David Ansen

There's a big difference between shock effects and suspense, and in sacrificing everything at the altar of gore, Carpenter sabotages the drama. The Thing is so single-mindedly determined to keep you awake that it almost puts you to sleep. [28 June 1982, p.73B]

The ads for Neighbors call it "a comic nightmare"; it's more like a sour case of creative indigestion. [21 Dec 1981, p.51]

Not only the silliest chapter in the Omen trilogy, it's the dullest and most inept. [30 Mar 1981, p.83]

It is perhaps not presumptuous to take the blind man as the director's image of his ideal viewer, but here, I think, Allen becomes overly cautious. Had the man been blind and deaf, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure would have achieved the stature of a true masterpiece. [11 Jun 1979, p.99]

Eastwood has no more singing talent than Citizen Kane's mistress, and this oh-so-well-intentioned movie takes more than two tepid hours to show us the boy becoming a man, the man achieving his dream and somebody singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot over his grave. They'll have to come for to carry you home after this one. [27 Dec 1982, p.62]

Attempting a slapstick satire of suburban paranoia and xenophobia, Dante lavishes his considerable skills on a one-note, repetitive Dana Olsen screenplay which, at best, contains enough invention for a 20-minute skit. [06 Mar 1989, p.58]

3 Men and a Cradle has precious few laughs. Shot in a strangely grave, twilight style ill suited to the sitcom premise, the movie plods dully from one foreseeable irony to the next. [26 May 1986, p.72]

My advice to moviegoers: Just say no. [16 Nov 1987, p.108]

By the time Pale Rider wends its solemn, deliberate way to the final showdown, all of its tantalizing potential has bitten the dust. The woefully inadequate screenplay by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack takes every mundane turn available, reneging on its mythical promises. [1 July 1985, p.55]

You know a romantic comedy is in trouble when you root for the hero not to get the girl.

With pretty Martin Hewitt as David and pretty Brooke Shields as Jade, what you get is an overwrought teen make-out movie. [27 July 1981, p.74]

An epic vision isn't worth much if you can't tell a story. This, in a nutshell, is the problem at the heart of the three-hour-and-39-minute debacle called Heaven's Gate. In his painstaking quest for period authenticity and his reliance on the operatic set piece, Cimino has lost all sight of day-to-day reality--and all sense of dramatic truth. [01 Dec 1980, p.88]

Flat, distressingly witless -- To put it bluntly -- the thrill is gone. Nobody did it better. But that was then.

Irreversible takes an adolescent pride in its own ugliness. “I Stand Alone" told me something about the world; this one tells me more than I want to know about the calculating mind of its maker.

Director Ronald Neame, who once made good movies, has instructed his actors to shout as much as possible. The rest is special effects -- and not very special ones at that. [05 Nov 1979, p.101]

Though kids may enjoy The Villain's harmless high jinks, most adults will feel that, at 90 minutes, this cartoon is about 80 minutes too long. [06 Aug 1979, p.56]

Writer John Patrick Shanley, whose mix of comedy and romantic whimsy produced intoxicating results in Moonstruck, mixes thrills, social satire and romantic whimsy in The January Man and gets mush. The whodunit is spectacularly implausible, the comedy misjudged, the romance forced. [30 Jan 1989, p.70]

Hill is a modern-day Peckinpah. But is there really a need for this pointless, graphic violence in the 1980s? Is this escapism, or is it just a distasteful, needless reflection of what has become horrifyingly common in the real world?... Only small boys will be able to keep a straight face. [4 May 1987, p.77]

Downright repetitive! [30 May 1983]

What Friedkin's film is about is anybody's guess. If he just wanted to make a thriller, he has made a clumsy and unconvincing one. If he wanted to explore the psychology of his characters, he has left out most of the relevant information. If he intended to illuminate the tricky subject of S&M, he hasn't even scratched the surface. "Cruising" is quite effective in working up an atmosphere of dread: the ominous bar scenes are butch grand guignol, full of sweaty flesh, menacing shadows and barely glimpsed acts of degradation performed by glowering, bearded men in black leather and chains. But who are these people and why are they doing all these kinky things? Friedkin isn't interested in explaining his milieu; he merely offers it up as a superficially shocking tableau for the titillation and horror of his audience. [18 Feb 1980, p.92]

Black Rain is the sort of movie where, if you see a motorcycle race at the start, you know you'll get one in the climax. The script is routine formula swill, at best. [02 Oct 1989, p.70]

Every role is miscast. Whose idea was it to have the boyishly British Bale play an illiterate Greek peasant, or the elegant Hurt a gruff-voiced country doctor? Cruz’s run of bad luck in American movies continues.

Pirates is pure Polanski, but it's unfortunately not good Polanski. Attempting to revamp the swashbuckler genre the way he parodied Dracula movies in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," he's produced an abstract action comedy so emotionally detached it's impossible to stay involved. [28 July 1986, p.70]

Criticizing it is like spitting in the wind, but at the risk of sounding like the spoilsport villain of the piece (a snippety liberal Washington bureaucrat, wouldn't you know), there's a smug, bully-boy spirit underneath this supposedly merry romp. The message is Go for It, and the theme song tells us 'Youv'e gotta have a dream to, make a dream come true," but what have our dreams come to? Breaking the 55-mph speed limit? In this movie, paradise is being able to land a Piper Cubin a busy city street to pick up another six-pack. Unfettered individualism has come to this: drive hard and carry a big Schlitz. [13 July 1981, p.81]

The superhero genre screams for a makeover, or at least a smart deconstruction, but Hancock isn't that movie. It just ups the foolishness ante.

One can forgive the orangutan's participation - he couldn't read the script - but what is Eastwood's excuse? James Fargo directed, every which way but well. [08 Jan 1979, p.60]

Everything in Rounders is right there on the surface. Watching it is about as exciting as playing poker with all the cards face up. [14 Sept 1998]

When a director as gifted, personal and eccentric as Peckinpah makes a film as gaseous and ludicrous as this, the temptation is to laugh, but the spectacle of his continuing skid is a sad one. [10 July 1978, p.83]