Dave Kehr

A serious disappointment, recommended only for inveterate Disney fans and very young people.

A sweet, well-intended picture, but like its title character, it is not quite good enough for the big leagues.

Looks like a Saturday morning cartoon (the characters all wear color-coded costumes) and unfortunately feels like one, too, with its thin characterizations, largely arbitrary action and feeble jokes.

Redford's inability to suggest any irony about himself finally sinks it—it's the only sanctimonious satire you'll ever see.

Photographed in murky yellows and browns by John Alonzo, this 1979 film is sluggish and vague, trivializing its subject in a wash of unearned sentimentality.

A moment or two between Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley recall the verbal skills of Levinson's Diner; the rest of the film is bloatedly “visual”: blinding backlighting, grandiose slow motion, overstudied montage.

Everyone seems sincere and bursting with energy, yet there is a strange lack of conviction: Forman has taken the honorable route by refusing to treat the material as easy nostalgia, but the confrontational sentiments no longer have the substance to survive his straightforward presentation.

Paul Mazursky hasn’t only remade Jean Renoir’s sublime 1931 Boudu Saved From Drowning: he’s yuppified it, inverting virtually every meaning until the film becomes a celebration of the crassest kind of materialism.

William Friedkin's direction of this 1970 film adaptation (made the year before The French Connection) doesn't do much more than underline the flaws in the material: every scene is shaped to build to the same forced hysteria.

The sudden, radical change of tone is something far beyond Mr. McKay's nascent abilities as a filmmaker, and Crush never really rights itself.

The best visual design in the world doesn't mean a thing unless there's someone around with a rudimentary sense of story. Jeff Bridges, playing the human hero sucked into the machine, has to carry the film's entire burden of charm and appeal; he seems to have freaked out under the strain, turning in some surpassingly weird, alienating work.

Has no local cultural history behind it. Its secondhand imagery and ideas seem to have barely involved its makers; it definitely does not involve its audience.

Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience--a kind of Kenneth Anger version of "Star Wars." (Review of Original Release)

The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum.

It becomes hard to tell just what Castaneda was advocating, apart from the liberal use of psychedelic drugs.

This 1979 teenage horror film has no redeeming style: it's a straight, pedestrian cop of Halloween, from the opening shock to the climactic battle against the psycho.

The film's confused moral sense is summed up by the contrast between the Aiello and Spader characters. Though both are professional killers, Aiello is somehow coded as "good" because he takes time to make pasta, and Spader is "bad" because he plays mildly kinky games with his mistress (imposing South African model Charlize Theron). [27 Sept 1996, p.43]

It's just about as awful as you'd expect, despite the presence of two first-class screenwriters.

As LaMotta, Robert De Niro gives a blank, soulless performance; there's so little of depth or urgency coming from him that he's impossible to despise, or forgive, in any but the most superficial way.

Denying us any catharsis, Haneke becomes a stern, finger-wagging lecturer; he seems to mean his movie as punishment, conveniently forgetting his own role in the crime. [11 March 1998, p.38]

It's all oddly sweet, and, for the viewer at least, more than a little dull.

A model French psychological drama in which very little action occurs but feelings and intuitions are documented with precision and discretion.

Amazingly arrogant, immoral film.

Kubrick is after a cool, sunlit vision of hell, born in the bosom of the nuclear family, but his imagery--with its compulsive symmetry and brightness--is too banal to sustain interest, while the incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense.

Z doesn't communicate anything—except for the doubtful propositions that pacifists are more threatening to right-wingers than communists and that fascist terrorism and homosexuality go hand in hand.

There must be some excuse for this but I can't imagine what it is.

Taylor Hackford directed, with occasional sharp, manic bursts, but the film is sluggish and sloppy overall, burdened with a dismally redundant plot line.

A shaky, uncertain film that nevertheless touches a few raw nerves.

Held back throughout by the self-conscious, overly explicit dialogue and the judgmental, moralistic undertone that throbs throughout.

Strains for a jazzy, Oliver Stone-ish look, but at its heart it is a placid and conventional moral tale about the dangers of wandering too far off the pathway.

Combining the sports obsessiveness of "SNL's" venerable "Da Bears" routine with the buddy bonding of Wayne and Garth, Mike and Jimmy might make great sketch material. But as the central characters in a feature film, they wear thin quicker than a cheap suit. [19 Apr 1996, p.65]

Half the film passes while Pierson fumbles with the exposition—setting up an intricate internecine war for control of a Gypsy clan—and then he fumbles the action. Pointless, messy, rambling; no atmosphere and no energy.

The picture is obsessed with strength and the use of physical force, though its attitudes are often slippery.

This is a tiny, vulnerable, rather treacly film at heart, one that would probably float away were it not for Ms. Rue's generous presence.

Based on the comic strip created in 1936 by Lee Falk, The Phantom is a handsomely produced, numbingly impersonal adventure film that fails to do anything new with the format. [7 June 1996, p.49]

The visual style--the orange-and-blue color scheme, the elegant 'Scope compositions, the graceful tracking shots, and the shrewd use of shallow focus--has been reproduced almost perfectly from John Carpenter's original, yet the wit and intelligence are gone.

George Stevens, a tireless moralizer and part-time embalmer of American myths (Shane), directed this melodramatic adaptation of Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and what does not seem facile in it seems overwrought.

