Gary Arnold

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

If a movie can be said to snore before your eyes, Damien sustains an ungodly, unstimulating buzz. [13 June 1978, p.B1]

An overwhelmingly friendly climate of opinion awaited "New York, New York." Scorsese has squandered it by backing off from the very challenge of rationalizing and sustaining a musical romantic drama.

Having hit a sassy stride in The Great Muppet Caper (after a treacly start with The Muppet Movie) Jim Henson and Frank Oz suffer a relapse in the progressively lackluster The Muppets Take Manhattan. The weakest link in Manhattan is a scenario of incurable listlessness. [14 July 1984, p.C7]

Raggedy Man is starved for scenes that might fill out our scanty store of information--for example, a little more about the marriage, the love affair, her identity as a mother. Even the location needs to be filled out, since one forms the misimpression that Gregory is not so much a small town as a ghost town. Next time, the Fisks owe it to themselves to bite off enough material to chew. [03 Jul 1982, p.B3]

The repeated fake-outs even lead one to entertain the fond delusion that The Burning might be absent-minded enough to diverge into harmless farce and end up as a rehash of "Meatballs." Regrettably, once Cropsy strikes again, he can't seem to stop, and the movie keeps him company by going methodically beserk. [28 May 1981, p.D11]

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

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]

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]

The Entity may be the least catchy title in movie history, and for the first tedious hour or so this curiously indecisive account of supernatural sexual intimidation remains in an expedient and exasperating rut: writer Frank DeFelitta and director Sidney Furie seem fixated on the rape scene from Rosemary's Baby. [09 Feb 1983, p.F11]

A bucolic sex comedy in which Nicholson the director indulges Nicholson the star an orgy of coy monkey-shines in the role of a scruffy outlaw who enters into a marriage of convenience with a demure young woman who owns a ranch and a goldmine - expires right before your eyes from a terminal case of the feebles. Goin' South is the most flat-footed comedy to collapse on the screen since Nickelodeon.

This would-be epic schlep, dragging almost 50 years of chronology over a sluggish 140 minutes, is far too slight of text and ponderous of presentation to sustain more than nodding-off dramatic interest. [U.S. theatrical release]

Halloween is a stab at a derivative minor classic. It's apparent where Carpenter got his horror devices - and a minor misfortune that he hasn't been able to synthesize them in a fresh or exciting way.

One gets the uneasy feeling that Jodie Foster is trying to tell us something that has nothing essential to do with Nell's plight. The movie is a coy, condescending vanity production. [25 Dec 1994, p.D6]

One is hard-pressed to isolate any feature of Now and Then that isn't stale from movie overtime and sentimentality. [20 Oct 1995, p.C17]

The interludes of terror are strictly functional and literal-minded: If it's not a murder spectacle, it's a tease that anticipates a subsequent atrocity. [25 Nov 1983, p.C2]

"Dragon" was apparently meant to be a big, rousing musical comedy-fantasy, but it's staged and photographed without musical-comedy energy, flair or coordination. [17 Dec 1977, p.D7]

Recommended only to moviegoers so indiscriminately fond of the Panther series and starved for belly laughs that they consider it a privilege to watch director Blake Edwards sort through his old footage and sweep up after himself. If your indulgence is less than open-ended, this lame attempt to scrape a "new" feature out of a filmmaking backlog is likely to seem more deplorable than diverting. [18 Dec 1982, p.C4]

Writer-director Dearden, who earned his gruesome credentials as the screenwriter on Fatal Attraction, underlines his leading lady's lack of rudimentary skill by leaving the soundtrack full of dead air and amateurish articulation during numerous conversations. He's also repeatedly drawn to Hitchcock allusions that slip out of his grasp. [26 Apr 1991, p.E1]