Hal Lipper

The Secret of My Success is Ross's most engaging romantic comedy since California Suite. Interestingly, it uses some of the best elements of his less successful movies: the pictorial splendor of Pennies from Heaven, the fusion of music and image in Footloose, the unbridled comic delivery of Protocol, the sense of character from Max Dugan Returns. [10 Apr 1987, p.1D]

The young Tianbai, Zheng Jian, is as demonic as a flesh-and-blood Michael Myers. Yet Ju Dou is grounded in the stark reality of turn-of-the-century China, where Confucian law has governed life for generations and where adultery is punishable by ostracism or death. [19 Jul 1991, p.7]

RoboCop 2 moves fast and looks great. How much you like it depends on your tolerance for machine-gun mayhem. [22 June 1990, p.6]

Lifeboat is one of Alfred Hitchcock's weakest films, yet it remains a notable experiment for its ability to maintain a sense of action despite its cramped setting. [9 March 1990, p.10]

Scene by scene, Batman Returns is more outrageous, inventive and fun than the original Batman. Yet, by its apocalyptic ending, Batman Returns is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. [19 June 1992, p.22]

Her Alibi isn't a tremendous movie. But it's pleasant and entertaining in a corny, old-fashioned way. [3 Feb 1989, p.10]

Surprisingly, though, Army of Darkness is slowest during its extended special effects sequences and best when human low-lifes are groveling in the squalor of the 13th century. [19 Feb 1993, p.8]

Jerry Lee Lewis' rise and repeated falls from grace are the makings of a great movie waiting to happen. Great Balls of Fire isn't that movie. [30 June 1989, p.18]

Hiding Out is a hip movie. Hip but slow. It's an adult comedy hiding in an adolescent concept, burdened by humor that can be very knowing or nauseatingly sophomoric. [06 Nov 1987, p.3D]

Dafoe is every bit as commanding as he was in Platoon or The Last Temptation of Christ. But the essence of this movie is as difficult to grasp as its title, White Sands. [24 Apr 1992, p.9]

Lean on Me is the type of cloying, crowd-pleasing drama you can't help but like - a little bit - even if its situations are contrived and its direction is stilted.

Miraculously, Chances Are has some engaging moments despite its saccharine script and Emile Ardolino's (Dirty Dancing) sluggish direction. [10 March 1989, p.10]

Reynolds can't sustain the movie's pacing, nor can he blend the disparate elements of this sweeping epic. Yet, there are touches that make Robin Hood enormously entertaining. The battles with flaming arrows, catapults and a forest city of catwalks and tree houses under siege are masterfully recorded. [14 June 1991, p.6]

As if these weren't enough subplots to juggle, screenwriter McPherson revives the romance between boat captain Steve Guttenberg and Antarean Tawnee Welch. This sort of interspecies romance presumably violates Florida law and certainly counters any attempts at efficient storytelling. [23 Nov 1988, p.1D]

No Man's Land takes the showroom approach. It doesn't get its hands dirty. It embellishes what you'd see if you stood in the waiting room of a Porsche dealership and peered into the service bay. A little more grease is in order. [23 Oct 1987, p.3D]

It waffles. In the end, it emerges a distinctly pro-soldier, possibly anti-war movie that supports America's overseas doctrine, whether it be right or wrong. One shudders to think what they might create if asked to portray the United States' current role in Central America. Their film certainly wouldn't dare make a statement, bother to educate or entertain. And most importantly, it wouldn't take sides. [29 Aug 1987, p.1D]

The material fails the execution and performances. [13 Jan 1989, p.7]

Like Top Secret and other less inspired efforts made by Zucker, brother Jerry Zucker and pal Jim Abrahams, The Naked Gun 2 is consistently amusing without being outright funny. [28 June 1991, p.6]

A stylish though formulaic whodunit that swathes old cliches in new wrapping. [6 Nov 1992, p.6]

A half-baked FBI drama in the 48 HRS.-Lethal Weapon buddy-buddy mode. [12 Feb 1988, p.7]