A Walk in the Clouds might have been helped by a more charismatic starring couple. They lack the character to stand up to such veteran scenery chompers as Quinn and Giannini. Instead, Reeves and Sanchez-Gijon seem like quivering Bambis in a lion's den. [11 Aug 1995, p.37]

Director Taylor Hackford shapes some engaging performances (the surly, withdrawn Baryshnikov of the early scenes is an intriguing figure) but never extricates himself from the plot machinery; this 1985 feature takes off only in the brief but well-filmed dance sequences.

John Cromwell, an excellent filmmaker in other circumstances (The Fountain, Since You Went Away), doesn’t have the taste for extremes that film noir requires; he softens the emotions and dims the motivations.

This is Middle-aged Sherlock Holmes in schoolboy drag, and the audience is expected to chuckle appreciatively as the old material is trotted out.

The tear-jerking is so determined and persistent that your ducts feel as if they'd been worked over with a catheter. But despite its great length, the film never makes sense of its central relationship, between Jon Voight's washed-up prizefighter and Faye Dunaway's chichi fashion designer.

The French original was a clever Hitchcock homage with a murder at its center. For reasons unknown, the murder plot has been dropped from the remake (though a few confusing traces of it remain), which leaves Wicker Park without much real urgency to drive its extremely contrived plot.

The situation—a mother and daughter switch personalities for a day—is rife with possibilities, but since this 1977 comedy is a Disney film, said possibilities are scrupulously squandered...Not so bad as Disney goes, but it's better left to the kiddies and other forgiving types.

As Angelo, Mr. Kirby has a boyish charm, which is probably the best that can be said for this film as well.

Schaeffer thickens the general air of narcissism by directing Parker's Lucy essentially as a female version of himself, with the same puckish sense of humor and undertone of self-pity. Stiller's Bwick is an entertaining invention, an art-world variation on The-Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Prince though he, too, turns out to be mainly a foil to Joe's wonderfulness. Clearly, Eric Schaeffer has at least one really big fan. [8 March 1996, p.40]

For all her prolificacy, Agatha Christie relied too often on one particular plot twist, and as soon as you recognize her old favorite here, the film loses all interest—it has nothing going for it apart from the mystery, which, of course, is no way to make a mystery movie.

It doesn't display an ounce of planning or simple craftsmanship (the Jamaican locations are photographed to look like the banks of Lake Calumet), but with a cast like that, it can't help but have its moments.

Assembled by Gene Kelly, it jerks and sputters along through an overedited collection of songs, dances, comedy routines, and dramatic excerpts, with a strong tendency toward camp. Gene should know better.

The film feels too formulaic and too familiar to produce the transgressive thrills of early underground work.

A flat, stagy, artificially cheerful affair that falls far short of the memorably creepy Laurel and Hardy version of 1934.

Though clearly meant as a heartwarmer in the longstanding holiday tradition, the film comes off as strange and sour.

A mildly amusing Japanese appropriation of 1950's American detective movies.

Mr. Guttenberg's direction of "Cat," is competent and unadorned, bringing out whatever qualities the text possesses -- mainly good-naturedness.

Despite a few flashes of talent in the 40s, Edward Dmytryk had descended to hack status by the time he filmed this 1954 version of Herman Wouk's novel, and his ham-fisted direction does little to alleviate the obviousness of the drama and the thinness of the characterizations.

It's hard not to chuckle, and hard, too, not to marvel at the many varieties of human experience.

Someone had another Hospital in mind, and they even hired Arthur Hiller to direct it, but the attempt to merge black humor and strident social commentary seems even more uncertain this time.

The failure of director-writer Peter Hyams to put any weight whatever behind the moral issues (crude as they are) makes this merely violent nonsense. 

The picture seems deliberately trite, blunt, and manipulative, as if the producers didn't trust their audience to respond to anything else.

Well, it really is a stinker, a compendium of The Deer Hunter's weaknesses (of plotting, narration, dialogue, and character) with few of its lyrical strengths.

Jessica Lange brings so much energy and personal involvement to her portrayal of Frances Farmer that you can't help but feel sorry for her; nothing else in the film remotely matches her talent and dedication, and she seems alone—and even slightly absurd—in her feverish creativity.

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

Cary Medoway uses backlighting and spatially distorting lenses to give the film the hyped-up look of a rock video, but his handling of actors is so inept that he must rely on the rock score to make the most basic emotional points.

Despite all the anguished huffing and puffing, there isn't a single authentic moment in it, and all you're left with in the end is the fading memory of two overscaled, Oscar-bait performances.

Even Neil Simon fans (and they do exist, believe it or not) will probably be bummed out by this stunningly unfunny 1976 parody of detective films.

Carpenter's direction is slow, dark, and stately; he seems to be aiming for an enveloping, novelistic kind of effect, but all he gets is heaviness.

Though we are largely spared Leonard Nimoy's stentorian presence as a performer, we must endure his miscalculations as a director: the dialogue scenes are often hilariously turgid; the action scenes—when Nimoy can be bothered to descend from his podium and film them—are zanily maladroit.

Remains a sadly earthbound thing, mired in a dismal realism that lies far from its natural environment.

Franklin J. Shaffner's deadpan adaptation of Ira Levin's silly story about Hitler clones. The plot is less suspenseful than the overacting contest between the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, who spend most of their screen time one-upping each other in affectations.

