Gary Arnold

John Flynn's crisp, laconic direction and evocative use of Southern Texas locations - the San Antonio area, with particularly effective, sinister excursions to border towns like Del Rio - transorm Rolling Thunder into a more distinctive exploitation movie than it deserves to be. [29 Oct 1977, p.B7]

Meatballs is a tartly, unpretentiously funny as its title. A sort of "M*A*S*H" for campers, the deftly timed episodic comedy is fabricated around the pranks, games, rivalries and lusts at a summer camp. As the seniors boys' counselor, an easygoing role model and spontaneous comic genius, Bill Murray of "Saturday Night Live" makes a deceptively sensational debut as a film comedy star. [11 July 1979, p.B1]

Watcher in the Woods represents a botched effort by the Disney studio to locate a suitable opening somewhere within the flourishing genres of supernatural and horror fantasy.

The fragile satric fable seemed to defy adaptation. But despite its shortcomings, director Hal Ashby managed to transplant the undernourished narrative with remarkable success. [08 Feb 1980, p.D1]

The rapport that ought to evolve between Gloria and her juvenile charge never quite makes it from the filmmaker's imagination onto the screen. [10 Oct 1980, p.E7]

Private Benjamin seems coarse, sluggish and interminable as a comedy scenario.

Schrader's second feature, Hardcore, is more confidently made than his first, Blue Collar, but it slips into a similar category: absorbing but unsatisfying. [10 Feb 1979, p.C1]

Social consciousness and cultural respectability are allowed to make deep inroads on the raunch, since the kids are suddenly congregated around the Drama Club and devote their major conspiratorial campaign to discrediting a bigoted preacher who threatens to interfere with the term play. [2 July 1983, p.C3]

Although he brings a certain muscular prowess to the screen, Norris is grievously deficient of charm and humor. [11 Aug 1981, p.C8]

Doug Trumbull has spent years maneuvering a potentially stirring mystic pretext to the threshold of realization, only to balk and stumble at the act of finally crossing that threshold. [29 Sept 1983, p.D1]

Although it has beguiling and funny interludes, The Jungle Book lacks the narrative suspense and excitement that propel the best of the Disney animated features from the pioneering Snow White and Pinnochio to last year's The Rescuers. It seems to reflect the Disney tradition in repose, still expert and pleasing but also a trifle stuffy. [29 June 1978, p.B7]

The premise and star remain out of whack until the rambling, diffuse screenplay finally struggles beyond basic training.

Never makes a subatomic particle of melodramatic or psychological sense yet nevertheless provokes an overwhelming proportion of women spectators into screaming fits. [19 Aug 1981, p.C1]

As endearing as most of the filmmakers' touches turn out to be, The Natural can be criticized with some justice for skating along the brink of outrageous affectation. In this case, though, the fairy-tale framework of the narrative is established so clearly and remains so cleverly sustained that the movie earns its right to romantic exaggerations. [11 May 1984, p.B1]

Regrettably, director Hal Ashby has allowed both the protagonist, folk-singer Woody Guthrie, played with surprising canniness and authority by David Carradine, and the Depression setting to drift away in pictorial reverie and dramatically evasive heroworship. [16 Feb 1977, p.B1]

The finished film remains a mess of tangled, turgid continuity and florid, mock-operatic style -- at best a collection of production numbers and set pieces waiting in rain for a story capable of accumulating suspense and meaning.

Belushi also controls a wicked array of conspiratorial expressions with the audience. His smoldering pouts, crazed gleams, elevating eyebrows and erotically-contended smiles generate gleeful rabble-rousing excitement. And he can seem irresistibly funny in repose or invest minor slapstick opportunities with a streak of genius.

