Gary Arnold

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]

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

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]

With pulpy material to begin with, the film's ham-fisted, novice director Robert Longo seems to be the major incompetent. [25 May 1995, p.M24]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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

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.

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]

Paternity may not be one of the dumbest excuses for a romantic comedy that ever littered the screen, but it certainly feels like a numbing inanity while you're exposed to it. [3 Oct 1981, p.C1]

The Toy, starring Richard Pryor, is a coarsened American remake of a deft French comedy of the same title, which starred Pierre Richard and passed this way five or six years ago. Fluctuating wildly between facetiousness and solicitude, the new version never comes close to reproducing the sane, lightweight charms of the original.

Lamentably short of sense and acting skill but extravagantly long on choreographic combat, Revenge of the Ninja supplies a mock-bloody feast of acrobatic punching, vaulting, cutting and thrusting for presumably insatiable martial arts fans. [28 Sep 1983, p.B11]

Like Parker's earlier features, Fame is a stylistic self-advertisement. The locale has shifted, but one recognizes the identical false urgency and coy tumult. Parker seems destined to spend his career whipping up ephemeral picturesque frenzies. [20 June 1980, p.C2]

Stanley Kubrick's production of The Shining, a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie. You might say that The Shining, opening today at area theaters, has no peers: Few directors achieve the treacherous luxury of spending five years (and $12 million-$15 million) on such a peerlessly wrongheaded finished product.

Biographical stinker that insists on remaining unreasonably disjointed for 2 1/2 hours. [28 Jan 1983, p.D1]

King of Comedy aggravates the problem it's supposed to illuminate. Far from clarifying the nature of a creepy social pathology, the movie assumes an attitude of smug, unjustified superiority toward every character in sight and the cockeyed spectacle of pop culture in general.

Irving is a generalissimo of literary assault techniques, shameless about shifting his emphasis from, say, the lewd to the sanctimonious on a moment's notice if he perceives an emotional advantage, particularly one lending itself to convulsive moral indignation. [17 March 1984, p.C8]

Miner doesn't linger over the multiple throat-slashings and skull-splittings. Comparatively speaking, he seems less bloodthirsty than the directors of Friday the 13th, The Exterminator or Mother's Day, to name only a few competitors of grosser gruesomeness. [13 May 1981, p.B6]