Jay Carr

Slides instantly into the realm of the forgettable.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.

Short, perhaps, on originality but long on savvy and panache, Dave is a feel-good film that's bound to have a lock on the popular vote. [07 May 1993, p.25]

Vampire in Brooklyn isn't a disaster. In fact, it has some funny moments. But it's a long way from being the comeback movie Eddie Murphy needs. [27 Oct 1995, p.57]

Flirt has its moments, and Ewell and Nikaidoh are auspicious additions to the Hartley rep company. But Flirt will appeal mostly to Hartley completists. [23 Aug 1996]

Being Human isn't totally devoid of the gentle Forsyth magic. But it doesn't have nearly enough of it. Even Williams can do only so much with an assignment that calls for him to mostly stand around looking bummed out - in quintuplicate. [06 May 1994]

Virtuosity doesn't really compute, but there's going to be more of its kind of cyberaction, not less. [4 Aug 1995, pg. 51]

Plays like a college version of ''When Harry Met Sally.''

As each scientist chronicles his or her story, one is impressed by the place that unswerving motivation and determination has assumed in the work.

Isn't awful, but neither is it the tangy entertainment it could have been.

Lethal Weapon 3 is a big, dumb, noisy, comic strip of a movie that begins and ends in flames.

Even an experienced director would have his hands full making anything out of this script. Four screenwriters are credited, and as any movie buff knows, the more writers, the worse the movie. Nowhere Faustian, this one aspires to camp classic status, but lurches lamely into vile gross-out territory. [10 Feb 1989, p.48]

When the action sequences move into the sky-diving stuff, they give you a real rush.... Otherwise, though, Point Break is all wet. Too bad, because you always get the sense in a Kathryn Bigelow outing ("Near Dark," "Blue Steel") that she's trying to push a genre into new places. [12 July 1991, p.54]

Putting a provocative spin on the body-fluids subtext, Lowensohn projects stony melancholy and a convincing capacity for romantic impulse as well, making Nadja a surprising little black orchid of a vampire movie. [29 Sept 1995, p.50]

Bell is utterly persuasive as the boy literally yearning to leap beyond the oppressively apparent confines of his world.

With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]

Melville's austere yet sensuous reinvention of the genre's macho honor and trenchcoated, fedora-wearing iconography, coolly projected by Delon's expressionless face, makes "Le Samourai" a pungent and pleasurable experience still. [02 May 1977, p.D7]

The bathroom jokes in Gun Shy wear thin.

Enough originality and emotional weight to keep you engrossed even when it lapses into some pretty standard moves at the end.

One of the most warmly beguiling romantic comedies the Southern Hemisphere has sent our way in ages.

The pieces don't always fit together smoothly, but there's a lot of flavorful work to savor.

It's a stunningly stylized, fiercely emotional one-of-a-kind film that seals in amber the horrors of a life the director couldn't wait to escape. [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

It's an amiable little low-grade comedy that gets by with goofing on movies and TV shows as John Ritter, a couch potato Faust, signs up for a cable package from hell (it's got 666 channels - the devil's number, get it?) from satanic Jeffrey Jones. [14 Aug 1992, p.46]

The chief trouble with Hardware is that it doesn't seem to contribute anything uniquely its own to the genre, although it works hard dismembering bodies and otherwise crushing and tearing them apart with its circular saw and drill-bit arms after homing in on them with its ruby laser eyes. [14 Sep 1990, p.40p]

An exercise in excess, but it's the best of the month's crop of mindless films, if only because it jumps off the screen with acertain pop and playfulness.

The only thing that keeps Cool World from imploding is that Bakshi turns it into a series of animator's riffs, with little explosions of toon action erupting like video game novas into the foreground of the story that isn't happening. [10 Jul 1992]

A zestful genre outing, and then some, right up its final overkill.

Road House is the kind of action movie whose rigging is so blatant that there can be no air of heroism about it. Although Swayze and Sam Elliott, in the role of his mentor, have the decency to look sheepish most of the time, there's no end to the cynicism and merchandising on screen, especially in the sex scenes. [19 May 1989, p.45]

My only complaint about Naked Gun 2 1/2 is that it doesn't give you enough time to finish laughing at one gag before the next one comes along, cracking you up all over again. Naked Gun 2 1/2 is high-flying low comedy, 90 minutes of sublime nonsense that only the devoutly humorless could hate. [28 June 1991, p.69]

Supposed to be a cheeky little lark but instead runs a narrow gamut from labored to aimless.

The Client is slick, but not much more than the sum of its surfaces. [20 July 1994, p.23]

It seems endless. It's also unusually crude and stupid, even for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

A little Hitchcock and some good Psycho fun at the beach.

