Gary Arnold

The disappointing thing about Streets of Fire is that it can't deliver on the promise of a tangy, sexy evening of stimulation. The failure is aggravated by the exorbitant scale of the production, which seems much too lavish for an atmosphere of B-movie squalor. [01 June 1984, p.B4]

The best reason to see The Rose is to be in a position to relish the inevitable parody on "Saturday Night Live." Here's a sitting turkey that virtually sits up and begs to be plucked. [8 Nov 1979, p.F1]

Until betrayed by its essential docility, The Promise promises a fairly stimulating wallow in the tear-jerking depths. [10 Apr 1979, p.B3]

Steve Rash directs the firm in a clean, observant and confidently transparent style - making an impressive debut after several years of TV pop-music specials - and demonstrates a flair for expressing Holly's appeal. [18 Aug 1978, p.B1]

1941 represents an appalling waste of filmmaking and performing resources. As one would expect, Spielberg, who directed "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," sustains a high energy level. But the energy is expended on material that is pointless at best and occasionally hateful. [15 Dec 1979, p.C1]

The movie proves a curiously harmless pet of a black comedy: It barks and snaps at you in fitfully funny ways, but it's essentially tame, pipsqueaky and more than a trifle antiquated. [05 Nov 1982, p.D1]

John Landis must have entertained greater aspirations for his new movie, "An American Werewolf in London," than the dismaying results he's stuck with -- a wasted clever title and a minor fiasco destined for an obscure niche in the scrapheap of horror movies.

Candleshoe isn't immobilized by wholesomeness, as Disney movies go, it's unsually spirited as well as pleasant. [11 Feb 1978, p.E1]

The shocks are strictly mechanical and redundant, the script uncomplicated by incidental humor or character byplay. It comes as no great surprise when the killer is revealed to a be a Halloween clone and then allowed to vanish, aggravating the pathetic resemblance. The reviewers who made a fuss over Halloween have a lot to answer for. [25 Feb 1981, p.B12]

After a fairly promising getaway, Romancing the Stone gradually chases its tail into enough melodramatic dead ends to deteriorate into an expendable runaround, all too easy to shrug off as a miscalculated clone of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Class, a sexual disillusion acted out at the prep school level, would be represented far more accurately by the one-word title "Crass." [22 July 1983, p.C4]

It's a beautifully composed and tautly engineered production, a model of trim and attractive genre moviemaking. This movie looks marvelous. Hyams and his cinematographer, Richard Hannah, seem to be experimenting with some form of enhanced lighting that gives the color images extraordinary vividness, a very fine grain combined with a sharp, hard-edged focus that produces a far more expressive three-dimensional illusion than 3-D. The effect is especially breathtaking. [5 Aug 1983, p.C6]

A powerful period setting might have taken up the slack, but Lynch doesn't impose the past as vividly as the theme demands. Nor does he place us in a position to appreciate Merrick's fears and longings as if they were our own. [17 Oct 1980, p.C1]

Splash betrays a slightly drippy side, but by and large it's a refreshing plunge into unabashed romantic fantasy and not to be missed for the sake of John Candy, who hits the screen like a playful fat diver cannonballing off the high board. [09 Mar 1984, p.D1]

Well, cloddish as it is, Tank doesn't put any obstacles in the way of separating the good guys from the bad guys. And while you might justly call it stupefying, it's never boring. [28 Mar 1984, p.B17]

Unfortunately, all too many paying customers will remember being suckered into the Derek remake of "Tarzan," which shortchanges every feature susceptible moviegoers must assume they'll find: tongue-in-cheek romance, exotic high adventure and generous scrutiny of Bo in the buff. Denying people the forms of amusement, notably erotic amusement, that the publicity suggests, Derek exposes a truly dangerous ineptitude.

Milius and his co-writer, Kevin Reynolds, commit a fatal blunder by jumping into combat sequences before we've scarcely had time to take in the idyllic heartland setting, a rural Colorado town called Calumet. [10 Aug 1984, p.B4]

At best, the filmmakers are guilty of wholesale confusion. For lamentable example, the plot degenerates into a hopeless tangle of loose threads and discarded hooks, beginning with the initial vicious teaser, which identifies Pam Grier as a drug-crazed prostitute who guns down a pair of unwary young patrolmen in their squad car. [7 Feb 1981, p.C1]

Innovative, lavish and lacking. [30 Mar 1984, p.D1]

Cannery Row is expendable and creaky, a lavishly mounted antique.