Richard Marquand's dull, literal direction takes all the edge off this variant on the “Will he kiss her or kill her?” formula.

A ski party movie in which the clothes are a little more revealing than they were 35 years ago, the practical jokes are a little more tasteless, and the uncertainty over sex is pretty much nonexistent.

Tricked up with an elaborate flashback structure, subtitled dialogue in three languages and as many gratuitous aesthetic touches as the traffic will bear, Proteus emerges as a heavy, pretentious and derivative film.

Some kind of equality has been achieved when it is impossible to distinguish heterosexual clichés from homosexual ones.

Young French director Luc Besson (Le dernier combat) aims for a little American slickness in this relentlessly empty action film: it zooms along from one arbitrary sequence to the next, and its only aim is to keep the audience pumped up with kinetic stimulation.

Mr. Girod is a fish out of water in the after-hours clubs and deserted industrial districts that constitute the sexual underworld of Brussels. His film feels more like what one would see from the top of a double-decker tourist bus than the work of someone who has immersed himself in a sexual subculture and its particular values.

Starts on a note of relative naturalism and under Mr. La Salle's nuanced direction gradually becomes more and more unhinged until it concludes in an altogether different genre.

This big-budget bubble-gum musical is appalling but compulsively watchable; it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980, complete with roller discos, dreamy boys, fashion shows, and fantasy father figures. Director Robert Greenwald has a lot of ideas, all of them bad: his style could be described as rapid misfire.

Quickly collapses into an overloaded, slow-moving series of predictable jokes and forced situations.

It's a rare sequel that fritters away the appeal of the original so completely: within minutes, this continuation of Romancing the Stone has reduced the Kathleen Turner-Michael Douglas couple to a nightmare pairing of the gushingly idiotic and the sourly venal.

First-rate schlock; overlong and incredibly stupid, but that's part of the formula by now.

The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.

The results, to judge from the examples here, have been stuffy and disappointing, an unholy alliance between Playboy Channel prurience and PBS cultural alibis.

Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).

The bucketloads of sanctimonious message mongering ladled on by director Peter Hyams still can't disguise the sheerly mercenary basis of this 1986 project, a wholly uncalled-for sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

The murder-mystery board game becomes a frantic, unfunny spoof (1985) under the direction of British TV writer Jonathan Lynn. The script recycles Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with six guests invited by a mysterious host to spend the night in a creepy mansion, but instead of parodying the material Lynn simply surrounds it with extraneous pratfalls and wisecracks.

Mr. Piccirillo's direction reflects a basic knowledge of stagecraft but no discernable sense of filmmaking. The dull television-style close-ups march relentlessly across the screen, leaving only the ghostly trails of badly transferred video images behind.

Seems a little too desperate to be liked.

A curdled, unfunny satire made more painful by McGrath’s inappropriately jubilant style.

The first-time director, Harold Ramis, can't hold it together: the picture lurches from style to style (including some ill-placed whimsy with a gopher puppet) and collapses somewhere between sitcom and sketch farce. Male bonding remains the highest value of the Animal House comedies: women are trashed with a fierceness out of Mickey Spillane.

Credibility, of course, wouldn't matter if the gags were good enough, which they are not. The film quickly falls back on the gross-out jokes that have made recent American comedies such a challenge to the digestive tract.

Dismal Stanley Kramer morality play about a middle-class couple facing the prospect of their daughter's marriage to a black man (Sidney Poitier). A disaster on all counts.

Less interested in politics than in profitably flattering the suspicions and resentments of its intended teenage audience.

It's astounding to see Arthur Penn's name attached to this piece of cheese.

It settles uneasily on the back of a verbal comic like Hanks—the movie keeps setting up gags that never quite materialize, and Hanks, unable to fill out his underwritten part with slapstick, is left stranded. Without any big laughs to even out the film's tone, the balance gradually shifts to the grim paranoia of the basic conception, and the movie that emerges seems oddly bleak and melancholic.

Travels fast and straight down a linear plot, and the ceaseless rush quickly becomes monotonous.

What's left is the framework for a graphic, brutal, sickening film (1980), without the violent effects that might have made sense (however illegitimate) out of the conception. Like The Exorcist, it alternates five minutes of shock with ten minutes of dull exposition, plenty of time to watch Al Pacino wrestle with his miserably conceived character.

The question remains: why work so hard to make something deliberately bad, when the world is hardly running a shortage of mediocre movies?

Less a formal documentary than a rambling screed.

Apart from Curtis, no one seems to be trying very hard (least of all director James Bridges, whose excellent work in the 70s seems long behind him here), and the film falls apart from a horribly evident lack of interest, conviction, and imagination.

Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.

Walter Hill's first outright failure, this revisionist western draws on the major themes of his work—the relationship of pursuer and pursued; the beauty of clean, planned action; the attraction to violence and resultant moral revulsion—but none of them ignites.

This time Mr. Burns is trying something in the Martin Scorsese street-realist mode, but his self-regarding sentimentality trips him up again.

It's a failure, less because the odd stylistic mix doesn't take (it does from time to time, and to striking effect) than because Landis hasn't bothered to put his story into any kind of satisfying shape.

The screenplay for this 1985 feature is so riddled with character inconsistencies and unmotivated behavior that it plays like science fiction: the unsuspected presence of body-snatching aliens is the only conceivable explanation for the bizarre twists of psychology the film proposes.

