David Ansen

Unlike some other Landis movies, the harmlessly silly Three Amigos never wanders too far afield in pursuit of a laugh. It's a well-wrought giggle machine. [15 Dec 1986, p.83]

Clearly nobody will mistake this comedy thriller for a precision-made object -- the scenes seem held together with old shoelaces, and you could land a fleet of 747s through the holes in the plot. But two things are clear: the movie provides a generous helping of laughs, and Whoopi proves herself a screen comedienne with a long and bright future ahead of her. [20 Oct 1986, p.79]

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension doesn't play it safe. For that alone you may want to bless its demented little heart. Buckaroo Banzai may not work, but that's the risk of high-wire acts. At least it's up there trying. [20 Aug 1984, p.75]

Full of invention, but under the colorful icing is a slightly stale cake.

To anyone who has seen half the movies he appropriates, and can therefore guess every twist of the plot miles before it happens, Foul Play's frenetic eagerness to please is about as refreshing as the whiff of an exhaust pipe on a hot city afternoon. [24 July 1978, p.59]

Unfortunately, no one seems to have clued Demi in on the joke. Never known for her light touch, she appears to be act-ing (earnestly, humorlessly) in some other movie altogether, a dreary melodrama about a noble mom fighting for her child.

Maybe you have to be 14 to find all of this terribly clever.

It’s sad to see such stunning work self-destruct. You walk out haunted by the movie that might have been.

Slightly soggy.

Doubt stirs up a lot of stormy theatrical weather, but the stolid transfer from stage to screen does Shanley's play no favors.

Scott's finesse can't entirely disguise the mechanical nature of Nicholas and Ted Griffin's script, which has one too many twists for its own good. Fun while it lasts, but it's a bit of a con job itself.

Though Helen Slater makes a bad first impression, she's not a bad Supergirl by the end, being likably straightforward, guileless and sweet. And unlike Reeve, who looks exactly the same whether he's Clark Kent or Superman, Slater makes you believe that people wouldn't know brunette Linda Lee was actually blond Supergirl. That may not be a major cinematic achievement, but it's about the best that Supergirl has to offer. [26 Nov 1984, p.119]

"The Final Frontier" is not as witty as the last installment, nor as well made as "The Search for Spock." But it has the Trek essence in spades. [19 June 1989, p.63]

For the most part, however, Beaches is lean cuisine. It's not quite good enough to ring with any authenticity and not quite tasteless enough to be a glitzy, trashy wallow. But it has one enormous, undeniable asset: Bette Midler. [26 Dec 1988, p.66]

Working from an intermittently clever script by Diane Thomas, director Robert Zemeckis, a talented Spielberg protege (Used Cars), sets his sights on fun and proceeds to blast away at our defenses. Some of the fun is real, but much of it seems grimly willed, which tends to be more exhausting than entertaining. Douglas himself is a less than ideal choice as a hip Indy Jones adventurer -- there's no sense of self-enjoyment in his swagger. But Turner more than compensates. [16 Apr 1984, p.93]

When George’s fortunes start to go from bad to worse, so does the movie.

Brando's performance is enormous fun, but it's not just a joke. He's hilarious and gently mesmerizing at once, and director John Frankenheimer savvily adjusts the tone of his movie to fit Brando's daft brilliance...Let's face it -- this is one nutty movie. It's not exactly "good," but I sure had a good time.

It's hobbled by the too-familiar conventions of the musical biopic: with so many chapters of Charles's life to cover, Hackford's movie never finds a rhythm, a groove, to settle into. It wins its battles without winning the war.

It's not just that the movie is formulaic; it's disingenuous. It relies on Roberts's smile to erase all misgivings. But all the stardust in the world can't disguise the fact that this is more package than picture.

Self-conscious to the point of suffocation.

On paper, this sounds like an ideal Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48 HRS.) movie. On screen, it is little more than a stylishly designed but feeble parody that quickly turns into self-parody. [11 June 1984, p.81]

Coming from director Carl Reiner, whose Where' poppa? had flashes of real comic fire, one expects more than Hallmark platitudes wrapped in Vegas banter. [24 Oct 1977, p.126]

Spielberg has brought forth a farce that is both relentlessly spectacular and spectacularly unfunny. [17 Dec 1979, p.111]

Almost perversely, Laura Mars breaks the easiest of movie promises: here is a movie about the Beautiful People that hasn't bothered to make them beautiful. [14 Aug 1979, p.62]

But if the endpoint is a homiletic given, the journey itself is more charming, and less sentimental, than you might suspect.

