Jay Boyar

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]

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.

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

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

Most of the names in My Girl are meant to seem a little peculiar. In fact, everything in My Girl is meant to seem a little peculiar. Which, I would say, is the problem with the movie. When eccentricity becomes as insistent as it does here, it's not really eccentricity any more, it's affectation. My Girl, which opens today, is a festival of affectation. [27 Nov 1991, p.E1]

Barkin's performance is so detailed that it becomes a little essay about the physical differences between men and women. Too bad that this modern woman's performance is trapped in the movie of an old-fashioned man. [10 May 1991, p.6]

A routine action drama, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book contains qualities of both forgettability and painlessness.

Although the film is watchable and, at times, even borderline entertaining, it has its share of problems. Mainly, the filmmakers seem to have had trouble deciding just what kind of movie they were making. [22 May 1996, p.E1]

It moves along briskly and lightly, leaving little trace and doing no serious damage to boomer memories. [22 Aug 1997, p.19]

Half of me thinks that Raising Cain is disappointing. The other half thinks it's just stupid. [07 Aug 1992, p.19]

Home Alone-style slapstick with occasional (almost random) heart-tugging. [17 Jun 1994, p.27]

If The Prince of Tides has a saving grace, it's the acting. In what is probably the most subdued role of her life, Streisand is remarkably graceful and charming: This woman who has so often been accused of self-infatuation hands much of the movie over to her co-stars.

The new big-screen Flipper isn't as lame as that series, which is one of the two nicest things you can say about it. The other is that its aquatic sequences are sometimes quite beautiful, with their views of dolphins and other sea life. [17 May 1996, p.17]

You would call Amos & Andrew a comedy of errors if it were actually funny. I suppose the precise term is an attempted comedy of errors - or maybe just a turkey. [05 Mar 1993, p.19]

Sgt. Bilko is a bigger con job than Bilko himself ever pulled. [29 Mar 1996, p.A2]

Reducing the racist characters to the level of frothing-at-the-mouth Karate Kid villains doesn't shed much light on a serious social problem. (Louis Malle's portrait of the young Gestapo member in the 1974 Lacombe, Lucien came much closer to exposing the banality of evil.) And Avildsen doesn't make matters any better by staging scenes of racial violence so luridly that they almost amount to a form of exploitation.

Like "The Living Daylights", Licence to Kill definitely has its moments. But also like "The Living Daylights", the new, two-hour-plus picture goes on too long and is encumbered by a needlessly complicated plot.

Director Richard Benjamin and screenwriter Holly Goldberg Sloan use a single comic device throughout the entire movie. In scene after scene, two things are made to happen simultaneously with supposedly hilarious results. [11 Jun 1993, p.22]

Otomo's movie, set in the usual sci-fi post-apocalyptic world, has all the narrative fascination of a Godzilla movie (not much). The filmmaker does have a vivid visual imagination, but this imagination has more to do with composition and color than with motion (i.e., animation). [01 Jun 1990, p.7]

Egoyan makes you pay dearly by subjecting you to large doses of film-festival-strength ponderousness. [14 Apr 1995, p.19]

The problem isn't that the film is derivative, it's that the film fails at being derivative. In Only the Lonely, we get only the baloney. [28 May 1991, p.D1]