Too dull even to function as camp.

Director John Landis is so deficient in basic storytelling skills that he must spend hours explicating the most elementary plot points while and Murphy are sidelined.

Disappointingly shallow and not terribly funny romantic comedy.

The film dissolves into a series of diminishing anticlimaxes, ending on a note of portentous ambiguity. To the last, Mr. Levin maintains his uneasy balance of reportage and melodrama.

A bland, half-finished film that seems to have been conceived as off-peak cable fodder.

The film exudes complacency and self-congratulation; it is a very cowardly, craven piece of ersatz art.

The action is clotted and murky, and Coppola obviously hasn't bothered to clarify it for the members of his cast, who wander through the film with expressions of winsome, honest befuddlement.

Mr. Allen's work is compromised by an apparent inability to match his shots in a spatially coherent fashion. It's never easy to tell who is chasing whom and in which direction, a needless confusion that dampens many of the thrills and scuttles quite a few gags.

Instantly forgettable film.

The crosscutting between the two plot lines is so feeble and intrusive that it destroys whatever faint narrative momentum the film possesses.

Mr. Cattaneo restricts himself to the smiling blandness that has become the stock in trade of British comedies made for export, turning in a film that is forced, familiar and thoroughly condescending.

Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

Despite the sophistication of the source material, this 1984 film isn't particularly successful: Petersen insists on forcing the superficial moral lessons, and the half hour removed from the film by its American distributors leaves it with a harsh, choppy rhythm.

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

Only adds to the sense that Mr. Konchalovsky has lost his artistic moorings. He has certainly lost his common sense.

Probably should have stayed on a shelf back in Paris.

Should soon join Mr. Greenaway's last few efforts in obscurity.

An unfocused, overplotted, painfully derivative comic fantasy.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

Relentlessly bright and superficial, even when the subject turns to self-destruction.

Whimsical fluff (1967) that weighs in on the far side of 50 tons; it's so clumsy and pounding that taking a child to it might be grounds for a visit from family services.

Isn't very successful at evoking the dream state, but does a good job of inducing it.

The project would have been much more palatable as a TV special; as it stands, it's just another symptom of the American cinema's addiction to facile mythmaking.

This 1965 hit is the sort of film that reeks of emotional Muzak, the most elemental responses programmed right into the scenario. Every audience sniffle and tear has been taken into account.

The emotional impact of Shark Skin Man is negligible.

Sluggish, repetitive, and strangely timorous, with little of the zap and imagination of the Pythons' television work.

The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances.

This 1979 movie adaptation of the cult TV series is blandness raised to an epic scale. Robert Wise's bloodless direction drains all the air from the Enterprise.

Every moment is hyped for maximum visual and visceral impact, but Scott doesn't display the slightest bit of interest (or belief) in the actual characters and situations.

Tired, poorly paced Bond from 1967, with Sean Connery displaying his discontent. Donald Pleasence's Blofeld has a memorably creepy softness, but that's about it.

McBride's presentation of Richard Gere is frankly pornographic, perhaps the only way to handle this Victor Mature of the 80s; Valerie Kaprisky costars—meekly.

Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals, draining the Hitchcock moves of their content and complexity. He's left with a collection of empty technical tricks—obtrusive and gimmick-crazed, this film has been “directed” within an inch of its life—and he fills in the blanks with an offhand cruelty toward his characters, a supreme contempt for his audience (at one point, we're compared to the drooling voyeurs who inhabit his vision of Bellevue), and a curdled, adolescent vision of sexuality.

The film is flat, dull, and sloppy.

It's fast-paced and full of gaudy action, yet it's thoroughly unsatisfying, largely because it's so lazy: once Stallone (also the screenwriter) and director George Pan Cosmatos have sketched out the standard genre archetypes, they leave it at that, not bothering to fill in the niceties of characterization, plausibility, motivation, and suspense.

A series of gun battles follow, none staged with quite enough verve or imagination to break through the pervasive torpor.

Little remains of the original but its weakest element - its overelaborate intrigue - and Hackford seems only to scramble it further.

Milius has nothing to say: this 1982 film only hints at the romantic heroics of "The Wind and the Lion" and has none of the personal quality of "Big Wednesday."

I can't remember another film that took so little care with the details of ambience: the cruddy sets and flat, underworked sound track drain any sense of life from the project, to the point where it looks like the cheapest kind of TV—canned theater.

Even the imaginative gore can't hide the musty scent of Todd Farmer's screenplay.

Starts to seem less like a political documentary than a one-sided "Battle of the Network Stars," with the younger generation clearly winning the charisma challenge.

The film runs through most of Leni Riefenstahl's bag of tricks as it builds up a patriotic frenzy, yet the crazed flag-waving would be a lot easier to take if it weren't so clearly a commercial calculation meant to salvage what is otherwise a crass, careless, shamelessly padded film.

George Roy Hill's 1969 film moves with steady, stupid grace from oozy sentimentality to nihilistic violence.

Loses its way in rhetorical excess and blatant sentimentality.

James Jones's antiwar novel was blandly realized by the usual bunch of Hollywood do-gooders in 1953...Sominex is cheaper and probably safer.

