Gary Arnold

Oxford Blues, the latest refinement in abysmal youth-pandering movies, suffers first and foremost from that modern filmmaking malady: The No Exposition Blues. [01 Sep 1984, p.B2]

A blockheaded travesty that fancies itself a rollicking update of "The Pirates of Penzance."

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.

Dismal.

It would be a grim day for the movies if every picture were as dignified as "Gandhi," but that's no excuse for an indignity as craven and amateurish as Spring Break. [30 March 1983, p.B10]

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.

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]

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]