Although there's a certain connect-the-dots quality to the storytelling, there's no denying the care and craftsmanship that Gardos has brought to her debut film.

What keeps the film going, and helps it keep its comic tone, is the constant threat of cataclysm - and the deadpan Buster Keaton charm of the ever-responsive Pinon as he combats the giant Rube Goldberg meat-grinder that the house, in effect, is. [17 Apr 1992]

Bizarre, shadowy, enticingly eerie...more poetic, more tantalizingly original.

Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Although Watermelon Woman is at times rudimentary and slight, it's saved by its humor and its way of tweaking political correctness. [9 May 1997, p.C6]

There are some sweet impulses in first-time director Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream, but it's a mess. [3 March 1989, p.47]

It isn't afraid to genuflect to heroes and heroism and has everything it needs to connect with the resurgence of patriotism after Sept. 11.

Varda's charmingly eccentric amble, wise in its seeming waywardness.

The sweetly enticing Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire repays the bit of patience it asks.

It doesn't tap deeply enough into any of the characters to compel us to identify with one or another.

The enormously appealing Randle holds the screen even when the thinness of Suzan-Lori Parks' script becomes inescapably apparent. There isn't much vigorous narrative pulse, complexity or even faceting of Randle's character, and the arbitrary ending seems both forced and inconclusive. [22 Mar 1996, p.53]

Despite a few tangy black comic moments, Lucky Numbers' is bummer theater.

Technically, the film is as sexy as art house sex gets, as the bold and precocious girl initiates the coupling in the "bachelor's room" the man rents in Saigon's teeming Chinese quarter. But the couplings lack heat and intimacy and spontaneity in ways that have nothing to do with the man's tentativeness. What you feel as these scenes unfold isn't passion, but a sense of how carefully the bodies are being arranged, how artfully they're being lit. What we're experiencing here isn't ardor; it's up-market craftsmanship. There's much more of a sexual charge in their first scene together, when he glimpses her on a ferry, is smitten, offers her a ride in his splendid chauffeured limo, tentatively moves his hand toward hers in the back seat, takes a deep breath, touches her hand, then exhales with relief when she doesn't push his hand away. [13 Nov 1992, p.32]

Earth Girls Are Easy is 90 minutes of bubble and squeak that doesn't shrink from sharing its subject's vacuousness. But it works often enough. And when it does, it plays like a collision between Zippy and Hairspray. [12 May 1989, p.45]

Seems embalmed in its own time, an earnest and handsomely crafted museum piece, not an urgent transposition of Miller's moral outrage to the new century.

In the Mouth of Madness is firmly lodged in the armpit of boredom. [03 Feb 1995, p.55]

Sinks under the weight of its ever more inescapably apparent contrivance, and its forced parallels to ''Lear.''

The Freshman, to be fair, offers delights. It's slight, a conceit better written than directed by Alan Bergman, but with flashes of witty satire and moments of screwball charm. [27 July 1990, p.29]

What you're not prepared for in Marziyeh Meshkini's astonishing debut film is the way its central image instantly leaps into the pantheon of world cinema with a rightness and an urgency that glue your eyes to the screen.

The end is a long time coming in Reindeer Games and the dialogue is mostly slush.

Structural shortcomings and all -- gives a neglected giant of African independence his due.

Puts the fun back into going to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. He said he'd be back, and he is.

At least hits a certain adrenaline level, and the stunts have panache. If you crave the ''Young Guns'' approach to the Old West, here it is again.

[Verhoeven's] cold, slick, funny, high-powered movie is informed by a humanism this genre almost always abandons in its chase after vigilante splat. [17 Jul 1987]

Junior isn't brilliant. A lot of its moves are as patently synthetic as Schwarzenegger's prosthetic stomach. But it goes through its paces with directness and savvy, arranges its big, bold elements into a likable pop construct (if you tune out the music), and some of Schwarzenegger's moves into motherhood will surprise you. [23 Nov 1994, p.25]

Empire of the Sun is an imperfect film, but at its best it's grand and haunting in ways that only a movie can be. [11 Dec 1987]

The film's triumph - and it is a triumph - in the end rests on the ability of Hrebejk and his actors to convince us that they never stop being normal people.

Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.

In short, "Crossing Delancey" is a joy of a romantic comedy. It's got warmth, brains, heart and humor. So what's not to like? [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

Suggests a summit meeting between ''The Princess Bride'' and ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' it has a decided charm of its own.

