Gary Arnold
Select another critic »For 390 reviews, this critic has graded:
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31% higher than the average critic
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1% same as the average critic
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68% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 14 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Gary Arnold's Scores
- Movies
- TV
| Average review score: | 52 | |
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| Highest review score: | The Right Stuff | |
| Lowest review score: | Poison Ivy | |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 113 out of 390
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Mixed: 179 out of 390
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Negative: 98 out of 390
390
movie
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Gary Arnold
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]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Ironically, the stars didn't get it together either. The Blues Brothers offers the melancholy spectacle of them sinking deeper and deeper into a comic grave.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
All the modest virtues of the original film have been discarded in favor of lurid excess. What was once unpretentious, suggestive, implicit and erotically tragic has become bombastic, literal-minded, explicit and erotically stupefying.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
An absurdly upbeat romantic vehicle for John Travolta. The film-makers appear to believe that the moviegoing public craves a reassuring love story, at any cost. This film ends up as s counterfeit endorsement of the so-called simpler so-called values.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Making a scintillating feature directing debut at the age of 30, Mastroianni reveals a special knack for juxtaposing funny and frightening stimuli, recalling De Plama and Steven Spielberg at their most provocatively amusing.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
While literate and coherent in digest-of-history terms, the chronicle of Gandhi's remarkable career as a mass political organizer and spiritual inspiration distilled from the biographical record by Attenborough and screenwriter John Briley remains grievously doting and squeamishly evasive.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Like their previous movies, it emerges as an interesting disappointment, reflecting a cultivated and audacious taste in material inhibited by a stuffy approach to filmmaking. The advantage of their intelligent, literate, methodical style is that it may accommodate novel themes and impressive performances. [28 Jan 1982, p.C11]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Neither triumph nor fiasco, Strange Brew leaves plenty of room for improvement, but I hope Thomas and Moranis get the chance to demonstrate that they've learned a lot from the mixed assortment of nuttiness in their first movie comedy. [30 Aug 1983, p.B4]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Barely adequate as a pictorial rendering of the book, the movie still thrives on the rousing nature of this unlikely but enthralling epic. [08 Nov 1978, p.C1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
The movie isn't skillful enough to back up its satiric presumptions. Though it obviously aims to be sassy and uninhibited, Airplane! never approaches the comic heights achieved unwittingly by "Airport '75" and the peerless "Concorde -- Airport 1979." [3 July 1980, p.C11]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Scavenger Hunt, a solvenly farce about a frantic competition for a multi-million dollar legacy, is the studio's bottom-of-the barrel Christmas treat. [29 Dec 1979, p.C6]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Content to pick up where the skid marks from "Smokey and the Bandit II" left off, The Cannonball Run quickly establishes itself as an aggressive shambles, the latest exercise in amateurism from facetious professionals. [20 June 1981, p.B1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
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]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
The most perfunctory and least imaginative of the recent cycle of horror melodramas, Motel Hell may be credited with a fleeting wry touch, but it wears out its welcome by running a minimum of ghoulish stunts into the ground. [25 Oct 1980, p.F4]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
The Tin Drum is likely to be remembered as another conspicuous example of why the urge to film certain books ought to be resisted. [25 Apr 1980, p.C1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
The movie is so shabbily written (by Dennis Hackin) and unevenly directed (by Eastwood himself) that the traditional obstacles to romantic comedy consummation are overwhelmed by superfluous complications and imprecise calculations.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
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]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Albert Brooks may be the Woody Allen of the 1980s. His extraordinary first feature, Real Life, demonstrates a potential genius for movie comedy and is animated by a peculiarly fertile and subtle imagination.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
The Wanderers is a well-made movie that leaves a so-what impression. [27 July 1979, p.B1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
From the outset, The Possession is calculated to make an alternately ludicrous and sadistic spectacle of the family's victimization.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
A smooth and agreeable entertainment, Hero is easy to enjoy while you're watching it. But ultimately it adds up to far less than you hope for at the outset. [3 Apr 1982, p.C1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Peckinpah is a filmmaking heavyweight, but in Convoy all he's doing is fighting off the boredom and frustration that grow out of coping with stupid material. [28 June 1978, p.E4]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
It could be the basis of a genuinely interesting drama, for stage or screen, about conjugal relations in the theater. Obviously. John Cassavetes is the last person in the world likely to perceive or write that drama. [15 Apr 1978, p.C9]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
George Romero has done it again. Martin, an eerie, sardonic updating of the traditional vampire legend, should secure Romero's reputation as a modern master of the horror film. [10 May 1978, p.B1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Cheech & Chong have adapted their stoogey characters and satirical burlesque of the drug culture "life style" to the movies with remarkable ease and assurance. They seem the freshest and most imaginative comics to seize a creative hold on the medium since Woody Allen emerged more or less confidently in "BANANAS." [5 June 1981, p.D1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
The new facetious depressant from Colin Higgins -- the screenwriter and now director who has parlayed "Harold and Maude," "The Silver Streak" and "Foul Play" into one of the more baffling winning streaks on record -- runs a merely weak comic premise into the ground with coarse, laborious execution. [19 Dec 1980, p.E1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Ice Castles has been shamelessly, and none too slickly, engineered to empty the tear ducts of customers primed to blubber at the sight of a Pavlovian cliche. [03 Feb 1979, p.D7]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
After slapstick farces as exuberant and hilarious as Sleeper and Love and Death, it comes as a soft, fuzzy, mildly diverting letdown.- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
Its cleverness is exceptionally congenial and sustained. [13 Apr 1984, p.B1]- Washington Post
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- Gary Arnold
I suppose it's also less than inspired to portray a ballet company where the codpieces of the male dancers bulge out so far that the ballerina can cover the width of the stage using them as steppingstones. Nevertheless, some dumb, obvious gags have a way of working by impudently flaunting their dumbness and obviousness, and this appears to be a textbook example. In fact, for the juvenile public that should supply its best audience, Top Secret! may serve as a veritable primer of irresistibly terrible wheezes.- Washington Post
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