Basic Instinct has the action and gore of Verhoeven's Total Recall and the cool sheen of his equally bloody RoboCop. Verhoeven can deliver style in spades, but Eszterhas' jumble of confusing plot twists and conventional movie cliches proves fatal. [20 Mar 1992, p.29]

Caton-Jones' North Sea sensibilities seem askew for Doc Hollywood. He's operating from movie memories, and movies rarely have been kind to Southerners. With Doc Hollywood, which already is exaggerated, he overplays its hand. [02 Aug 1991, p.19]

It's all art direction and no content. There's nothing for Morticia and Gomez to do. [22 Nov 1991, p.7]

The problem is this sporadically funny farce takes 40 minutes to snap into gear and then it struggles to maintain momentum. [12 June 1992, p.5]

While the first half of The Rescuers Down Under is breathtakingly magnificent, the second half is slower than a sloth. [16 Nov 1990, p.7]

Planes, Trains and Automobiles puts on the miles without many smiles. The journey hardly seems worth the trouble. [27 Nov 1987, p.6]

Single White Female is simply Fatal Attraction or Final Analysis in a new locale. Superbly crafted, yet unremittingly violent, it's the cinematic equivalent of being bludgeoned for two hours. [14 Aug 1992, p.21]

Withnail and I is one of those pictures that manages to be consistently amusing and grating at the same time. It stirs some good memories while pointing to the aimlessness of an era. [2 Oct 1987, p.5D]

While the movie's technical aspects are first-rate and Stallone manages more than a monosyllabic performance, Over the Top can't overcome its sense of deja vu or provide any reason for Hawk's suitability as a parent. [14 Feb 1987, p.5B]

Director Alan J. Pakula generates a degree of suspense, even though the story's implausibilities and overall stupidity of Kline's and Mastrantonio's characters are stupefying. Everyone in this movie is a prig, including a frail E.K. Marshall as Richard's defense attorney who doesn't believe his client's innocence and Forest Whitaker as a private eye who lets Richard do the investigating. [16 Oct 1992, p.5]

Silver wrote The Hand that Rocks the Cradle as a graduate thesis at the University of Southern California film school, and the movie's derivative nature shows it. The Hand that Rocks the Cradle has the viciousness of The Stepfather. DeMornay's live-in nursemaid recalls Michael Keaton's malicious tenant in Pacific Heights. The entire picture stinks of Fatal Attraction, a movie that begins as an ethical exploration and ends as a mad slasher movie. [10 Jan 1992, p.5]

Miami Blues is reminiscent of Demme's Married to the Mob and Something Wild. It has a superb sense of place. It savages Middle American tackiness. Regrettably, Miami Blues is even more mainstream and less developed than Married to the Mob. Its characters' lapses of logic and the holes in Armitage's script require a forgiving audience. The blood-letting at its conclusion necessitates a strong stomach. [20 Apr 1990, p.19]

Co-writer and director Barry Primus knows his characters well, but his scenarios are stilted and pretentious. So is Landisman's screenplay, which everyone wants to change.

The Power of One emerges as a broadly painted piece of rhetoric. It means well and has an undeniable dramatic pull, but its relegation of blacks to the sidelines and its creation of a white savior are unforgivable. [10 Apr 1992, p.10]

Hook is so enormous, so cumbersome, that it resembles a complex machine inching its way across the resplendent three-moon Neverland landscape. It's a brilliant technical achievement, but it hasn't much of a soul. [11 Dec. 1991, p.3D]

Its logic is so simple, its emotion is so heartfelt, its editing and composition are so fluid, it seems to be a perfectly-crafted contemporary drama. Yet, in retrospect, it's a difficult movie to stomach. The problem with Brothers' script is that he and Yates paint characters with unbelievably broad strokes. [06 Oct 1989, p.12]

Prelude to a Kiss lacked a sense of flow on stage; the problem is compounded on film. [10 Jul 1992, p.5]

