Jay Boyar

The bottom line is that The Crow is a somewhat-better-than-average exploitation flick that has received an extra shot of hype from the untimely and dramatic demise of its star performer.

The Firm and The Pelican Brief, both of last year, were solid entertainment. Now along comes the movie version of The Client - the best of the Grisham film trilogy.

Let's just say that compared to Son-in-Law, Green Acres is Noel Coward.

What's surprising about Not Without My Daughter (which was adapted from a book that Betty Mahmoody wrote with William Hoffer) is how effective it is despite its obvious shortcomings. As a conventional thriller along the lines of, say, a Mission: Impossible episode, the movie actually manages to be borderline entertaining. [11 Jan 1991, p.9]

Dalton shows a serious side that's been missing from the role since Sean Connery's earliest 007 days.

For the most part, then, Tomorrow Never Dies is a straightforward action picture. And since the action is clearly and suspensefully staged, this unpretentious production turns out to be the best Bond flick in years.

By putting Thompson together with Schwarzenegger, DeVito and the others, Reitman creates abundant opportunities for comedy. The situation is ripe with possibilities. [23 Nov 1994, p.E1]

If the Muppets sometime seem at sea in Muppet Treasure Island, the film still has more wit and irony than most kid-oriented productions. Fozzie, in fact, has more in that index finger of his than Barney has in his whole purple carcass. [16 Feb 1996, p.30]

Director Ivan Reitman isn't an especially careful moviemaker, though this latest film is structurally superior to such previous efforts as Ghostbusters, Stripes and Meatballs. He's still got a lot to learn about giving dramatic points the proper weight, and his visual sense is shaky. But for all his shortcomings, Reitman seems to have something that other, more elegant directors lack: the ability to get stars to go a little crazy. The enjoyment we get from the goofy performances in his movies is something rather rare.

Yet Kids does stay with you - which is more than can be said for a picture like Showgirls, most of which vanished from my consciousness 10 minutes after it ended. Nearly a month has elapsed since I've seen Kids and, tedious though much of it is, the experience lingers. [29 Sept 1995, p.19]

What's different about this film is that it holds together better than Brooks' other movies. And in the end, it's somewhat sweeter. [17 Jan 1997, p.21]

Much as I like Beauty and the Beast, I think I would have preferred it if its dark parts had even been darker. The brooding beast is a fascinating character to consider, and his fearsome battle with a vicious pack of wolves is one of the most powerful scenes in the movie.

But even with Dudley Moore, this movie would probably have fallen flat. At best, Skin Deep is a VCR movie. Rent it when it comes out on tape, fast forward to the best part, and replay the condom scene until you stop laughing.

Young Guns II shoots blanks. [02 Aug 1990, p.E1]

When the dust clears, Blue Steel turns out to be just one more violent movie whose basic theme is women as victims. [16 Mar 1990, p.3]

Passenger 57 was directed by Kevin Hooks, a former actor who directed last year's Strictly Business. He manages to keep the action fairly clear, which is something that can't be taken for granted in today's adventure movies. [09 Nov 1992, p.C1]

Obviously, the premise is pretty implausible, but the moviemakers do a decent job of addressing (if not entirely satifying) our questions about the implausibilities. And the stars, especially Belushi, bring an amazing amount of conviction to this formulaic material. [17 Aug 1990, p.8]

It's an efficiently crafted psychological thriller that keeps you guessing - even when you're sure that you have all the answers. [08 Feb 1991, p.6]

In Howard the Duck, the special effects -- and the Muppety duck jokes -- command so much attention that it's easy to overlook the movie makers' clever narrative touches. It's rather fitting, for example, that Howard is shown to be almost as much of a misfit on the duck world as he is on Earth. And there's a sometimes-touching, sometimes-hilarious Fay Wray-King Kong relationship established between Howard and a sexy, baby-faced rock singer named Beverly (Lea Thompson). The main reason the relationship is so intriguing is that Thompson always keeps you guessing about her character's true feelings for the cantankerous bird. It's hard to fault the tongue-in-bill high spirits of a movie like Howard the Duck.

