6 Nov 1992, p.G5]

Before it's done, Hello Mary Lou has touched most of the bases, flirting with taboos (incest, locker-room lesbianism, fingernails on the blackboard) and purloining effects from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. It's a badly made film, as awkward as can be, and long stretches of it make no sense whatsoever. Nor does it manage, as the better slasher films do, to re-create a high-school milieu of even passing authenticity. [21 Oct 1987, p.D5]

Barkin's performance is deranged and wonderful. You won't see anything else like it at the movies for a long, long time -- at least until Edwards returns to the gender-swapping theme. When he does, perhaps he'll make it funnier. [10 May 1991, p.G5]

There are not as many jokes as a 95-minute movie needs, however, and most of the good one-liners are doled out to the supporting players rather than to Dangerfield, who goes ahead and rolls his eyes anyway. He's a good sport about it, but his fans are going to wish instead for one of those "concert" movies, such as the ones that showcase Richard Pryor. And those without an abiding affection for Dangerfield are going to wonder what the rest of us have been laughing about. [23 Aug 1983, p.C5]

Doctor Detroit is Dan Aykroyd's first big solo vehicle, and it has some traditional Motown problems: It sputters and wheezes and lurches, never does run smoothly, never does satisfy. In the spirit of products from another troubled industry, this is a raucous comedy that just doesn't have very many jokes. [10 May 1983, p.B5]

The special effects used to illustrate these drawbacks are remarkable, but the movie around them isn't. There's precious little chemistry between Chase and Hannah, there's not much real menace in the over-the-top performance by Sam Neill as a CIA assassin, and there's nothing but a skin-deep gloss to Carpenter's direction. [03 March 1992, p.E4]

Basically, it's an inversion of an already proven formula, a kind of Fatal Attraction's Revenge, with every bit of business save the parboiled rabbit, and you can see the ending coming up Main Street. [08 Feb 1991, p.G5]

The film rarely makes any sense, and the climactic confrontation is incomprehensible. [10 May 1991, p.G5]

It's fluffy stuff, lovingly made and instantly forgettable. [20 May 1988, p.5]

The film's one great asset, a real surprise, is Robert Downey Jr. in the title role. He grabs something of the Little Tramp's innate grace and anarchic wit, and he runs with it -- pratfalls with it and waddles off into the sunset with it. [08 Jan 1993, p.G5]

Real Men is too goofy for its own good, but not nearly funny enough. [21 Oct 1987, p.D5]

Two things are going on in The Razor's Edge, the second movie adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel. One is that Bill Murray, the comedian, is trying a dramatic role for the first time. Another is that people out in the seats are being bored to tears. [19 Oct 1984, p.D1]

He never gets the material under control. But what he has, in 1492, is dazzling. [09 Oct 1992, p.G5]

Young Guns II looks good, and offers -- for those in its audience who, against all odds, might care -- a mildly interesting theory on what really happened to Billy the Kid. And if this is what it takes to keep the Western alive, if not yet prospering, ride on, Guns, ride on. [01 Aug 1990, p.D1]

Oscar, the new Stallone vehicle, is dreadful for an hour or so, then merely bad. By the time it's bearable, the picture is almost over. And by the time it's over, no regrets. [26 Apr 1991, p.G5]

Out of Bounds is a jazzy, raffish looking movie. It flirts with punk. It's also a fundamentalist summer-teen thriller, with two kids on the lam from everyone, and in L.A., too. The movie wants it both ways: stylish, safe. Mostly it's dumb. [28 July 1986, p.D5]

The script is by Chris Columbus (Home Alone), who also directed, and it's as lazy as it is maudlin. [24 May 1991, p.G13]

Chase and D'Angelo are clever and naturally funny, and they're well-matched. And yet the movie is dumb, so dumb it must have taken some work to make it that way. Perhaps next the Griswalds should make a forced march through a Hollywood executive's brain. [27 July 1985, p.B3]

To be fair, Secret Admirer is somewhat more clever and a great deal sweeter than the standard for its damp genre. Those who remember with affection Archie's constant flailings at Veronica with the help of lovesick Betty will feel on familiar ground here. The outcome seems fixed almost from the opening moments, and the fact that lonesome Toni, who is made out to be the wallflower, is considerably more attractive than the horsy Debora Anne ("the most beautiful girl in school") is only the first of many tip-offs. [14 June 1985, p.D2]