These are the rules: When watching The Bonfire of the Vanities, you don't think of Tom Wolfe. You think of Dr. Strangelove. Only then will you embrace what little there is to like in this sprawling, seemingly racist, absurdist-revisionist twist on The Bonfire of the Vanities. [21 Dec 1990, p.20]

Dark, heavy and plodding, with imaginative sex and a strong sense of magnetism between its characters. [26 March 1988, p.1D]

Punchline, a movie about the pain and sacrifices of being a comic, is a lot less pretty and less believeable than it should be. It's also a lot more manipulative.[7 Oct 1988, p.8]

Dream Team might strike some viewers as insensitive, particularly after the care that was accorded persons with psychological disorders in Rain Man. But crass fun is a major component in Dream Team's tasteless charm. In fact, what this movie needs is less taste and lower regard for standard plot formulas. [07 Apr 1989, p.6]

Although Throw Momma From the Train has its moments, it's largely a leaden affair. A trifle amusing, perhaps, but never worthy of the talents of DeVito and co-star Billy Crystal. [11 Dec 1987, p.7]

As hollow as it is hip. [5 Feb 1988, p.8]

Envisioned as a surrealistic painting come to life, it is a delight to behold, yet it fails miserably as a compelling piece of storytelling. It is a listless, largely vapid tale, even though it has been revised over a dozen years by writer-director Barry Levinson. [18 Dec 1992, p.21]

Rather than embellish the original movie, the filmmakers have merely strived to re-create it. [22 Mar 1991, p.6]

This tender tale of two sisters coping with their free-spirited mother in innocent 1963 is just too cute. It needs some chinks in its gossamer-glazed armor. [14 Dec 1990, p.12]

Writer-director Luis Valdez's movie is an example of just how tedious a bio-pic can be. [24 July 1987, p.3D]

Overboard is predictable, yet charming. Russell exudes a natural earthiness that lends itself to this type of material. Hawn plays gamely along. While Overboard recalls director Marshall's (Nothing in Common) sitcom days, the movie is shot with the sort of graininess that can never be mistaken for television. It could look a lot better. [18 Dec 1987, p.7]

The Believers is the type of movie that generates shocks more successfully than it tells a story. [10 Jun 1987, p.1D]

Although The Bear is as handsome as Quest for Fire - the story of an Ice Age tribe moving up the evolutionary ladder - it is also as turgid. [27 Oct 1989, p.12]

Eastwood is absolutely the wrong actor to play Huston, called John Wilson in White Hunter, Black Heart. Eastwood is tense and tightly coiled, while Huston was gleefully bombastic. [12 Oct 1990, p.7]

For all its shortcomings and long speeches, The Presidio is to be credited for trying to reach beyond formula. Hyams and screenwriter Ferguson (Highlander, Beverly Hills Cop II) have aspired to make more than a mismatched buddy movie. But the task has proved too intricate for them to achieve. [10 June 1988, p.6]

Whatever raffish charm Reeves and Swayze exhibit is lost in the superficial gloss of Iliff's screenplay and Bigelow's direction. [12 July 1991, p.7]

What undercuts Deep Cover is its convoluted, talky and ultimately predictable screenplay written by Henry Bean and Michael Tolkin. [15 Apr 1992, p.1D]

You're safe this Christmas. There are no more obnoxious, senile or terminally stupid relatives to go around. Clark Griswold has invited them all to his house. Know what? They're no more fun to watch at his place than they are at yours...This sort of predictable, lowest-common-denominator humor is entertaining to a degree. It fulfills expectations. [1 Dec 1989, p.7]

The Rookie is the most brain dead action-thriller Eastwood has ever directed or starred in. It plays well as a comedy, but that isn't its intent. [07 Dec 1990, p.6]

Like most of Hill's movies, Johnny Handsome plays like an outline: a good idea in need of development. [29 Sep 1989, p.7]