A rousing and scenically breathtaking romance about ranch life in the 1880s, the film should recommend itself strongly to families. [24 Dec 1982, p.14]

Although it frequently misfires and occasionally keeps firing away on empty satiric chambers, Student Bodies is a likably sarcastic and knowing assault on the cliche's of horror movies. [11 Aug 1981, p.C10]

The most nagging impediment to wholehearted acceptance of Tootsie and its little storytelling subterfuges is a failure to recognize the hypocritical aspects of Dorsey's imposture and alleged character improvement. Although Dorsey is supposedly sensitized to the desirability of honesty and consideration in romantic dealings by being forced to seethe on the sidelines while Ron treats Julie badly, the hero never does square things with Sandy, the woman whose trust he betrays in a far more deliberate, systematic fashion. Indeed, it seems downright outrageous for Dorsey to get indignant about Ron's oblivious sort of misbehavior when he's conning Sandy in premeditated ways. [17 Dec 1982, p.F1]

Despite the flailing around, the picture fitfully accumulates a handful of modest highlights and silly brainstorms. [03 Feb 1984, p.E6]

An amateurish jumble of romantic and tear-jerking overtures from novice writer-director Willard Carroll. [28 Jan 1999, p.M20]

With The Hollywood Knights, Floyd Mutrux, the director of "American Hot Wax," seems determined to wear out the welcome of a once-amusing nostalgic device once and for all.

As a movie concept, Dragonslayer seems to have so much going for it that it could scarcely miss. Yet it does miss in crucial respects. [27 June 1981, p.C1]

Since I had been fortunate enough to miss or avoid the earlier installments, "The Love Bug" and "Herbie Rides Again," the latest entry in the Disney studio's cycle of farces about the exploits of a sentient, racy Volkswagen, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, came as a more stupefying shock than it probably should have. As excruciating kiddie vehicles go, a Herbie is certainly more diverting than a Benji, but comparison at this level smack of sheer desperation. [27 July 1977, p.B7]

Absence of Malice was directed with earnest, straightforward proficiency by Sydney Pollack, and there are crucial public issues involved in the premise. Still, excessively generous allowance must be made if one is to overlook the defects and confuse Absence of Malice with a pertinent, lucid melodrama on a hot topic. A remarkable number of journalists seem to be overcompensating for the film's mildness by treating it as something hard-hitting and usefully purgative. More power to the souls considerate enough to do the filmmakers' work for them, but look out for frustration if you're only prepared to meet them halfway. [18 Dec 1981, p.C9]

It couldn't have been easy, of course, to orchestrate the continuity of an adventure movie in which most of the action takes place in an essentially invisible setting, but it's Lisberger's failure to orchestrate this aspect of the show that ultimately causes the picture to sag. Fascinating as they are as discreet sequences, the computer-animated episodes don't build dramatically. They remain a miscellaneous form of abstract spectacle. [10 July 1982, p.C1]

The Final Countdown emerges from a round trip through this time-bending exercise flattened into a two-dimensional letdown. [01 Aug 1980, p.C7]

Moses has staged one totally abstract, contemplative sequence of Erving practicing by himself on a playground court at night. The succession of slow-motion, overlapping dissolves of Erving gliding and dunking in solitary grandeur is a rather pretty abstraction, but it seems to stylize his prowess in a misleading way. The transcendant thing about Erving is that he's capable of performing feats in competition and in real time that the rest of us only dream of doing while playing one-on-none.

There's no doubt about Burt Reynolds' skill. Starting Over finds Reynolds at a level of proficiency that approaches the awesome. [05 Oct 1979, p.B1]

F.I.S.T. may be given patronizing credit for reflecting some vague desire to do an important picture about the perils of corruption within the American political system. Unfortunately, it can't be given credit for realizing that desire with much skill or credibility. [26 Apr 1978, p.B1]

A GREAT American movie in a new epic form, The Right Stuff fuses the comic and the heroic to emerge as a knockabout social comedy that also packs a thriller inspirational and -- why deny it?-- patriotic wallop.

One of the best little slice-of-contemporary-Americana pictures to emerge from Hollywood in recent years. [01 July 1984, p.F1]

High Road to China suggests "Raiders of the Lost Ark" slowed to a crawl. [18 March 1983, p.D3]

An absorbing but rarefied, introspective variation on traditional thriller motifs, it's probably not the synthesis between the personal and traditional that Wenders needs but it's a fascinating compulsively watchable experiment.