Johnny Handsome may lapse into downbeat formula, but its acting is pungent, and, in the case of Barkin and Henriksen, as immediate as a razor slash. [29 Sep 1989, p.34]

Without Limits gives us the achievement, gives us Prefontaine'sflaws alongside the considerable appeal, makes us feel his loss. It's miles beyond the previous biofilm about him, Prefontaine. It works because it makes running a subset of being maniacal - and nothing works better in a movie. [13 Sep 1998, p.N25]

Occasionally wills itself to rude, crude life. But most of the time it's pretty limp.

It would be gratifying to report that there's a lot more to K-Pax than Spacey at the top of his form, but there isn't.

The kind of comedy that takes the fun out of stupidity.

As savage and as epic as film gets.

Could have been a classy thriller. But all the Aramaic in the world can't save it from its own pounding slickness.

Herek's brisk pacing and skillful way with the hockey sequences gives The Mighty Ducks an urgency its manipulative copycat soul doesn't really earn. The Mighty Ducks - with its team calculatedly organized along gender as well as multi-cultural lines - is the kind of film kids like, then outgrow. [02 Oct 1992, p.49]

Agreeable eye candy and ear candy, but it's too slight to reach as deep as it thinks it wants to reach.

Titanic is a big-budget spectacle and director Cameron brings it off with high-tech bravura, placing us aboard the ship in real time.

The tame, confused script eventually sinks the film, although Field shows skill directing actors.

The playfulness and high spirits bubbling from the pages of Leonard's novels are squelched by Schrader's earnestness. Schrader's touch with Touch isn't light, and it costs him. [14 Feb 1997, p.D9]

Throughout the history of film, nothing turns campier faster than dinosaur movies. This one will have a much longer shelf life than most.

Young Guns had no vision at all. Young Guns II at least tries for poetry and irony and epic scale. And it finds humor in such things as the outlaws' keen appreciation of media exposure and image-making. But its chronicling of the gang's downfall just slogs. [01 Aug 1990, p.63p]

A bit of a cop-out, wrapping in wistful sentimentality a failure to acknowledge a connection that is more than epidermal.

The slightly androgynous Curtis is always interesting to watch; her sentience, her thin lips pressed into an ironic smile, her hood-ornament sleekness are tempered by a believable capacity for edgy affection. But the fact that the force is against her is minor compared to the way the film is against her. Blue Steel victimizes her more than any of the celluloid heavies in it. [16 Mar 1990, p.42]

As Die Hard clones go, it's easier to take than most. [06 Nov 1992, p.38]

The moral universe remains unsullied in this lite, lo-cal thriller - the cinematic equivalent of a fizzy summer drink.

It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.

Likable, but at times it's also inescapably sketchy and ramshackle.

What gives the film its tension, apart from Hitchcock's masterly manipulation of suspense as he sends them into a wine cellar used to conceal uranium, is his way of connecting with Bergman's masochism and Grant's stoniness as they circle one another, mutually attracted but holding back. [03 Apr 1992, p.94]

Son-in-Law (bet you can't guess the ending) would be brain-on-vacation fun if it weren't so smug and patronizing. [2 July 1993, p.44]

Plummets into the realm of ludicrous failure.

The Quick and the Dead is a sly, savvy Hollywood sendup of Sergio Leone Westerns with Sharon Stone playing the Clint Eastwood righteous avenger role and Gene Hackman the heavy. You'd call it a spaghetti Western, but the budget is too high. Maybe we'd better think of it as Hollywood's first angel-hair-pasta Western. [10 Feb 1995, p.47]

Pink Cadillac, you might say, is low on gas. [26 May 1989, p.43]

A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.

It's too diffuse, too turgid, an intelligent failure, but a failure nonetheless, with no real heat between Garcia and Thurman, riveting as she is as the blind woman literally and figuratively struggling to find a purchase on the world. In the end, it spends so much effort avoiding cheap obviousness that it seems to implode on its own muted restraint. [6 Nov 1992, p.38]

Nair, to her credit, doesn't succumb to any special pleading, which deepens her film's impact. Time and again, you sense that she and her subjects come from a place that believes in film, as "Salaam, Bombay" specifies its world and compels us to inhabit it. [15 Sep 1988, p.68]

It is Close's performance that gives the movie its oomph and will leave adults with smiles as wide as the kids'.

Space Cowboys does achieve liftoff.

Give your brain the night off, and Myers will make you smile too.

Snazzy visuals, of which she (Moss) is one, carry The Matrix past its klutzy script.

It's too circumscribed and polite for the story it's telling, curiously deficient in the unexpected.

Mother has a slyly subversive premise and a terrific and commandingly comic role for a woman - which immediately sets it apart from most other American films - and Debbie Reynolds pounces on it with such savvy and self-assurance that it reminds us how funny self-possession can be in the right hands. [10 Jan 1997, p.C3]

I know it's not "Citizen Kane," but it pushes my buttons. [25 March 1994, p.47]