While The Hidden never manages to meld Aliens with Blue Velvet - that appears to be Hunt's intention. It has a kinky charm that fuels it full throttle throughout. [30 Oct 1987, p.5D]

Pink Cadillac is the most amiable and mindless Eastwood comedy in years. That it's even marginally entertaining is a substantial feat, given John Eskow's predictable script, which has more pings than the Caddy's engine. [30 May 1989, p.1D]

Memphis Belle is the most superficial, jingoistic, stereotyped World War II movie in years. [12 Oct 1990, p.6]

Always is meant to be a fantasy. But it is far too sappy to ignite the imagination. [22 Dec. 1989, p.6]

Toy Soldiers is a lame-brained action-adventure casting a quintet of Tiger Beat heartthrobs as prep school pranksters battling Colombian narco-terrorists who overrun their alma mater. [26 Apr 1991, p.12]

Action director John Badham has made the ultimate smash-and-crash chase movie. It's practically brain dead. It uses a hackneyed premise to string together as many stunts as possible, all the while borrowing from Badham's, Gibson's and Hawn's movies. [18 May 1990, p.7]

Switch is a movie in search of an ending, much like Edwards' other lesser comedies. It covers an incredible amount of ground without getting anywhere. [10 May 1991, p.6]

Foley's screenplay and direction constantly require viewers to re-evaluate the trio and their relationship with one another. This works as long as the dialogue is tolerable, which isn't long enough. [07 Sep 1990, p.6]

It is a fairly conventional cartoonish farce, like his 1986 horse racing comedy A Fine Mess. And despite Blind Date's emphasis on excess, its final cut seems uncommonly restrained. [27 Mar 1987, p.4D]

Ironweed doesn't work despite the stellar performances of Nicholson as former baseball pro Francis Phelan and Meryl Streep as his pal, Helen Archer, the former musician whose booze-ravaged voice still bears the air of cultivation. [12 Feb 1988, p.5]

It never digs very deep. But it's palatable and well-meaning. It's a Disneyland version of a big-issue movie. Nothing great. But we could do worse. [07 Feb 1992, p.7]

Deceptions drive A Kiss Before Dying. Too bad they're too implausible to impart any sense of believability in this bloody fantasy. [26 Apr 1991, p.10]

Chevy Chase only knows how to play Chevy Chase. Unless he jettisons his smug routine and learns to act, he will always be his and his movies' biggest liability. [17 March 1989, p.6]

More than a little has been lost in the translation. Screenwriters Richard Maxwell and A.R. Simoun have created a horrific Indiana Jones adventure with Davis being portrayed by Bill Pullman, an actor who does a poor imitation of Michael Douglas doing a poor imitation of Harrison Ford.[6 Feb 1988, p.2D]

Even Pee-wee seems subdued. The man-child whose suit cuffs are intimate with his ankles and elbows is growing up. Kids may still adore him. But adults will find his persona worn at the edges. [23 Jul 1988, p.1D]

Despite sharp humor and bravura performances - including a cameo by Regis Philbin as the epitome of Harry's dream of success - Night and the City is not a pleasant experience. While anything less would betray its bracing dose of true grit, Night and the City is so downbeat that it ultimately seems like an exercise in self-flagellatio.

Belushi is the Clydesdale of formulaic comedies. He performs as expected with little artistic invention. He carries Mr. Destiny amiably, although a more resourceful actor might have provided the additional gloss this formulaic comedy so sorely needs. [12 Oct 1990, p.12]

With its clunky, overworked script (credited to a non-existent Joseph Howard) and Emile Ardolino's predictable direction, Sister Act is a spry but witless comedy aimed at mainstream audiences. [29 May 1992, p.6]

Goldberg has honorable intentions. But like Tammy Faye's make-up, it's impossible to see beneath his movie's overwrought facade. [27 Oct 1989, p.7]

Cadillac Man's beginning and ending are superb. (The hearse sequence is classic.) But the movie, like most of the salesmen's waists, sags heavily at its midpoint. [18 May 1990, p.6]