Ward, a gruff, amiable presence, has the stuff of an appealing blue-collar hero, but he hasn't got a chance with the feeble setup the filmmakers have given him: he's made the butt of meathead jokes for 60 minutes (as he tries to cope with the rigors of Chiun's training) and then plopped down in the middle of a slipshod intrigue, where his success has more to do with luck than any of the skills he has supposedly mastered.

There is little here to hold the attention of anyone older than 9. For families in search of entertainment, it may be time to find Nemo again.

Michael Mann (Miami Vice) produced this exercise in fascist chic, and it plays like a TV pilot filled out with a few cusswords and strokes of excess violence.

Hughes invokes the classical unities of time, place, and plot symmetry, yet he trashes his careful structure every time he needs a gag - destroying the integrity of his characters, shattering the plausibility of his situations.

He's (Marco Filiberti) his own best audience, and Adored is best left to his own enjoyment.

Disturbingly superficial in its approach to the material.

Seemingly endless and punishingly unfunny.

It sounds like standard Cinderella stuff (and the script comes complete with plenty of allusions to princesses in towers), but it's played here with an emphasis on possessions and possessing that borders on the obscene… It's a pretty ugly movie. [23 Mar 1990, Friday, p.C]

It's the premise of Crazy People that what the American public really responds to in advertising is absolute honesty. If that were true, then the ads for the film would proudly point out that "Crazy People" is cloying, derivative and never more than mildly funny. [11 Apr 1990, p.2C]

It is one of the conventions of movies that maladies of the brain make people more childlike, lovable and full of life, as in, most recently, "Rain Man" and "Awakenings." But Regarding Henry drops even the marginally realistic trappings of those films in favor of pure fantasy, a fantasy of starting over, of returning to the womb. [10 July 1991, p.C-1]

There's some fun potential here, but Marvin's direction is plodding enough to snuff it fairly quickly. Yet Charlie Sheen, promising in his second-banana appearances in Lucas and Pretty in Pink, emerges with his promise intact. Sheen already has the reserved but powerful manner of a Wayne or an Eastwood; with a little more maturity, he could be a contender.

"Damage" is a fruit bowl reduced to a raisin. [22 Jan 1993, p.B]

Child's Play would probably be sickening if it weren't so relentlessly stupid.

As silly as it sounds, but strangely dull.

The film is full of carefully balanced moral proclamations, to the point where it begins to resemble an episode of "Nightline." [15 Jan 1988, p.B]

As the movie slowly slogs along to its dreary, moralistic conclusion, Ryder`s sharp presence seems to recede into a candy-colored fog of sentimentality.

A feature-length commercial for the Nintendo electronic games system, so thinly disguised that it wouldn't even fool a Reagan-appointed FCC commissioner. [15 Dec 1989, p.G]

As directed by Daniel Petrie from the slightest excuse for a story by Stephen McPherson and Elizabeth Bradley, Cocoon: The Return amounts to little more than a desperate effort to fill a couple of hours of screen time, to which the commercially potent title can be affixed. [23 Nov 1988, p.C1]

Alan Johnson`s direction is so limply amateurish that the entire project quickly descends to the level of a cheesy backlot production. The action lurches along without the slightest regard for logic or pacing, and there are Dominick`s commercials with more sophisticated characterization.

Unlike Richard Pryor, whose rough language adds an important rhythmic punctuation to his monologues, Murphy uses vulgarity to shock and divide his audience.

There's always room for debate, but John Schlesinger's The Believers could be the dullest movie ever made about child sacrifice. [10 Jun 1987, p.4C]

A weirdly out-of-scale movie that constantly juxtaposes the trivial and the cosmic, less to comic effect than to a mounting sense of muddle and uncertainty.

In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute. [17 Nov 1989, p.A]

Godawful allegorical western from the height of the cold war (1958), with lanky Yankee Gregory Peck caught between two superpower ranchers who are fighting it out over water rights. Directed by William Wyler in that glassy, studied way of his that gives craftsmanship a bad name.

The first starring vehicle for shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, turns out to be the kind of detective spoof worn out 30 years ago by Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, though refitted with salty language, graphic violence and an attitude toward women that makes the Marquis de Sade look like Phil Donahue. [11 Jul 1990, p.18]

The pretty-pretty visual style is evidence of a close study of Days of Heaven, as well as a complete misunderstanding of it. With Leo McKern and William Daniels; photographed by Nestor Almendros, forced into garish effects far below the level of his talent.

It is hard to imagine a world where films such as Child's Play 2 - essentially, a dim excuse for a prolonged, extremely exploitative display of abused and abusive children - can pass as mainstream entertainment. [13 Nov 1990, p.3C]

Kinjite is clearly the work of dedicated industry veterans, all of whom decided to go home after lunch. [03 Mar 1989, p.P]

A fatally compromised, half-realized execution. [ 10 Jul 1992]

It's not, however, a particularly pleasant surprise. Directed by 25-year-old Marc Rocco (son of actor Alex Rocco, who appears in the film), Dream a Little Dream places the usual plot inanities of the genre in the context of a wildly ambitious, baroque-surrealist style. The effect is a little as if the late Russian mystic Andrei Tarkovsky had directed "Police Academy VI." [9 March 1989, p.6]

Armed and Dangerous is an extremely violent, often mean-spirited comedy in which most of the gags depend on the absurdly excessive use of force. Jokes like these are designed to appeal to adolescent power fantasies, and while kids may love them, adults are likely to be bored by their repetitiousness and senselessness.