Ridley Scott has made a triumphant directing debut by creating a film that looks beautiful but never loses sight of the capacity for animosity and conflict lurking in the human psyche. [08 Mar 1978, p.D1]

Smokey and the Bandit is an unexpected good time, a playful, wisecracking and curiously revealing example of All-American escapist entertainment. [29 July 1977, p.B1]

Jaws 2 isn't a disgraceful self-imitation, but one sampling should be enough. It may inspire nothing so much as a nostalgic hunger to see "Jaws" again.

Pennies From Heaven is a rejuvenating, landmark achievement in the evolution of Hollywood musicals, and certainly the finest American movie of 1981. [18 Dec 1981, p.C1]

For the first 40 or 50 minutes of Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson, I was convinced it was going to emerge as a great human interest comedy. But it takes such a nose dive in the final hour that bailing out early may be the only way to protect a favorable impression.

When it comes to the tantalizing prolongation of suspense, nobody does it better than De Palma. He has absorbed and adapted the Hitchcock's fondness and flair for sustaining exposition through sheer pictorial virtuosity, his mischievous erotic humor and even his ambiguous mixture of morbid, romantic and comic impulses. [25 July 1980, p.C1]

Martin Scorsese's obsession with a dubious mystique of masculinity turns Raging Bull into a ponderous work of metaphysical cinematic bull.

The character is again a lackluster after-thought, exploited by a new Universal assembly line that specializes in the serials manufactured for weekly television consumption.

Thanks largely to the dexterity of director John Badham and the irresistibly fresh attractiveness of the young leads, Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, WarGames contains enough entertaining suspense and more than enough personality appeal to finesse many of its implausible plot twists. [3 June 1983, p.B1]

The vacuous quality of Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown" would be better represented by a title like, "Bore Me to Death, Charlie Brown." [24 Aug 1977, p.B4]

Sounds hard to mess up, but Death Hunt is so unconvincing that you never once stop asking yourself, "Why is this manhunt necessary?" [27 May 1981, p.B6]

While it's fitfully, harmlessly diverting, Breaking Training never overcomes the handicaps that derive from its fundamentally derivative character. [04 Aug 1977, p.B11]

You're obliged to take your fun where you can find it during this coyly coarse-minded, near-wreck of a musical, and there's precious little to be found watching the costars gather moss in each other's uneasy company. [23 July 1982, p.D3]

What really compromises Midnight Madness is not inexperience or subsophomoric humor, inconvenient as they frequently are, but derivativeness. This vehicle can't quite build up its own head of steam when it seems to be assembled with spare parts from National Lampoon's Animal House and Scavenger Hunt. [13 Feb 1980, p.B4]

The general idea is obviously dog-eat-dog, but it's depicted in ways that convince you of nothing so much as the filmmakers' obscene dependence on brutality. Bad Boys emerges as a textbook example of rotten melodrama. [25 Mar 1983, p.C2]

Malle's most forcefull dramatic element is the feeling of rivalry and resentment that exists between mother and child without the characters being conscious of it. The script is eloquently supplied with scenes illustration this fundamental conflict and bond. [26 Apr 1978, p.B1]

It's difficult to view Sudden Impact as anything more exciting or authentic than the action movie equivalent of drawn-out foreplay and faked orgasm.

It's difficult to predict if audiences will be patient enough with Best Defense to allow it the shakedown time necessary to hit a funny stride. But the movie confirms a flair for comedy that may pay dividends when the filmmakers' rapport with the actors is strong enough to discipline and perhaps improve dodgy material. [25 Jul 1984, p.D3]

If Kagemusha falls short dramatically, and many admirers may not share that impression, the sag occurs at an awesome level of filmmaking prowess. Ironically, this tale of a shadow warrior is diminished only by the length and intensity of the artistic shadow thrown by Kurosawa in his prime. [21 Nov 1980, p.F1]

The premise breaks down just at the point when it needs to be cleverly elaborated into a story. [05 Aug 1978, p.H1]

A gaudy erotic showcase for a male stripper named Richard Gere. A couple of feebleminded heads were put together on this would-be-torrid production, a kind of glorified featurette for Playgirl subscribers. [13 May 1983, p.B1]

By and large the film seems humorless, the reflection of exhausted or snide entertainers. [21 June 1978, p.B13]

"Grease 2" is the most serendipitous sequel in recent memory. It is an ingratiating, jubilant improvement on a crummy original.