Romances such as Frankie's and Johnny's work better in the artificial environment of the stage than the "real" world of movies. The couple's bond seems phony from the start. [11 Oct 1991, p.7]

Schepisi & Co. appear to have forgotten a tenet of film making: A moving picture needs to move to succeed. [21 Dec 1990, p.6]

A relatively inane movie about good will and unfounded distrust. [06 Nov 1987, p.3D]

That's Home Alone 2's biggest shortcoming. Hughes merely moved his movie to a new locale and wrote a retread. [20 Nov 1992, p.5]

A suggestion: Mr. Pyle should stop writing screenplays Pacific Heights is more tedious than a lease's fine print and tour the country lecturing on the dangers of landlording. [28 Sept 1990, p.6]

Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Rafelson's Black Widow is seriously flawed despite several compelling scenes. It plods to a contrived resolution, piling implausibility upon implausibility, rarely pausing to account for the incredulous events that transpire. It is the type of movie that squanders potential at every juncture. [7 Feb 1987, p.5B]

Hook is largely failed by his earnest, workmanlike cast of boys who seem painfully aware that Lord of the Flies is an Important Movie. [16 Mar 1990, p.12]

Beaches, adapted from novelist Iris Rainer Dart's hankie-wringer, is truly horrid. Its only redeeming qualities are heartfelt performances by Midler and Barbara Hershey, as pen-pal buddies since pre-adolescence. [13 Jan 1989, p.6]

Three Fugitives, which for all purposes is one extended chase, has a few chuckles, though nothing to justify its existence.[27 Jan 1989, p.11]

If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, then 3 Ninjas is a lovers' rhapsody. If duplication is theft, then Disney is guilty of grand larceny. [07 Aug 1992, p.8]

If the saccharine quality of movies could be translated into seismic activity, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael would level Los Angeles. [12 Oct 1990, p.13]

Swayze exhibits virtually no charisma, although the terpsichorean skills he demonstrated in Dirty Dancing appear to have translated well to martial arts. He can kick box like a champ. He sweats handsomely in the sunset. He is able to flex his buns, which are shown naked more than once. [19 May 1989, p.6]

For all their bantering about being losers on the verge of falling in love, there's very little chemistry between Ringwald and Downey. [21 Sept 1987, p.1D]

Dante's movie is so helter-skelter, that he can't generate the uncomfortable mood the moment requires. It's the balloon principle. The 'Burbs is so full of hot air it simply blows up in its own face. [17 Feb 1989, p.6]

Neophyte Joanou's camera is airborne so often it gives the impression Three O'Clock High was filmed between traffic reports by Chopper 8. It's an example of virtuoso film making solely for the sake of virtuosity. [9 Oct 1987, p.3D]

Aside from a few nifty computer-generated "trip" sequences and a foul-mouthed nun (Amanda Plummer) who advises her torturer to turn the other cheek before flattening him, Freejack has little to recommend it. [18 Jan 1982, p.1D]

Funny Farm is one of the dullest, most predictable movies in Chevy Chase's and director George Roy Hill's spotty careers. It's on par with Chase's Modern Problems and Hill's A Little Romance. This picture is not destined to be fondly remembered in their memoirs. [3 June 1988, p.8]

Hardware runs more precisely, it crawls aimlessly as the robot, pieced together from household appliances, attempts to slice, dice, drill and saw Jill to death. There's no tension, no suspense, no climax. [14 Sep 1990, p.7]

Extreme Prejudice is an exceptionally bad movie, despite a powerful introduction in the tradition of Hill's bloodiest ventures, Southern Comfort, The Long Riders and 48 HRS. [24 Apr 1987, p.1D]

Project X is a predictable, sappy Save The Monkeys movie. [17 Apr 1987, p.1D]

Fire Birds is Top Gun without wings. Without personality. Without sex appeal. Nicholas Cage is no Tom Cruise. Sean Young is no Kelly McGillis.