Although Bostwick is left in the most exposed position by the nonsensical war games invented for Megaforce, it's obviously Needham who deserves the preeminent rap for fabricating a system of illusion so juvenile that the actors can scarcely avoid looking like chumps.

Mr. Mom has its share of bright lines and funny moments, but if you bring anything beyond trifling expectations to this role-reversal farce, starring Michael Keaton and Teri Garr as a couple obliged to switch homemaking and breadwinning duties, it will be difficult to avoid feeling shortchanged. [20 Aug 1983, p.C1]

John Carpenter's remake of The Thing is a wretched excess. It's not that originals are too sacred to be reinterpreted. They're period pieces that would have to be tinkered with to appear contemporary. They've simply been unlucky with their tinkerers, who haven't spruced up the pretexts without laying waste to the accompanying human interest, wit and thematic suggestiveness. [25 June 1982, p.C3]

Sufficiently attractive and absorbing to sustain the fond delusion that Charles' pursuit of the mystifying Sarah might culminate in a revealing, conclusive confrontation. [02 Oct 1981, p.C1]

The movie is a stunning example of collaborative fidelity and artistry directed by Karel Reisz, and its impact may be heightened if one is in the dark as to the plot of its literary source, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Suddenly you find yourself in the grip of an overwhelming cinemate and melodramatic undertow, at once thrilled, astonished and dreadfully uncertain of where it may set you down. [09 Aug 1978, p.B1]

There's sure nothing purgative about the kind of anxiety the filmmakers are exploiting. If anything, it condemns them to strictly degenerate company. [24 Mar 1981, p.B8]

You find yourself chewing over Laura Mars after the lights come up. Unfortunately, it's the kind of chew that leaves your jaw feeling tired and your mouth tasting sour. [03 Aug 1978, p.B6]

If any one made a respectable effort to invest this story with authenticity or tension it is not apparent on the screen. Even the big spectacle, the demolition of a dam, is going to look unimpressive to moviegoers who've already been to Superman and seen the identical illusion depicted with far more skill. Force 10 is a mission that should probably have been aborted. Instead it's been allowed to abort on the screen.

Directing from his own screenplay, Alan Alda displays an alarming aptitude for the comedy of manners at its most trifling and synthetic. [22 May 1981, p.F1]

The most coherent thing about the new action thriller Blue Thunder is its eagerness to succeed and its rabble-rousing spectacle of stunt flying and aerial combat. Blue Thunder, a chase melodrama with police helicopter pilots as the good guys, transposes the salty tone of The French Connection and Dirty Harry to a chopper squadron in Los Angeles. [13 May 1983, p.B1]

Indeed, you come out of Back Roads feeling more familiar with the configuration of Sally Field's spinal column and chestbone than the character she's struggling to embody.

A handful of funny brainstorms can be found rattling around the slapdash confines of Ice Pirates. [03 Apr 1984, p.C6]

One of the snazziest, wittiest productions in the history of the serial.

A round of misfires from title to denouement, the new comedy "Modern Problems" is a modern problem for moviegoers: the latest rummy example of that strange abomination, the unfunny "fun" movie, victimized by utter confusion about its genre, tone and audience. [30 Dec 1981, p.B6]

The finished film obliterates whatever promise of novelty and human interested existed in the basic idea of Belinski's culture shock. If the rabbi's odyssey was embryonically appealing, the filmmakers have nurtured it along pact from an elephant trying to hatch a robbin's egg. [27 July 1979, p.B1]

A more modest, down-to-earth disappointment than Firefox, it benefits from a fair amount of incidental entertainment value, much of it supplied by a distinctive and often humorous supporting cast. [18 Dec 1982, p.C4]

Eager to seem warmhearted and endearing, Author! Author! is frustrated by Pacino's conspicuous resistance. If anything, this uncharacteristic vehicle illustrates his inability to lighten up an emphatically gloomy, brooding screen presence. [19 Jun 1982, p.C1]

After getting off to a wretched start, the film settles down in mid-passage and grows unexpectedly appealing. Down the stretch it reverts to faltering form. The best policy might be to go about 30 minutes late and leave about 15 minutes early. [7 Aug 1981, p.C1]