Just about every scene written for JoBeth Williams, as an idealistic lawyer pushing the lawsuit and falling in love again with her old teach Nick Nolte, strikes a stridently false note, and in the final 20 minutes the movie totally self-destructs. Too bad. The cast is good and so are Teacher's intentions. A strong principal should have whipped this show into shape. [08 Oct 1984, p.87]

The storytelling is cheesy, but action fans won't want to miss the debut of the Next Big Thing in martial arts.

There are just enough fresh, funny gags and witty throwaways to keep the 88-minute MIB2 percolating -- it fulfills its end of the bargain: a good time will be had by almost all.

Inside this numbingly formulaic action comedy there's a small, quirky movie not screaming hard enough to get out--the kind of movie that director and co-writer Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham,” “Tin Cup”) could have had some real fun with.

There are pleasures to be had in the handsome, heroic The Last Samurai. But they' all on the surface.

But the tale has been squeezed to fit the mold of director John Hughes, which for long stretches makes it feel as much like the third "Home Alone" as the second "Dalmations."

Nimoy and his writers prefer blandness to satire; an E.T. without toilet training, little Mary has been sent to earth to prove that even playboys have big hearts. A feel-good fantasy for baby boomers, Three Men and a Baby is so aggressively innocuous you may be ready for beddy-bye time long before it's over. [30 Nov 1987, p.73]

Resoundingly so-so.

American Flyers is too accomplished not to wring tears, but you may want to kick and scream before you succumb. [09 Sep 1985, p.90]

In the end, artifice overwhelms art. Apt Pupil is too serious to work as a genre movie, and too contrived to be taken seriously. [12 October 1998]

Force 10 is funny, but not quite funny enough: too often one laughs at its implausibilities without knowing if the filmmakers are in on the joke. The old-fashioned script by Robin Chapman has just enough tongue in cheek so that the cliches can be taken as irony, but Guy Hamilton's direction tips the balance toward cliche. An old hand at engineering actors in and out of impossible pickles, Hamilton keeps the action going, but the surprises are so mechanically executed that they rarely amaze. [18 Dec 1978, p.85]

Romero and King want to be as unsophisticated as possible, while maintaining a sense of humor, and they succeed all too well. The characters, story lines and images are studiously one-dimensional. For anyone over 12 there's not much pleasure to be had watching two masters of horror deliberately working beneath themselves. Creepshow is a faux naif horror film: too arch to be truly scary, too elemental to succeed as satire. [22 Nov 1982, p.118]

After the taut and troubling Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World feels like a breather. As usual, you can expect solid, no-fuss craftsmanship, but it's best to set your expectations down a notch.

It's sometimes hard to tell the characters from the candelabra. This lavish screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical is so chockablock with decorative detail the human figures are often competing with the decor for attention.

Harron sets the stage expertly, but her lack of a point of view ultimately enervates the movie. [6 May 1996, p. 78]

For those who believe that movies are a proper place to explore the riddle of sex, no holds barred, this movie is de rigueur.

Basinger almost redeems this mess: whether feasting on battery fluid or learning to kiss from a tourist-guide hologram, her earnest ditziness is out of this world. [02 Jan 1989, p.58]

The storytelling seems occasionally disjointed, but more important, for all the special-effects wizardry, that touch of film magic never surfaces.

Penn is a real talent, but it seems downright unfair to cast him in a part designed to compete with the memory of his brother Sean's role in Fast Times. This is one for the kids; had it tried harder, it could have been one for everyone. [08 Oct 1984, p.89]

Ritt and DeVore don't capitalize on their fairy-tale structure; they let the magic dribble away. The moviegoer knows from the start that this isn't a story about real people and accepts the fact. [16 Mar 1981, p.97]

It is entirely forgettable except for Grodin, who once again compensates for having the most anonymous face in movies with his sly, expertly timed comic delivery. [10 Sep 1979, p.76]

The great '30s comedies had edge, bite and relentless forward momentum. Leatherheads is laid-back, amiable and terminally tepid.

I don't want to sound like a party pooper (or deny that there is something wickedly funny about seeing these middle-age adolescents beating the crap out of a playground full of little bullying kids) but there's something depressing about the never-ending celebration of eternal adolescence in recent American comedies.

The Fog needs more suggestive magic to sustain its farfetched premise. There's no doubt that Carpenter has talent to spare, but he's misjudged his gifts this time. The Fog ought to come on little cat feet, but its tread is heavy and literal. The harder it tries, the sillier it gets. [03 March 1980, p.68]

It's a gorgeous bad movie, the folly of a great visual stylist.

