Bill Cosford

Those opening minutes, in which Hawn plays a heavy, are some of her best work. The rest we've seen before, a lot. Overboard is overlong, and stale as can be. [18 Dec 1987, p.D6]

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]

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]

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]

Schepisi and his writers don't get what they should have from the business of traumatic culture shock; they spend too much time on twaddle. [13 Apr 1984, p.D1]

The picture is schematic and awkward, made in movie-of-the-week style and laced with implausibilities and ham- handed set pieces. Still, someone deserves a nod for making Gramps the hero of an action potboiler. It's an idea, and in the Hollywood of the '80s ideas are very rare, very special things. [31 Oct 1985, p.6]

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]

Three O'Clock High is one of those ideas that must have sounded wonderful at one point, and to be fair it still sounds better than the pop-out plots of most teen-explo projects. It turns out, however, to have surprisingly little range. Once the story is under way, there's nowhere for it to go but home room, lunch and out the door. [13 Oct 1987, p.C7]

The World According to Garp is another of those films that fairly cries out for Robert Altman, who makes movies the way John Irving writes books. Altman doesn't seem to be making movies any more, so this is as close we're able to get to Garp, and it's not close enough. [23 July 1982, p.D10]

Richard Jordan, who can be uniquely menacing (see: The Mean Season, Flash of Green) is here reduced to lampooning himself in leatherette storm-trooper garb. Charles Durning, looking wonderfully rumpled as the warden of the orphanage, does as little as possible in the heat. The skating stunts are routine. [2 Dec 1986, p.B4]

As time goes on, and more King comes to the screen, The Shining, once widely disparaged, looks better and better. At least that film translated some of King's terror; subsequent adaptations, Pet Sematary included, do little more than animate the gore. [24 Apr 1989, 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]

An almost-horror film called The Hunger has in common with Flashdance an apparent obsession with style over other considerations, and the result, though weird, is no more satisfying. [02 May 1983, p.C6]

It's a movie of surpassing flatness, all surface, all monotone. Pace? It's as if the director, Alan J. Pakula, had dialed in half speed on the first day of shooting and never checked the throttle again. [27 July 1990, p.G5]

The Bear is a big, polished children's film, nothing more. [27 Oct 1989, p.G5]

White Hunter, Black Heart looks good, but it's as humorless as Eastwood himself increasingly appears to be. [21 Sep 1990, p.G5]

I suppose if you haven't seen Rocky or its many imitators, The Karate Kid might have its modest charms; there's a good bit of man-to-boy philosophizing in it, on the order of "To thine own self be true," and that's harmless enough. But there's a measure of laziness in this whole idea that is dismaying, that borders on cynicism. One wonders what went through the minds of the filmmakers as they prepared to make a film that has been made so many times before. By the look of The Karate Kid, some quick-play box-office may have been the highest aspiration. [26 June 1984, p.B3]

This is mildly amusing, and the scenes with Niven -- his last, and reportedly dubbed by impressionist Rich Little when Niven's illness had taken the strength from his voice -- are poignant. But there is no restoring the force that made the earlier Panthers work. [12 Aug 1983, p.C5]

It's not awful; it isn't dull. But The Golden Child is a kids' film, and there are times when Murphy himself seems uncomfortable, as if he knows he's making a movie he wouldn't pay to see. [13 Dec 1986, p.B1]

Though there's a scene of racial discomfort (nothing more serious) and a few rather flat-footed references to anti-war feelings back home in Hamburger Hill, the sense of time and place is missing altogether. Hamburger Hill is an all-purpose war movie with the requisite noble message -- war is hell, and futile, too -- but it could be set anywhere. In those parts of the world where local audiences will not accept an American adventure movie with the Vietnamese as vanquished foe (parts of Southeast Asia were shown Rambo with subtitles that portrayed it as a anti-Japanese commando raid from World War II), Hamburger Hill will play with few problems...Unhappily, neither screenwriter Jim Carabatsos (who did Heartbreak Ridge for Clint Eastwood) nor director John Irvin is able to provide the story any tighter focus, either. [28 Aug 1987, p.D1]

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]

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]

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]

In the hands of director John Lafia, who uses many tricks of the genre (none of them his own), this is all less horrifying than it sounds, and a good deal funnier. [09 Nov 1990, p.G5]

It's one of those movies made by hard-core techies, meticulous about the "period" details and utterly neglectful of pretty much everything else, including such nuances as plain old plot. [15 Sep 1990, p.E6]

This movie runs in great, lazy circles, covering its implausibilities with gags, and finishes with the let's-get-it-over-with patness of a movie- of-the-week. Goldblum's performance is the key: We never do figure out who he is beyond the easy guess that his cuckoldry was well-deserved. Sometimes he's in charge, outfoxing the thugs, and sometimes he's helpless, and a lot of the time he's just along for the ride. [12 March 1985, p.B4]

The best-developed theme in 2010, in fact, is anti-climax. Many scenes have one, the entire movie seems to be one. And we still don't know what the deal is with that monolith. [7 Dec 1984, p.D1]

This is a nearly universal theme and might provide the spine for a funny comedy. [29 July 1983, p.C1]