Coleman and Thomas are unusually sympathetic embodiments of a father and son, and they have some moments that are legitimately stirring. Cloak & Dagger is never as adept or perceptive as you'd like it to be, but it's got what members of the critical fraternity traditionally characterize as a little something.

Smokey and the Bandit II -- is a premeditated embarrassment. It seems to prove that entertainers who discover a successful formula may not have the foggiest notion of how to protect, duplicate and sustain it.

An intimate theater piece conceived for the movies, My Dinner With Andre illustrates how much human interest, entertainment value and even philosophical inquiry can be derived from a situation as static as a dinner conversation. It should also prove a great incentive for dining out and shooting the bull in general. [19 Jan 1982, p.D3]

The unsavory nature of the concept is softened to a considerable extent by the ridiculous nature of the depiction. The performers are obliged to stumble through such a prolonged, outrageous dance of death that the stupidity of it all tends to obscure the viciousness of it all. [26 Feb 1982, p.D3]

King of the Gypsies gets caught in a paralyzing bind between sordid subject matter and ridiculous casting. Ostensibly a serious, compelling melodramatic chronicle about dynastic conflict within the gypsy subculture of contemporary American, the movie resolves itself lickety-split into a laughter. [20 Dec 1978, p.E1]

The director, J. Lee Thompson, was once a proficient craftsman. Not all that long ago he and Quinn were associated on the prestigious hit The Guns of Navarone. You can't help wondering what they, along with Mason and Neal, talked about between the takes of this howler. [29 Mar 1979, p.D15]

Exquistely written but treacherously threadbare Greene. The author's style doesn't emerge through the filters of Tom Stoppard's foreshortened screenplay and Preminger's monotonous direction, which keeps the exposition at such a low energy level that the scenes feel instantly depleted. [18 Apr 1980, p.E1]

Such a half-baked, arbitrary update that the decrepit plot seems to arise from the misty region of a kind of Jewish Brigadoon in contemporary Manhattan, a Ghetto That Time Forgot. [20 Dec 1980, p.D3]

The film only succeeds in establishing a remarkable new low in remakes.

Unfortunately, Rhinestone is content to cackle and scratch around at such a dumb cluck level of facetiousness that what began as a "cute" idea degenerates into a moronic one. [22 Jun 1984, p.B8]

Vicious and hypocritical as it is, The Gauntlet remains an entertaining sort of disreputable show, considerably more proficient and interesting than junk melodramas in a dogged vein.

Parker's fatal misjudgment is failing to recognize that a solemnly expressionistic movie presentation of themes from "The Wall" tends to magnify its inherent lack of dramatic substance.

Something is missing, and you feel that its absence prevents both the characterization and movie from going decisively over the top.

Shoot the Moon leaves you with more than fresh respect for Parker and Keaton. It also suggests that American family life has just begun to be depicted with true candor and sensitivity on the contemporary screen. [19 Feb 1982, p.D1]

An inconsistent but good-natured ramble, Bustin' Loose looks like a secure investment for Richard Pryor fans.

As Frank Galvin, the misbegotten inspirational hero of Sidney Lumet's imbecilic courtroom melodrama The Verdict, Paul Newman takes sanctimonious satisfaction in impersonating the sorriest excuse for a crusading attorney since Anne Bancroft misrepresented Margaux Hemingway in "Lipstick." [17 Dec 1982, p.F12]

A number of grievous things have gone wrong with Gorky Park, the disappointing film version of Martin Cruz Smith's savory mystery novel, in its transition from print to celluloid. But chief among them is the casting of William Hurt as the leading man. [16 Dec 1983, p.F10]

Unfortunately, The Champ does not let well enough alone. It slogs on for about two reels too many, concluding on a note of utterly contrived tragedy that should make just about everyone feel wretchedly deceived. [04 Apr 1979, p.B1]

Suffers from sluggish exposition mediocre direction and a one-closeup-after-another method of composition advertising the film's eventual retirement to the Disney TV series, but it probably salvages things with juvenile audiences by finishing fast. [5 Feb 1977, p.C5]

Directing his own starring vehicle, that sly boots Burt Reynolds gives the audience a shamelessly lurid but stylish going-over, while putting a clever new wrinkle or two on his own status.