Too facile to resonate deeply. Shouldn't a movie celebrating Nash give you some idea what his mathematical work is about? Fishier still is the suggestion that the cure for paranoid schizophrenia is love.

Dahl himself thought his book would be impossible to translate into film, and for all the ingenuity that's been thrown at the screen, perhaps he was right. This overgrown peach never ripens.

The whole movie has the air of a sermon delivered over an empty grave. In surfers' terms, Big Wednesday is a wipe-out. [14 Aug 1978, p.62]

It doesn't help matters that Connery has been given a cardboard wife and child who--fed up with dingy space colonies-abandon him early on. They're ingredients, not characters. Once again, Hollywood's superlative technology has been squandered on an undernourished screenplay. [01 June 1981, p.91]

Relieved of his courting duties, Allen gives his funniest performance in ages.

In lieu of dramatic depth, Norton's film relies on its wonderful sound-track music to suggest the emotional truth of the era. Anyone who went through the '60s listening to Heat Wave and 96 Tears, to Cream and the Byrds and Aretha Franklin, will be instantly aroused: the memories they prompt are more stirring, troubling and complex than anything More American Graffiti chooses to show us. [27 Aug 1979, p.63]

Director Amy Heckerling cripples half her jokes by telegraphing the punch lines: a sight gag at the top of the Eiffel Tower involving a tossed hat and a little dog would be a lot funnier if we hadn't seen it coming. Some of the jokes seem 25 years out of date: one hardly has to go all the way to France these days, much less cross a state line, to encounter a racy topless bar. [12 Aug 1985, p.71]

The preposterousness of the premise (concocted by writers Perry Howze and Randy Howze) is the appeal of Chances Are. The problem is the execution. Where "Heaven Can Wait" seduced you into belief with its expert comic timing and romantic urgency, director Emile ("Dirty Dancing") Ardolino's fantasy grows increasingly labored as it piles improbability upon psychological impossibility. [20 March 1989, p.83]

Slick and violent and reasonably tense, Ransom holds your attention without being the least bit interesting. [11Nov1996 Pg. 74]

As a quirky travelogue, Kubui's movie has an unassuming appeal, but the characters remain too sketchy to elicit much passion. [16 May 1988, p.83E]

Nice as it is to see these actors again, the trouble with this less than necessary sequel is that it merely attempts to duplicate the experience of the original, with the inevitable loss of freshness. We get geriatric high jinks (instead of break-dancing, a basketball game), another dose of extraterrestrial sex between Steve Guttenberg and Tahnee Welch, saintly Antareans in peril, deathbed scenes and another spaceship liftoff. As the man once said, deja vu ain't what it used to be. [29 Nov 1988, p.87]

In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.

Wonderfully cast and acted, Parents establishes an intriguing comic metaphor about the dark side of the nuclear American family but unfortunately doesn't know where to take it. In the end, the wafer-thin script capitulates to the routine horror-movie conventions it's been battling against. But at least until then it puts up a good fight. [13 Feb 1989, p.79]

Iceman may boil down to a disappointingly sentimental/mystical concept, but Schepisi is such a fluid, exciting filmmaker that you remain thrilled by his images even if you're dismayed by the direction the plot takes. [16 Apr 1984, p.92]

Ultimately, Huckabees doesn't work. But it sure does stimulate. This is just the kind of "failure" we could use plenty more of.

It can't risk real pathos, or real horror, and still be a Jim Carrey movie, so the most it achieves is a kind of unsettling creepiness. Strange movie: Carrey is working his gifted butt off, and we're not allowed to laugh.

Films about great theatrical divas (so temperamental! So divine!) all strike familiar notes. This Somerset Maugham adaptation is no exception. But Annette Bening, playing the queen of the '30s London stage, makes it worth another go-round.

Why does this chronicle of a passionate life refuse to catch fire? For all of Taymor’s flashy embellishments -- surreal dream sequences, constructivist collages come to life -- it trudges through the Kahlo chronology with the dutiful step of a conventional Hollywood biopic.

Lethal Weapon will undoubtedly strike gold. But for those weary of overwrought macho displays -- My pistol's bigger than your pistol is the true theme -- this strenuously "fun" movie is a pretty joyless affair. [16 Mar 1987, p.72]

The saving grace of Con Air is its sense of its own absurdity.

Has a quiet sense of community, a wry, unsentimental sweetness, that grows on you. It's a patient movie for impatient times.

The actors attack their roles with commitment (Hartnett’s understatement is impressive), but their fervor can’t hide the movie’s implausible, often confusing storytelling.