Aimed squarely at adolescents in subconscious search of strong father figures, most of the movie is dull and familiar. [18 Aug 1987, p.C]

Manhunter is full of useful tips on interior decoration, but a movie it's not. [15 Aug 1986, p.JC]

It seems that as long as Jason can keep his costs down-by hiring unknown young actors, desperate for any kind of a break, and hiring directors (Rob Hedden this time) straight out of television or film school-he`ll be with us forever. Conveniently devoid of any personality (a variety of anonymous stunt men have filled the role over the years), he`s as infinitely reproducible as one of Warhol`s soup cans, though considerably less expressive. [31 July 1989, p.C3]

When the smoke clears, only one thing is certain: Howard the Duck has laid an egg.

The action sequences, when they arrive, are so poorly staged and absurdly one-sided that they contain no excitement or suspense. Again and again, the film finds the huge, hulking Seagal beating up on flabby middle-aged men - and even then, resorting to such questionable techniques as wrapping a cue ball in a handkerchief and using it as a club. [15 Apr 1991, p.C7]

It's true that there has been a shocking dearth of talking-horse pictures lately, but even so, Hot to Trot has few pleasures to offer.

Adventures in Babysitting not only panders to expectations but also attempts to exploit fears and prejudices. [03 July 1987, p.A]

The First Power is nowhere above average for the genre, and frequently far beneath it. [09 Apr 1990, p.2C]

Landis never bothers to account for the friendship that springs up spontaneously between these two antipathetic types, but then he never bothers to account for anything in this loose progression of recycled Abbott and Costello riffs and fumbled Strangelovean satire.

The fight scenes are staged cleanly enough by Newt Arnold, a veteran assistant director (to Sam Peckinpah, among others) making his debut at the helm. But the contest format is hopelessly repetitive and inert, the characters would seem underdeveloped in a comic book, and the restricted setting ensures that the action will never develop any real scale or velocity. The Chinese may take it on the chin in Bloodsport, but their own movies are infinitely better.

The film, directed by Nancy Savoca (True Love) from a screenplay by Bob Comfort, is one of those sensitive dramas that defines its sensitivity by how brutally it can hammer the audience into feeling pity for its characters. [04 Oct 1991, p.L]

Superman IV is a pathetic appendage to the series, a dull, shoddy film that makes the minimal 1950s TV series seem rife with production values by comparison. [27 July 1987, p.10C]

A horror picture very nearly as mushbrained as its title character-a terrible demon that rises from a pumpkin patch to seek vengeance...As a technician, Winston clearly knows how to make a monster, but as a director he's yet to learn how to bring one to life. [28 Oct 1988, p.C]

Soul Man is a slick, frightening piece of work. It's not only because Ron Reagan Jr. has a bit part in it that it seems the definitive Reagan-era film.

Crass, shoddy and crudely exploitative of the public's worst instincts, John Badham's Bird on a Wire reflects just about everything that's wrong with American movies right now.

Vincent & Theo is a by-the-numbers art biography that barely succeeds in recapping the best-known events in the life of its subject, Vincent van Gogh. There is something almost chilling in the degree of the director's evident disengagement from his material and the complete lack of craft with which he has filmed it.

Jaws is looking a bit long in the tooth these days. As the venerable series (b. 1975) sets off on its fourth paddle around the pool, Jaws the Revenge is definitely dragging its tail fins. Give a poor fish a break.

Nobly intended and about half baked, School Ties is a slightly glorified ``Afterschool Special`` that might function as an introduction to the evils of anti-Semitism for sheltered teens.

The film becomes far too explicit much too quickly, as if Friedkin, frustrated by his inability to build a genuine suspense, had decided to move to the main course as quickly as possible. [27 Apr 1990, p.B]

Brooks' own timing as a director doesn't seem up to its usual snuff. Light-years stretch out between the set-up of a gag and its payoff, and for a director who has always depended on the quantity of his jokes rather than the quality, the gap is fatal. When a character is introduced as "Pizza the Hut," and then shown as a melting mass of mozzarella and tomato sauce, the result is to turn a fairly clever pun into something thuddingly obvious and vaguely nauseating. [24 Jun 1987, p.3]

A confused and confusing mixture of genres and tones, John Landis' horror comedy Innocent Blood is consistent only in its unpleasantness. [25 Sept 1992, p.B2]

The film is madly, compulsively overcontrolled, from its funereal pacing to its pristine red, white and blue color scheme; those moments when it loses its dignity are irresistibly comic, and in this grim context, infinitely precious.[16 Mar 1990, p.B]

The movie`s underlying message seems to be that racial harmony can best be achieved by allowing white boys to beat the stuffing out of minority kids- that`s what really earns their love and respect. There must be a better way.

Predictably impersonal and uninspired.

Selleck's persona can seem coherent and mildly pleasant in the airless, miniature world of series television, but when he walks into the larger, more physical world of movies he melts away. There's too great a disparity between his bulk and his whining delivery, and he carries himself awkwardly on screen, as if he knew he was taking up too much space. [3 Feb 1989, p.A]

Brian De Palma has always been a derivative filmmaker, pilfering indiscriminately from Alfred Hitchcock (Sisters), John Ford (The Untouchables) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blowout). But his failed new thriller Raising Cain makes him seem a startlingly incompetent one as well. [07 Aug 1992, p.14]

A movie about a pair of garbagemen that falls into the general category of refuse. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

Marked for Death is, even by the xenophobic standards of the recent action genre, uncommonly racist and misogynistic.