What's especially encouraging about Just Another Girl is that in it Leslie Harris demonstrates a genuine knack for capturing on film the sounds and rhythms of adolescence. [10 Apr 1993, p.E1]

Malkovich temporarily brings the movie to life, but, finally, it's too little, too late. Amusing though it is, his brief performance probably won't be enough to keep "Jennifer Eight Is Enough" off the ballot. [6 Nov 1992, p.23]

Not only is House Party breezy fun, but its dialogue often sounds as authentic to its black-teen setting as The Breakfast Club did to its white-teen one. And authentic or not, much of it is funny. [27 April 1990, p.4]

Ending The Paper cleverly - in the spirit that it begins - doesn't appear to have occurred to Howard and the Koepps. And that disappointing ending is certainly the movie's loss. [25 March 1994]

Allen's sensibility is so engaging, his perspective so intelligent and his cast so resourceful that the sum of the movie's parts is greater than its whole. You might say that Alice is like Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters crossed with Gremlins - or like a lesser version of the filmmaker's wonderful comic fantasy of 1985, The Purple Rose of Cairo. [25 Jan 1991, p.4]

Basically, it's like a standard TV cop show with better-than-average acting and a few brief scenes of violence that would be too extreme to pass network standards...The word that comes to mind is generic.

Permanent Midnight might have been somewhat smoother if it had been framed by the talk-show sequences. The motel scenes with Kitty could have been dropped in favor of scenes that would have offered a deeper sense of Jerry's arrangement with his wife. But the movie touches something real. By the end of Permanent Midnight, you almost feel that you do know someone like Jerry Stahl. [25 Sep 1998, p.23]

How bad is Something to Talk About? Well, it's not the worst movie I've seen this year, but it is the biggest waste of talent. [4 Aug 1995, p.18]

Bad politics sometimes makes for good movies, and the harsh, politically incorrect truth about Basic Instinct is that it's a tantalizing, suspensefully correct thriller.

Working from a smart, sassy script by James Toback (The Pick-Up Artist, The Big Bang), director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) has fashioned an elegant adult entertainment that is, by turns, dramatic, funny and sexy. It's also a movie with too many loose ends and undeveloped themes, but Levinson's knack for smoothing out unruly material serves him well in this case.

Far-fetched as the premise is, I was willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt for the sake of the impressive cast. But as Flatliners rolled along, its pretentiousness became increasingly toxic.

For the first time on the big screen, Williams' whirligig wit is totally unencumbered - and it isn't just free, it's supercharged by animation.

The Last of the Mohicans isn't a classic, but it's one of the most exciting action pictures to come along in recent memory.

This movie will finally kill off the series.

The film may be a collection of little moments that don't add up, but on a moment-by-moment basis, it isn't hard to take. [22 Jun 1990, p.6]

I am not going to try to tell you that this one-joke, talking-horse comedy is, in any meaningful sense, a good movie. What I am going to say is that it's a little better than my rock-bottom expectations led me to predict.

If it's not the most awful thing I've ever seen, it's close enough to make me wince.

Quite simply, Ran is a great, nightmarish motion picture.

Though the film does contain a few other humorously erotic moments, it's mostly a listless exercise in intentional camp.

If anything saves Untamed Heart from itself, it's Tomei's performance which, if nothing else, proves that her terrific turn in My Cousin Vinny was no fluke. She's a star on the rise, and even in a formula flick that is something to see. [12 Feb 1993, p.20]

We're No Angels is far from heavenly. It never even gets off the ground.

Navy Seals stands out among this summer's violence-oriented pictures as the only one that doesn't leave your brain feeling like mashed potatoes. There are plenty of exploding bombs in this picture, not to mention various other forms of destruction...But the action is orchestrated so sensitively that it's both aesthetically satisfying and emotionally resonant. There's a texture to the violence in Navy Seals that's completely absent in this summer's kaboom cartoons.

Singles - a seriocomedy about the twentysomething singles scene in Seattle - doesn't do a whole lot to locate this lost generation on the socio-cultural map. But it's fairly enjoyable most of the time, anyway. [21 Sept 1992, p.D2]

Doc Hollywood is the rare film that actually improves as it develops. What begins as an all-too-standard fish-out-of-water comedy eventually grows into something more. [02 Aug 1991, p.4]

With its delicate fabric, this film sometimes seems in danger of unraveling. But ultimately it holds together, partly due to Foster's fine, poignant performance and also because some of the characters surrounding Nell reflect aspects of her personality. [23 Dec 1994, p.23]

Putting up with weeks - or even months - of such media-fed psychobabble is a big price to pay for a couple of hours of defiantly unwholesome entertainment. The Getaway might just be worth it, though.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie isn't any individual performance or scene but the mere fact of its existence. At a time when so many films strain to be either tragically hip on the one hand or distressingly saccharine on the other, a movie like Down in the Delta is a genuine rarity. [25 Dec 1998, p.19]

Fortunately, director David Carson and screenwriters Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga (all of whom have served in the Star Trek universe) keep the longueurs to a minimum. Whenever you feel like beaming up (or is it out?), they switch scenes.