Despite its excesses, "The Howling" has some tricks and jokes worth howling about. The sexual undercurrents in the werewolf myth have been made playfully explicit, especially in the sultry, voluptuous form of Elisabeth Brooks, cast as a nympho werewolf named Marsha. When she ambushes a victim in the woods, they change forms in the course of coupling strategically obscured by a blazing campfire in the foreground -- a deliberate howl of a sex scene. [13 March 1981, p.C1]

Zieff & Co. give it a game, good-humored try, but I don't think they're in jeopardy of being celebrated as inspired farceurs. [14 Feb 1984, p.D8]

The Funhouse begins with a lamely facetious reprise of the shower sequence from Psycho and slides steadily downhill there. [18 Mar 1981, p.B4]

A fitfully witty and reliably spine-tingling horror melodrama...While it works you over effectively, Poltergeist betrays a good deal of rather dubious, uncoordinated manipulation. [4 June 1982, p.D1]

Stallone hasn't done himself proud in Paradise Alley. The film could still use a director, a scenario writer and someone to discourage the star from lapsing into happy-go-lucky imitations of Lee J. Cobb. Still, there's something likeable about this zany manipulator. [10 Nov 1978, p.E1]

If you aren't feeling so generous, it's pretty obvious that the movie is not only a stinker but an inexcusably corrupt stinker, dependent on the indulgence of a public slavish or naive enough to feel honored when old pros content themselves with smugly amateurish shtik. [29 June 1984, p.B5]

An acceptable scene-setter, Carpenter reveals glaring inadequacies as a storyteller. [15 Feb 1980, p.C3]

One may feel limitations on the dramatic side, but Bridge is an unqualified pictorial achievement.

At once warmly earthbound and nobly starstruck, it should give receptive spectators a savory pick-me-up. [13 July 1984, p.E1]

The title, of course, leads one to expect the long-awaited movie version of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but the actuality is closer to tattered but dopily diverting remnants from The Karate Kid, Road House and Rocky IV. [14 Nov 1989, p.E3]

Christine does indeed suffer from the preposterous, low-octane nature of the devil-car pretext. But this satanic nonsense is saved from strictly facetious appeal by a few sensational pictorial effects, notably the sights of Christine speeding after a victim while engulfed in flames or miraculously repairing her own battered body, and by the no-nonsense performances of an excellent cast, especially Keith Gordon as the obsessed and transformed Arnie Cunningham.

Profanely funny, wised-up and heroically antiheroic, North Dallas Forty is unlikely to please anyone with a vested interest in glorifying the National Football League.

Black Sunday takes such a plodding literal-minded approach with an extravagant thriller premise that we have more than enough time to watch the gears working and all too often jamming. [01 Apr 1977, p.B1]

More American Graffiti suffers from a terminal case of the cutes. Made with the approval of George Lucas, the director of American Graffiti, and perhaps with his misbegotten collusion, More American Graffiti succeeds in making a blithe mockery of its predecessor. [03 Aug 1979, p.D4]

Oh, God! Book II revives that excruciating game of false piety in which Hollywood humorists grovel for brownie points in eternity by presuming to be God's chummiest press agents. [03 Oct 1980, p.C1]

An admirably crisp, incisive counter-terrorist thriller, the most proficient and entertaining movie of its kind since Richard Lester's Juggernaut.

The conventions that worked for High Noon break down in the high-tech atmosphere of Outland and the story seems trite and dinky. [23 May 1981, p.C6]

Patchy, underbudgeted pop-music satire a la This is Spinal Tap but lacking its professional assurance. [30 Jun 1994, p.M28]

Over the Edge is an oafishly made movie that claims to deal with a documented case of adolescent unrest in an authentic upper-middle-class social setting, then manipulates the situation only for hypocritical suggestions of teen-age vice and picturesque sprees of teen-age violence. [04 Mar 1982, p.C13]

A generous entertainment of its kind, Any Which Way mixes plentiful portions of gauche, robust action and comedy with frequent musical interludes. [17 Dec 1980, p.E1]

Slap Shot comes at you like a boisterous drunk. At first glance it appears harmlessly funny, in an extravagantly foul-mouthed sort of way. However, there's a mean streak beneath the cartoon surface tha makes one feel uneasy about humoring this particular durnk for too long.