It`s patently impossible to maintain the realism required for suspense in such a strained and silly context, though that doesn`t stop Ritchie from trying.

The violence of Class of 1999 is so extreme, so redundant and so meaningless that Lester ends by nullifying his own message - it seems that brutality in the name of law and order is wrong, but that brutality in the name of entertainment is just fine. [11 May 1990, p.E]

Craven has proven himself a talented director of horror films on several occasions, from Last House on the Left to A Nightmare on Elm Street. But this time he's chosen a project that plays not at all to his abilities, which lie with the creation of isolated, disturbing images rather than with the careful sustaining of suspense through story-telling. [13 Oct 1986, p.5C]

Called upon to do little more than imitate the mannerisms of their French predecessors, Nolte and Short seem hemmed in and desperately uncomfortable. [27 Jan 1989, p.A]

It`s shoddy, lazy and numbingly stupid.

There's some solid talent here, but Gottlieb's overemphatic direction reduces them all to broad caricature--the kind of crazed mugging that isn't often seen outside the boundaries of Saturday morning kiddie shows. [13 Feb 1987, p.A]

CRUSHingly unfunny. [24 Dec 1997, p.34]

With last week's elections in South Africa finally pointing the way toward a dismantlement of apartheid, it can't be said that the timing of "The Power of One" is particularly astute. But this is a film with no particular relationship to the real world in any case. [27 March 1992, p.M]

The film is ugly on so many levels—from art direction to human values—that it's hard to know where to begin.

Its optimism has a certain naive charm, though it also seems one step removed from a clinical condition. [28 May 1993, p.C]

It's a deeply, creepily dishonest piece of work. [27 Oct 1989, p.G]

Given the grosses of the original, a sequel to Teen Wolf was inevitable-and it was inevitable, too, that the sequel would lose the quality of innocence and unconscious artfulness that made the first film work. The material has been broken down, analyzed and reassembled with scientific precision; what was instinctive in the original has become self-conscious and calculated in the followup, and the spirit is gone.

The confusing screenplay, by John Eskow and Richard Rush, makes a few fumbling attempts to get a plot going (Downey crash-lands and has to be rescued by Gibson; later, their CIA bosses try to frame them for drug smuggling), but mainly the movie tries to get by on attitude, which is a mistake when Mel Gibson is its main perpetrator. [10 Aug 1990]

Clifford can muster no interest in the cardboard characters or absurd plot developments, which leaves Gleaming the Cube to limp along listlessly between indifferently filmed skateboard demonstrations.

It's a wholly passive performance, and one that touches not at all on Pryor's special gifts. This man desperately needs a new agent.

Under the direction of last-minute replacement Richard Benjamin, the results are insufferable—grotesque, chaotic, demoralized.

For the record, this movie stars George Burns and Charlie Schlatter, and its one distinguishing feature is a consistent tastelessness, which still doesn't manage to make it much fun. [08 Apr 1988, p.H]

Crass but imponderable, bizarrely mixing glowingly back-lit sentimentality with stomach-churning violence and juvenile sex jokes.

None of the characters has been written with any personality, and none of the actors succeeds in discovering any. [05 Mar 1993]

Directed by John Schlesinger, Eye for an Eye is a repellent, cynical piece of work a movie that exploits violence while pretending to deplore it. [12 Jan 1996, p.33]

A talky, plodding film that seems likely to bore children and adults in equal measure. [11 Dec 1992, p.B2]

With its general spirit of tabloid scandalmongering and frequent cutaways to an oddly enhanced Melanie Griffith in scanty panties, the point of reference seems less Victorian fiction than Victoria's Secret.

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world.

The performers never find the right spin on the dialogue, and DeSimone never finds the right rhythm in his pacing, to make these deliberate cliches take off into comedy. A stodgy literalness in DeSimone`s approach suffocates the joke.

Comedy doesn't have to be refined or original to be entertaining, but it ought to have a little flair. The gags of this "Academy" are blunt and literal, delivered without the careful set-ups or rhythms that, in the hands of a Laurel and Hardy, can make physical comedy into its own kind of poetry. [22 Mar 1988, p.C3]

It has a lack of ambition and energy that is almost total: It's the most this movie can do to roll over and ask for a little more lotion on its back. [22 July 1987]

Fawcett isn`t half bad--she works hard and doesn`t commit any egregious technical faults--but she doesn`t have the resources to give her slimly written character a sufficiently commanding inner life, and it`s difficult to get beyond her sunny, fashion-model good looks. It`s another sad case of the clown who wanted to play Hamlet.

Raffill and Steve Feke take credit for the original screenplay, though Steven Spielberg might have a different opinion. [15 Aug 1988, p.2]

The Secret of My Success is crushingly bland. Bland, yes, but somewhat chilling, too--particularly in the way Ross and his screenwriters (Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr. and A.J. Carothers) zero in on their teenage target audience by indulging in the grubbiest of grubby fantasies.