Sean Penn, Elizabeth McGovern and Nicolas Cage are three attractive, gifted young actors whose combined talent, if properly used, could set a movie ablaze. Nothing of the sort happens in Racing With the Moon, a movie that wants badly to be taken as tender and understated when in fact it's merely dull and trite. [02 Apr 1984, p.85]

Zoo avoids any taint of exploitation, but it errs on the opposite extreme. I came away from it wanting a little less Art and a lot more simple reportage.

John August's trickily structured script owes an all too obvious debt to "Pulp Fiction," but Liman's film is more like kiddie Tarantino.

If only the laughs were bigger, smarter and more frequent than they are.

The Hunger is slick, silly and not without thrills. [09 May 1983, p.85]

Not every movie -- even one based on an unproduced Kurosawa screenplay -- has to be about Life itself. Oh well, enjoy it for the thrills, and don't worry about trying to keep a straight face. [30 Dec 1985, p.62]

The most interesting thing about Beowulf, alas, is its technology. It's the work of a man who has fallen in love with his toys, but I miss the wicked satirist who made "Used Cars." And the truth is the motion capture in Beowulf comes across as an unsatisfying compromise between animation and live action.

For all its shortcomings, The Human Stain is an honorable, sometimes moving attempt, better at evoking the poignancy of Silk's autumnal affair than exploring the moral ambiguities of his deception.

Part satire, part love story and, in its lurid deprogramming scenes, pure horror story. Not everything jells, and one never fully believes the hero's transformation from skepticism to subservience. Yet Kotcheff has again delivered a compelling entertainment and one savvy enough to raise more questions than it answers. [25 Oct 1982, p.119]

Under the Cherry Moon is not recommended for seekers of good taste, but if you're looking for a giddy, outre night at the movies, Prince is your man. [21 Jul 1986, p.65]

For all its isolated lovely touches--there's a wonderful moment of repose while Garp listens to Nat King Cole on his car radio--the movie leaves a cold, sour aftertaste. Some of this can be attributed to the uncertain tone of Hill's direction--overly broad here, too remote there--but much of it goes back to Irving. [26 July 1982, p.77]

The demands of the historical epic form seem to hobble Jordan's imagination. He's a director who's at his best when he can follow the dark logic of his own subconscious.

Talk Radio feels like a sketch inflated beyond the breaking point. Sure, it's disturbing. So is watching Morton Downey Jr. Stone seems to believe that he's lifting the lid off the creepy-crawly American unconscious. Perhaps. Or maybe Talk Radio is just a movie in love with the hysterical sound of its own voice.[9 Jan 1989, p.54]

It's ersatz classicism, in its inoffensive way as much a dead end as Stardust Memories. Allen seems to be biding his time, waiting for the "real" Woody Allen to figure out what a real Woody Allen movie will be. [19 July 1982, p.70]

Shorn of its medical shock value, Coma is nothing more than Nancy Drew Goes to Surgery, a creaky blend of red herrings, ominous stares, stale cliff-hangers and doom-laden music. [06 Feb 1978, p.86]

It’s not half bad, with cool locations and a great stunt leap from the top of a Hong Kong high-rise.

Rollover wants to be a thriller, love story and economics lesson rolled into one, but in trying to do so much, it shortchanges each element. The screenplay (by David Shaber from a story by Shaber, Howard Kohn and David Weir) doesn't hang together. [14 Dec 1981, p.125]

A dispiriting attempt to wring a last gasp of mirth from an already dangerously overextended series. [22 Aug 1983, p.73]

It's not as cool as it sounds.

But once the couple clinch their bond -- just when the story gets really shameless -- the life drains out of the movie. Love Affair takes such pains to dodge vulgarity it forgets to put anything in its place.

Actually it's relatively clean, downright affirmative (the girls get insurance plans and 90 percent of the take) and resoundingly unfunny. [2 Aug 1982, p.63]

Light of Day has the virtues of sincerity, but that may also be what keeps it so relentlessly mundane. [09 Feb 1987, p.75]

This stiff-in-the-joints movie has little feel for its setting or period, and crucial chunks seem to have been left on the cutting-room floor. Robert Rossen's Oscar-winning 1949 version has nothing to fear.

Neither hilarious nor horrible, Junior is the first would-be Arnold blockbuster that coasts on charm.

By the time this atmospheric but thoroughly muddled story reaches its conclusion, the film has totally self-destructed. [31 Dec 1979, p.49]

Herbert Ross directed this murky-looking film, and Buck Henry wrote it from a story by Charles Shyer, Nancy Meyers and Harvey Miller. They have all had better days. [31 Dec 1984, p.65]