Moonraker, the newest James Bond spectacle, is a cheerful, splashy entertainment. The curators of the Bond museum do not surpass themselves with this exhibition, the 11th in the series, but they haven't fallen down on the job either. Moonraker is a satisfying blend of familiar ingredients, from the highly polished to the barely adequate. [29 June 1979, p.C1]

Although the material is conventionally manipulated to provoke terror by exploiting Cujo as a mad dog--a four-footed Jaws as a shameless matter of fact--moviegoers are likely to feel too appalled at the way a sick animal is systematically neglected.

It becomes apparent during the stuttering course of the movie itself that exploiting a nuclear power plant as an effective deathtrap in a doomsday thriller requires more than melodramatic wishful thinking. [16 March 1979, p.B1]

Alligator, the most amusing variation yet on the Jaws formula, finds plenty of room for incidental humor and romantic byplay while sustaining a breezy suspense plot. [20 May 1981, p.B1]

Iceman proves an intriguing premise that is allowed or encouraged to go daftly astray. [13 Apr 1983, p.B10]

Remains one of the most estimable mystery movies of its period. [25 Mar 2005, p.D03]

The Dark Crystal leaves no doubt that Jim Henson and his colleagues have reached a point where they can create and sustain a powerfully enchanting form of cinematic fantasy. [21 Dec 1982, p.C1]

For my taste a little bit of Steve Martin goes a long way. Moreover, a rickety vehicle like The Jerk is apt to wear out as aspiring comic star's welcome in one swift stroke.

Its toxic recipe consists of prurient exploitation steeped in dankly pretentious imagery. [01 Jun 1992, p.D4]

Eagle flops around trying to sustain a premise that defies suspenseful elaboration from the outset. No one with his wits about him believes the conspirators will succeed in capturing or shooting Churchill. More to the point, who would want them to? We're asked to suspend disbelief for the sake of a gimmick that not only insults common sense and general knowledge but also betrays old loyalties and convictions. [26 Mar 1977, p.B5]

A would-be endearing romantic entertainment that becomes an exercise in futility, Racing With the Moon concentrates a considerable amount of pictorial polish, acting talent and sincerity on a trifling amount of content. [24 Mar 1984, p.C1]

An amusing, buoyant documentary about competitive body building, dominated by the humorous though awesomely proportioned star presence of champion of champions Arnold Schwarzenegger as he trains and disarms the competition prior to defending the title of Mr. Olympia for the fifth time.

Stanley Donen's otherwise witty and diverting science-fiction thriller Saturn 3, a parable of jealousy set on a remote, futuristic Eden suddenly contaminated by insane lust, suffers desperately for the lack of an epilogue. As a result, an hour and a half of tense, funny sexual melodrama is squashed flat by a dud of a fadeout. [18 Feb 1980, p.B1]

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy promises to take off every so often, but the material proves too slight for buoyant fancy. [16 July 1982, p.C1]

The Karate Kid can't really brushoff the conventional showdown it's incited, so the movie adds the obligatory action payoff to its less expected and more substantial rewards. The filmmakers can't help overbalancing on melodramatic excess from time to time, but their mistakes never obliterate the civilized wisdom of Miyagi's outlook: "Have balance, everything be better." [22 June 1984, p.B1]

A diverting hit-and-miss satirical anthology in the same spirit as The Groove Tube and Tunnelvision. [13 Oct 1977, p.B15]

Both loyal fans and neutral observers may agree that Eastwood has steered himself into a peculiarly murky flight path on this occasion. Literally murky, too. Much of the picture is so miserably underlit, even before the action reaches the Soviet Union, where gloom is meant to prevail. [22 June 1982, p.B]

Perhaps the most satisfying and endearing aspect of The Hidden Fortress at this juncture of movie history is that it so persuasively lends meaning to a high adventure format, using the stimulation to enhance ideals of individual valor and group solidarity.

Used Cars, a mean, spirited farce about cutthroat rivalry between ruthless used-car salesmen somewhere in the Southwest, recalls the worst tendencies of "Ace in the Hole" crossed with the worst tendencies of "One, Two, Three." It's assiduously nasty and hard-driving too, a double-duty excess. Director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis has undeniable energy and flair, but it's being misspent on pretexts and situations that seem inexcusably gratuitous and snide.

A sporadically funny, marginally interesting fiasco that might have evolved into a memorable romantic comedy.