Dr. Giggles strains for the kind of charnel house humor that once was the glory of 1950s horror comics like Tales from the Crypt. But Coto's imagination, like Dr. Giggle's rusty scalpels, isn't all that sharp, and the picture soon peters out into a flat, predictable series of stomach-churning unpleasantries. [26 Oct 1992, p.5C]

Like Father Like Son has the cheap, florid look of a rejected television pilot, and the same air of anything-for-a-laugh desperation. [02 Oct 1987, p.J]

It's the sort of film that can only be watched in stunned disbelief, as it lumbers from one misfired, unpleasant sequence to the next. The nicest thing that can be said about Nothing but Trouble is that there is nothing else like it, thank goodness. [19 Feb 1991, p.7C]

Buried somewhere in the screenplay are some Robert Altman-esque satirical intentions, in which the wildly corrupt college football recruitment process is offered as a panoramic image of frenzied American venality. But Bud Smith's broad, colorless direction removes whatever sting the material may once have had, edging the action instead toward sub-"Police Academy" slapstick-flying pizzas, exploding fire extinguishers, mass fist- fights that break out for no discernible reason. [25 March 1988, p.D]

RoboCop 2 is every bit as sadistic as its 1987 predecessor but considerably less effective.

The coarse material, from a screenplay by Seth Winston and Michael J. Nathanson, is roughed up even more by Dragoti's abrasive exaggeration, both of performance (there's a terrifying sequence in which Hicks finally gets her long dreamed-of engagement ring and goes into a frenzy of triumph and delight) and of visual style (visits to the office of sinister shrink Wallace Shawn are filmed in weird expressionist off-angles). [14 Apr 1989, p.D]

Queasily suspended between drag theatrics (Faye Dunaway and Brenda Vaccaro camping it up on a soundstage replica of a carnival spook house) and Spielbergian wholesomeness (Canadian Helen Slater as a toothy, Aryan Ubermadchen), this is one comic-book feature that doesn't fly.

One of the most mawkish films ever made.

There hasn`t been a movie quite like Police Academy 4 since, well . . . "Police Academy 3." Make that exactly like, because here are the same characters, the same situations and the same jokes (most of them focused on damage suffered in the genital region) that have served the series since its inauspicious debut in 1984.

Director Colin Higgins plays foul with the audience, constructing some of the most dishonest suspense sequences ever filmed, and ends with a thriller that is obnoxious and manipulative in the extreme. If it were exciting, I suppose it wouldn't matter, but it's not: Higgins can't be bothered to bring the slightest bit of conviction to his plot, which takes nearly two hours to run its unimaginative course.

Ludicrous and inept, this low-budget 1985 splatter film directed by former Chicagoan Stuart Gordon tries to compensate for its complete failure to establish even a sliver of credibility by inflating the usual quotient of giggly camp humor and squishy gore effects...It's this kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.

If Make a Wish is meant to be a parody, it lacks one essential element: humor. If it's meant to be a horror movie, it lacks the corresponding qualities of shock and suspense. It's almost enough to make "Friday the 13th" look like a masterpiece. Almost.

Ottman doesn't have the firm grasp of tone necessary to make his deliberate ambiguities seem other than simple confusion, nor the sense of humor necessary to turn the deliberate clichés into effective satire.

The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.

As Corky, Mr. Kattan never finds an appealing perspective on his character. Sweetness is not this gifted comedian's strong suit, and in its place Mr. Kattan offers a desperate eagerness to please, a far less charming quality.

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

Craven seems to have set out to make a bad movie, and he's succeeded.

There is hardly any point in discussing the direction of a picture like this, in which almost every shot has been predetermined by the requirements of the special effects, yet director Richard Marquand fluffs the two or three real opportunities he has, rendering the long-delayed character climaxes with a chilly indifference.

The usual Spielberg rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood and the beauty of dreams seems wholly factitious in this crass context, which even includes a commercial--in the form of a rock video--for the tie-in merchandise.

The film is slow-moving, overlong and never more ambitious than a TV feature, though younger kids will probably respond to O'Neal's amiability. [16 Aug 1997, p.24]

Drab and unenticing.

You get the plot, all right, but that's all you get - no body, no texture, no rhythm, no shading.

A numbing combination of sloppy writing, vulgar art direction, high school acting, and bungled special effects—in short, par for the course for venerable hack Michael Anderson.

The film strains mightily to be flashy and hip but finishes more in the realm of the merely distasteful.

It's as if Russ Meyer had made "Death Wish III" with an adenoidal cast, though it isn't that good.

What's left is a curiously disconnected illustration of American racism, which nevertheless fails to realize the power and irony inherent in its pop-Marxist analysis.

A limp, cheaply made version of the Broadway. Director Randal Kleiser shows no real sense of how a musical is constructed: the songs are bunched together, the production numbers don't move, and the whole project shifts awkwardly between naturalism and stylization.

Though Mr. Hayata seems convinced that he is a colorful, romantic figure, the movie itself is crushingly mundane and unlikely to attract any audience beyond close relatives.

A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

Does little more than add another title to the very long list of movies influenced by George Romero's 1968 horror classic, "Night of the Living Dead."

Theory of Flight follows the standard inspirational formula. [23 Dec. 1998, p.43]

Desperately, depressingly in thrall to the Farrelly formula.

While "Dumb and Dumber" possessed a bracing, genuine vulgarity, this new film is more often merely disgusting as it piles up jokes involving various bodily discharges and the unpleasant things that can be done with them.

Spectators will indeed sit open-mouthed before the screen, not screaming but yawning.