To watch To Wong Foo is finally to be reminded that camp-meisters often have a weakness for sentimentality that is far more appalling than anything they do in the name of outrageousness. [08 Sep 1995, p.17]

There are so many terrific small moments to discover in The Commitments that there's no danger of ever growing bored. [14 Sep 1991, p.E1]

One reason that this movie works as well as it does is that everyone takes everything completely seriously. The world of the Addams family may be amusing to us, but to them it's just life. [22 Nov 1991, p.16]

Memphis Belle simply doesn't fly. [12 Oct 1990, p.4]

Filmmaker Haynes has brought forth a punishing little movie, but he fails to make the case that the viewer deserves to be punished. Poison really wants us to suffer - which, come to think of it, is also the underlying aim of many exploitation flicks. For all their cheap thrills, they are basically soul-deadening - and so, ultimately, is this earnest little message movie. [17 May 1991, p.6]

The Big Easy is as atmospheric as they come, but -- surprise! -- it's also sharp and swift. Plus, it has ample amounts of chemistry -- the steamy, sexy kind.

For those of us who will never go to the moon, watching For All Mankind may be as close as we'll come to fulfilling that ancient dream. If what the Hubble eventually sends back is nearly this splendid, it could actually be worth the wait. [17 Aug 1990, p.10]

This delicious, mystical Mexican drama keeps you in an almost constant state of stimulation. [11 June 1993, p.28]

Bottom line: Stake out another movie. [23 July 1993, p.8]

The best to be said for the current production is that the editing is refreshingly swift, the cinematography is clear-eyed and the running time is mercifully short. (I clocked it at just under an hour and a half.) But do I recommend Fire Birds? That's a negative. [29 May 1990, p.D1]

The movie works the way Westerns have always worked: In clear, simple terms and with straightforward dramatic devices.

Where Fargo was cool and wryly detached, the zany new film is aggressively antic - more like parts of their Barton Fink or The Hudsucker Proxy. On occasion, in fact, the Coens' anything-goes approach can begin to get on your nerves. [6 March 1998, p.17]

Hard as it is to justify Bond films on intellectual grounds, there's something invigorating -- and strangely reassuring -- about this sort of picture. It is comforting to feel that should a psychopath threaten the stability of the world, our hero will be ready to wipe the grin off his face and shove him into San Francisco Bay.

The movie's sneaky intelligence pokes out in surprising, amusing ways.

There is a sweet, simple tale at the center of this overstuffed epic. And sometimes, its romanticism manages to shine through all the picture-book pomp. [07 Jul 1995, p.17]

The movie may have been so structured to offer whites in the audience a central white figure with whom to identify. But it's the ultimate irony that moviemakers who want to call attention to the historical accomplishments of blacks feel that they can only do so if the hero of their film is white. [12 Jan 1990, p.6]

You buy the movie's premise because director Fred Schepisi evokes such a rich spirit of playfulness and romance that you want to buy it. [26 Dec 1994, p.D1]

In Hero, Frears and Peoples send up the press and the public, but they stop short of debunking the notion of heroism itself. [02 Oct 1992, p.17]

Represents a new low for the form. Watching this one, you may be tempted to throw the baby movie out with the bath water.

I had fun watching Drop Dead Fred, but I want to take special care not to raise expectations unrealistically by overpraising it. The movie is no comic masterpiece, but it is consistently amusing in a way that sometimes reminded me of a kiddie picture and at other times of a more sophisticated comedy.

Although Daniel Petrie Jr., who directed and co-wrote Toy Soldiers (with David Koepp, based on William P. Kennedy's novel), has never before directed a movie, he sure knows how to keep things moving. Even with its faults, Toy Soldiers gets by a lot of the time. [26 Apr 1991, p.12]

Frankly, the original was never one of my favorite Disney cartoons - pleasant enough, but uninspiring. The sequel, I'm afraid, isn't much of an improvement. [16 Nov 1990, p.8]

Nominally a romantic action-comedy, this Goldie Hawn-Mel Gibson picture is actually a mind-numbingly raucous exploitation flick with occasional bad jokes and mild sex scenes. [18 May 1990, p.21]

Spike Lee's ambitious, occasionally brilliant new film about an interracial relationship might have been a masterpiece if only it had been integrated. Thematically integrated, that is. The cast of Jungle Fever is racially integrated, but there's so little holding the diverse elements of the movie together that Lee could have called it Jumble Fever.