Exorcist II seems to have evolved out of delusions of cinematic grandeur shared by Boorman and writer William Goodhart. It's obvious that they wanted to contrive a metaphysical thriller that would be astonishing and spiritually inspiring, but their thought processes are so muddled that the movie degenerates almost instantly into a confounded shambles. [18 June 1977, p.B1]

The level of unintentional mirth in Silent Rage is convulsive enough to endear it to connoisseurs of the preposterous. Still, the movie may be too much of a dumb delight to retain a shred of credibility. As an exercise in brawling action combined with blood-curdling terror, it represents a botched experiment. [2 Apr 1982, p.C6]

A curiously overextended spoof of the cliche's of Hollywood's hard-boiled mystery melodramas of the 1940s. [21 May 1982, p.B4]

Cox gives the denizens of Edge City wacky ways of expressing themselves whether they're principals, passers-by or disembodied voices. [14 Sept 1984, p.C1]

It seemed to me that what Eddie and the Cruisers aspired to do was certainly worth doing. The problem is that it finally lacks the storytelling resources to tell enough of an intriguing story about a musical mystery man. [30 Sept 1983, p.E2]

The movie's very smoothness may set viewers up for a letdown. It's a low-key exercise in genre suspense and romance that fails to generate a high level of excitement or deliver classic dynamic thrills. [06 Mar 1981, p.C1]

Still of the Night emerges as not only failed, synthetic Hitchcock but also failed, synthetic slasher and failed, synthetic love story. [18 Dec 1982, p.C1]

Herzog has nothing of lasting value to offer the vampire tradition. His Nosferatu is at best unintentional, fitfully risible camp.

A flagrantly vicious and broken-down murder melodrama that leaves recognizable fingerprints all over the place while making a chump of director William Friedkin. [13 Oct 1995, p.C16]

The Driver is a chase melodrama abstracted to the verge of pointlessness. [31 July 1978, p.B1]

No need to buy a Christmas present for Redford and Fonda this year. They've already made a movie calculated to smother each other in garlands of self-congratulation. [21 Dec 1989, p.C1]

Within the stylistic limits and shortened time span the filmmakers have decided to use, All the President's Men is an exceptionally well-made film. It's simply impossible to suppress the feeling that a more involving and satisfying movie would have emerged from a less restrictive framework.

The bitchery may be funny for its own sake, but it causes the film to lose touch with its real heroine and genre. Moreover, the Christie plot ends up so drastically foreshortened that you'd swear a reel must have been misplaced, although the sluggish direction of Guy Hamilton doesn't make one anxious to see it restored.

Grandview, U.S.A., shot in the picturesque small town of Pontiac, Ill., opens with some pleasantly misleading evocations of Breaking Away, then degenerates into one of those blithely cretinous entertainments that leave you despising characters you were presumably meant to like. [08 Aug 1984, p.F9]

The lowest common denominator of smutty amusement [03 Aug 1983, p.B2]

The Amityville Horror is a feeble excuse for a haunted-house thriller, but given the source, who could ask for more?

Huston's straightforward, sardonic direction reinforces a compact, unusually literate screenplay. [07 May 1980, p.C1]

Even the premise for this sputtering attempt at a picaresque farce seems to anticipate a vehicle prone to misfires and breakdowns. [12 Aug 1982, p.E1]

Ralph Bakshi's half-baked epic American Pop exposes the banality of his pop mentality. The creator of "Lord of the Rings' and "Fritz the Cat" surpasses himself: American Pop is undeniably his sorriest spectacle yet. [6 March 1981, p.C11]

Both The French Connection and The Exorcist gave Friedkin a reputation as a talented manipulator, but it appears that he may have begun to overestimate the appeal of manipulation for its own sake. The characters and episodes in Sorcerer seem totally arbitrary. They're used to implement certain pictorial or inconographic notions, but they're never developed dramatically.