While it's too pat, Little Girl is several cuts above thrillers in the dopey, bedraggled class recently exemplified by Burnt Offerings and The Sentinel. [17 May 1977, p.B9]

This is certainly Chase's most likable vehicle to date, and he endows Mr. Griswold with a sincere sort of goofiness. [29 July 1983, p.D1]

Lacking the necessary gusto and sexual chemistry, Rollover is doomed by an excess of huffing and puffing...Despite posh accessories and surroundings, Jane Fonda and leading man Kris Kristofferson seem oddly haggard as well as mismatched -- two rawboned impostors who can't believe in themselves as a dynamic, voluptuous erotic duo. Their skepticism is well-founded. [11 Dec 1981, p.C3]

Mommie Dearest, the film version of Christina Crawford's poison-pen memoir of her adoptive mother, Joan Crawford, looms as wretched excess. Considering the source, however, this ill-advised and disreputable movie could have been worse.

Although Rohmer's adaptation, shot in German with a cast of actors drawn from the German stage, is pedantically faithful to the letter of the original - almost word-for-word as well as scene-for-scene - it substitutes a style that seems woefully wrong. Rohmer's approach is too static and repressed to release the comic ironies Kleist perceived in the very premise of an honorable man's lapse leading to an honorable woman's distress and built into his brilliantly objective story-telling style. [21 Jan 1977, p.B15]

Edwards persists in the missing-person subterfuge in Curse while avoiding the blatant outrage of recycling old footage under false pretenses. He's shot new footage this time, but that technicality hasn't prevented it from feeling depleted and secondhand. [17 Aug 1983, p.B6]

A dinky, lackluster offering. [10 July 1981, p.B4]

Without a Trace provides little sustenance. It keeps serving up overprepared tidbits of torment when you'd prefer to get down to a main course. [04 Feb 1983, p.C4]

Perhaps their quest had a mythic significance in Richard Sale's original novel that has somehow eluded his screenplay in which it's impossible to believe that the movie heros are doing anything more than beating on a dead prop. [03 Jun 1977, p.B1]

Harry Hamlin remains in a depressing, narcissistic low gear in King of the Mountain. Part of the problem is a blah role: Steve is not a protagonist of many words, or even many revealing looks. [06 May 1981, p.E7]

Isn't it past time to stop dangling Brooke Shields as erotic bait in movies where it's obvious that she doesn't comprehend sexality and everyone knows she's always doubled in sexually graphic interludes anyway? There's one weirdly funny take that seems to satirize this pretty string bean's excruciating lack of sexual consciousness. Tilting her head to one side and smiling like a simp, she looks amazingly like the friendliest extraterrestrial in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." [17 July 1981, p.B2]

The largest shares of credit for this pleasant surprise evidently belong to director Ron Howard--whose assurance behind the camera may come as a revelation to people still associating him with the roles of little Opie on "The Andy Griffith Show" and clean-cut Richie on "Happy Days".

Missing lacks the streamlined tension of the dynamically paced, left-wing political thrillers -- Z, The Confession and State of Siege -- that made Costa-Gavras' reputation a few years back. Nevertheless, it's an expertly acted and suggestive impression of battered American innocence and good will in the explosive, political environment of a South American country (obviously Chile, 1973) during a military coup. [12 Feb 1982, p.C1]

Although Psycho II is obviously a travesty masquerading as a sequel, it's impossible to tell how deliberate the ludicrous aspects of the masquerade were meant to be. In fact, the best sustained mystery element of the show derives from stylistic sloppiness and confusion.

It's obvious that Blank has been forced into many organizational shortcuts in an effort to stitch the random footage together.

Delightfully melodious, high-spirited and nonsensical, the movie version of The Pirates of Penzance can be recommended with only trifling reservations. [25 Feb 1983, p.D1]

Even before it begins laying waste to the reputations of cast members, Firestarter is promptly exposed as a derivative embarrassment of a conception. What could be better calculated to illustrate King's recent decline than a "new" thriller whose devices have been poorly cribbed and patched together from "Carrie" and "The Fury"? As a matter of fact, "Charlie's Fiery Fury" would be a catchier bad title than Firestarter.

While you don't come out of this movie feeling pleased, you may come out feeling mysteriously affected, muttering to yourself, "This one is on to something . . ." [19 Nov 1981, p.C15]

Obliged to launch the hero on an effective counterattack down the stretch, Wallace goes through the motions proficiently enough for exploitation thriller purposes. He should have quit while he was ahead, but Halloween III demonstrates a reasonable ability to control comic-horror effects on his first derivative try. [27 Oct 1982, p.D9]