Director Donald Petrie (Grumpy Old Men) and his screenwriters have nimbly constructed a movie around young Culkin in such a way as to almost conceal the boy's shortcomings - or, at least, to divert us from them for surprisingly long stretches of time. [21 Dec 1994, p.E1]

A big-screen version of a routine cop show that occasionally gets by on momentum from the original movie.

Abetter title for Jaws The Revenge would be Jaws The Refund. A refund is what a lot of people who go to see this picture will demand. This Time It's Personal, the tag line for the new film's ad campaign, doesn't seem quite right either. This Time It's Terrible would have been more accurate.

One great thing about the script for Housesitter - the new Steve Martin-Goldie Hawn screwball comedy - is that it takes the romanticism of shared dream-spinning and turns it into a sustaining comic device. The other great thing about the script is that it's beautifully structured. [12 June 1992, p.19]

Although the second half of the picture (which could have been called Single White Females Can't Live Together) is mostly a waste, the early scenes are tantalizing enough to be worth a look. [14 Aug 1992, p.17]

This picture isn't Shakespeare for the ages, and purists, of course, must be scandalized. But it isn't Shakespeare for the masses, either. This Richard III is only for very particular tastes. To like the film you have to love Shakespeare, but you can't worship him. [16 Feb 1996, p.22]

Somehow, the new production fails to sustain the creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky and altogether ooky visual sweep that held the first film together.

There's another, more important reason why Stand By Me isn't for kids. Its perspective is that of a knowing adult, which is to say that though the film is frequently affectionate and funny, it contains a drop too much condescension to be entirely successful.

City Slickers II is not merely one of the worst movies of the year. It's one of the worst movie sequels of all time - and, by the way, one of the least necessary. [10 June 1994, p.21]

Fun-and-fin-filled feature-length Disney cartoon that revitalized the studio's animation department.

Kika is flamboyant and provocative. But the new film, which was partly inspired by the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, is ultimately quite serious.

No one looks particularly comfortable, not even Midler, who has most of the best dialogue. She's watchable as Stella, but that's really the nicest thing I can say for her work in this unfortunate picture. Does Bette Midler really believe that people of limited means can't raise their kids decently? Or is the Divine Miss M making some great joke whose subtle point I am failing to grasp?

Imagine the most exciting parts of The Fugitive but filmed with real moviemaking brio by director Brian De Palma (The Untouchables). [12 Nov 1993, p.20]

A creep-out with style to spare. [16 Jan 1998, p.19]

For the most part, Life Stinks is about as far from art - or even simple entertainment - as you can get. And if I may be forgiven a small joke that's as true as it is obvious, most of the time Life Stinks stinks. [30 July 1991, p.E1]

Nine Months does have its problems, but it also has its moments, mainly thanks to a truly remarkable cast. [12 July 1995, p.E1]

What really holds the movie together is Rachel Ward's exceptionally moving portrayal of Fay. [07 Sep 1990, p.7]

"Steel" isn't offensively exploitative, just awkward, goofy and terminally sluggish. But then, how fast-paced could a movie be whose central character clumps around in 75 pounds of body armor? [15 Aug 1997]

This is ugly. [20 Sept 1993, p.D2]

Fifteen years ago Sylvester Stallone starred in a movie called Rocky, which won an Oscar. Now he is starring in a movie called Oscar that is, well, a little rocky. [29 Apr 1991, p.D1]

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a serious film, but is it a great one? Not as far as I'm concerned. Overall, I'd say it's only pretty good, though parts of it are much better than that. [30 Apr 1990, p.D1]

To her credit, Spheeris elicits winning performances from most of the kids. [05 Aug 1994, p.6]

What I like best about Husbands and Wives is that for the first time in a long time, Allen seems to be experimenting.

Writer-director David Koepp (Carlito's Way, Jurassic Park) certainly knows how to hold an audience's attention. [30 Aug 1996, p.15]

Like Home Alone, Career Opportunities is inoffensive, breezy and contains a funny cameo appearance by John Candy. The new film starts out well but falls apart midway because the serviceable situations that Hughes and director Bryan Gordon set up don't much go anywhere.

Color me dissatisfied with Color of Night. For starters, it's a murder mystery with a really obvious solution. How obvious? It's so embarrassingly obvious that even I figured it out - and I can never figure these things out.

Witty, sharp and, ultimately, chastening, Ridicule is a terrific movie in the sinuous tradition of Dangerous Liaisons (1988). [31 Jan 1997]