There's not a dull moment in the thing, and it's dumb as dirt. But who can resist? It's the ultimate guilty pleasure, the kind of movie that in years to come, when they're chronicling the decline of our culture, will turn up as an exhibit. [23 Nov 1990, p.G5]

I guess Perfect is a movie about aerobics, journalism, ethics and love and a couple of hunks. It is even more stupid than it sounds. It is the stupidest thing I have seen this year, in or out of the movies. [7 June 1985, p.C9]

Director Daniel Petrie Jr. does a journeyman job, though he lets the air out of the thing at the end. [26 Apr 1991, p.G5]

Beaches is the never-less-than-maudlin soap opera about two childhood pen pals who meet again as adults, enjoy triumphs and endure failures, and wind up watching their story climax via a Fatal Illness straight out of Terms of Endearment. It's what used to be called a "women's picture." [13 Jan 1989, p.C5]

There is certainly nothing wrong with this; very young children, and the less discriminating among their elders, are likely to find The Care Bears Movie charming. [08 Apr 1985, p.C4]

That's what happens when film noir goes bad -- and this is a failed noir, so packed with double-crosses and red herrings that after an hour or so you just get tired. Who did it? Who cares? Let's just head home and get some rest. We can try to figure it all out tomorrow. [24 Apr 1992, p.G5]

Only the quips aren't funny. Not much about the script is amusing at all. Worse, the director, Herbert Ross, who once had a reputation for grace, has been growing clumsier for years and now seems to have lost his timing. [14 Sept 1993, p.E6]

Though directed by Guy Hamilton, who has made four Bond films, Remo Williams is lackluster of pace and quite clumsy in the telling. And though no one demands devotion to verisimilitude in this kind of thing, a plot this ridden with holes is not an auspicious beginning. It seems unlikely that an audience that already has Rocky and Rambo needs a Remo. [11 Oct 1985, p.D1]

Weird Science is a nerd-reform film, down to its dewy finale in which all concerned have learned a Lesson About Life. But it's almost always fun. At its best, it's more proof that Hughes is one of American movies' unusual talents. He's an original. [2 Aug 1985, p.C1]

A film that has too little to entertain grownups, and perhaps too much for children. It's a blunder. [21 Dec 1983, p.C8]

For a while, director Joe Dante spins some daft gags off the situation, and Hanks and Fisher deliver their droller lines with a deadpan sincerity that produces genuine unease. But it turns out that there isn't really much of a script here, and soon The 'Burbs has devolved into a slow build to the big anti-climax. [17 Feb 1989, p.10]

This is, in other words, an adventure film for the 6-to-12 set, a movie for the void left by Disney's forays into the elusive teen market. All but the most easily frightened children should enjoy it; all but the most easily diverted adults are likely to find it tedious. [01 Aug 1983, p.C6]

The idea that there is evil under the sun and amongst the verities out there in the clean-living heartland is not exactly new to fiction. Neither is the one about the bad seeds, the homicidal children. In combination, however -- the combination in Children of the Corn-- the elements have a perverse novelty. [19 Mar 1984, p.C6]

The presence of Culkin in the cast should not deceive parents: This isn't a kids' movie. It's just not much of a grownups' movie, either. [24 Sep 1993, p.G5]

Though there's some wit on the fringes (including splendid use of a Reagan stump-speech line), the whole thing plays a lot like a Miami Vice via Star Trek. [7 Oct 1988, p.E10]

The performances -- even those by Rosanna Arquette and Jeff Bridges, as Sarah and Scudder -- are simply trashy; they're throwaway stuff. [30 Apr 1986, p.C7]

To the extent that it has a serious theme, the film is about the tug of mortality and the demands it makes on simple humanity -- courage, selflessness, the sharing of wisdom. There's not enough of this, not by far. But it's something. The rest of Cocoon -- The Return is hash. [23 Nov 1988, p.D1]

What the movie is all about is Twin Peaks with the sex, violence and "colorful" language left in...Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is not David Lynch at his most challenged and hence most inventive. The rigid restraints of television, with its prudish codes and goofy winks at prurient-life-as-we-know-it, may now be seen as Lynch's real muse. The movie, lurid as it is, reads like a perverse set of CliffNotes to the series, the details recapitulated explicitly but without a dram of passion. [2 Sept 1992, p.E1]

There is more truth to the lives of people alone than Hiller and his writers have cared to admit, and, consequently, more humor. The Lonely Guy is short on both. [31 Jan 1984, p.B5]

But whether even kids will be able to take The Outsiders seriously is a hard question. Whether by fidelity to his source or by director's embellishments, Coppola has come up with a story about tough kids who appreciate sunsets and recite Robert Frost from memory, about members of a mid-American urban underclass who ponder their situations with the dispassionate acumen of sociologists. The Outsiders is about "greasers" who are not greasy, and it seems likely that even kids will see through it. [29 March 1983, p.5]

Interesting. Not worth the trouble, but interesting. [22 Apr 1988, p.C5]

The Ice Pirates is a Star Wars knock-off tricked out with cheesy special effects and nonstop gags, and it's almost entertaining despite itself. It's as if someone wanted to try the Airplane! formula on space epics, and nearly got it right. [20 Mar 1984, p.C7]

Director Coline Serreau has a deft touch with sugary material. Her Three Men and a Cradle is a slick, confident comedy that moves from point to predictable point without a surprise, but moves so gently and gracefully that it seems by the end something more than it is. [23 May 1986, p.D5]

It's like an afternoon at the quarter slots -- lots of effort, small payoff. [11 Oct 1982, p.B6]

Pryor is so lacking in energy that Wilder steals most of the movie from him. For the first time in his career, Wilder actually seems robust, but it's only because he's performing opposite a ghost. It's quite sad. [12 May 1989, p.DW5]

Parts of House are certainly meant to be funny, and other parts draw laughs the way the tools move, without the apparent intent of their creators. As haunted-house tales go, House is something of a bust. [4 March 1986, p.B5]

Mel Brooks has never been a finesse comic, and no one expects him to hit with every gag. But this film reminds you how far his films have slipped behind the shotgun comedies of the Zucker brothers (David and Jerry) and Jim Abrahams, collectively and singly, who have built on Airplane! to a broad- gag frenzy. [28 July 1993, p.E2]

It was pretty interesting a couple of years ago, too, when a variation of it was the premise for The Final Countdown. The big difference is that the earler film wasn't bad, and this one is. [03 Aug 1984, p.C9]

Firefox is no masterpiece, and it's not even a startling picture within its genre -- Cold War mischief. But it's briskly entertaining and, until the nyet-effect of all those stereotyped Russians catches up with us, even believeable. [21 June 1982, p.B4]

Largely devoted to whatever laughs may be coaxed from the sound of a freshman belching and the sight of some mighty mature-looking coeds removing their blouses. There's some nose-picking, too, but not enough to save the picture. [20 July 1984, p.D6]

Craven packs routine teen-confrontation material into the plot as filler, and still has trouble getting to 90 minutes. His ending is contrived and nonsensical even by the standards of the form. [14 Oct 1986, p.B7]

It helps that Raw Deal works, for a time at least, as a first-rate cop movie. It is violent to excess -- more graphic by far than Stallone's films, and bloodier, too -- but it's a real movie. [07 June 1986, p.D1]

The production has a Disney-ish, well-scrubbed feel to it, and were it not for a sprinkling of obscenities would be G- rated. But Russkies is never quite right, even as pap. [06 Nov 1987, p.D5]

Disney's latest incarnation parries and feints somewhere between the "serious" melodramas of vintage Hollywood and the frisky cavortings of Richard Lester's mid-'70s send-ups. [13 Nov 1993, p.G3]

Though even Blake Edwards, the director behind the Panthers, could not make the connective material in this film work well, there is so much joy in the vintage Sellers that Trail of the Pink Panther rates as one of the funniest films of this year. Sellers' outtakes are funnier than most of the new material on film today. We shall not see the like of him again soon. [21 Dec 1982, p.C7]

I'd have thought you'd get more for $3 million. The dialogue here is among the worst in modern big-budget memory; even the cliches are lame. [20 Mar 1992, p.G5]

Still of the Night is a restful thriller, soft and dreamy and largely undisturbing. Like the wee hours themselves, the movie seems to stretch its time beyond the normal frame of minutes; here, 90 of them go by at the pace of an entire evening. [17 Dec 1982, p.D14]

Missing in Action is thus never especially compelling, even as a B-movie, because it is never remotely believable. Nonetheless, Norris' appeal is so quiet and uncomplicated that, although the film exploits the issue of MIAs as thoroughly as any movie has to date, Missing in Action is never offensive. [20 Nov 1984, p.D1]

A movie about lunatics with chainsaws that is neither funny nor frightening. [25 Aug 1986, p.C5]

Even with sex, Big Top Pee-wee seems dry and juiceless. [22 Jul 1988, p.C7]

Nothing here for the time capsule, make no mistake. But the Boz seems to have found a calling. [21 May 1991, p.C1]