Jay Carr

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]

Watson's character grows in importance until she eclipses the recessive Luzhin.

Nowhere near as dynamic as the title implies. It's hard not to think of it as ''Sleepwalk Lola Sleepwalk.''

Sirens aims at "Enchanted April," not at D. H. Lawrence. Languid, sexy, benevolently naughty, it's right on target. [11 March 1994, p.68]

May not be deep, but it certainly is lip-smacking.

At least Dragonfly isn't contemptible or altogether dismissible. But it doesn't use Costner well, and it even more unforgivably wastes Kathy Bates.

A rich mood piece, a study in bleakness, spiritual exhaustion and death. [02 June 1995, p.56]

Brings the '30s vividly to the screen.

If you don't get hooked on the storytelling in Fried Green Tomatoes, you'll surely be charmed by its five terrific actresses. Fried Green Tomatoes can't match the dramatic focus and rich texture of Rambling Rose, it's far more appealingly nuanced than Steel Magnolias - and with actresses like Tandy, Masterson, Bates, Parker and Tyson on the job, it's downright irresistible. [10 Jan 1992, p.73]

Recedes to a string of mere action exploits. These are proficiently executed but, for all their visual authority, not much more than routine.

While Harrison Ford brings all you could hope for to the role of Clancy's hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, Patriot Games is a pretty routine, generic and on the whole pedestrian film. Considering the talent and obvious care taken, it's surprisingly flavorless. [5 June 1992, p.25]

Even as a romantic confection it would soar higher, glow brighter, if it had permitted itself some texture, some bite. It's too simply emblematic to muster all the magic it needs, even though it has a pair of utterly winning performances by Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda. [29 July 1994, p.53]

The Muppet Christmas Carol plays like an overextended rerun of a not-quite top-drawer Muppet show. [11 Dec 1992, p.53]

Silverado plays like a big-budget regurgitation of old Westerns. Whatkeeps it going is the generosity that flows between Kasdan and his actors. It's got benevolent energies, but not the more primal kind needed to renew the standard Western images and archetypes. [10 Jul 1985, p.26]

Sly, oddly sweet, wickedly funny take on violence that's as American as apple pie. [15 Apr 1994, p.91]

There's a little less hilarity in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult than in the first two films, but there's still enough slapstick firepower to put it across. There's efficiency in Peter Segal's direction, but never real zaniness, and in the gaps between the sight gags lurks the onset of sequelitis. [18 Mar 1994, p.68]

Leaves you questioning its intentions.

Somewhat sanitized but gorgeous Americana, with another impressive turn by McTeer.

It's a terrific musical biofilm filled with drive, solid characterizations and - biggest surprise of all - musical performances that jump off the screen. [22 Apr 1994, p.33]

A triumph of romantic impulse over stylistic indulgence. [21 Oct 1983]

It's a spectacular ballet of death, lavishing upon us the highest body count of any action movie since "Total Recall," and its cynical panache marks a return to form for kickboxer Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose recent vehicles have sputtered. Not "Hard Target," though, which floors it from start to finish as it sends Van Damme after a vicious gang that rounds up homeless vets to serve as sacrificial victims for rich hunters in New Orleans. [20 Aug 1993, p.43]

The film will resonate with today's alienated workers, whose every brain cell and nerve ending hates the soul-crushing jobs they're told they should be grateful to have.

It's often corny, but it's never boring, and it'll sweep you up in its momentum if you give it a chance.

It'll make a natural double-feature repertory-house companion to The Player for years to come. It's filled with humor that has paid its dues. [21 Aug 1992, p.38]

The more intense it gets, the sillier it looks. The only thing worth watching in this wannabe noir is Christian Clemenson's performance as Spader's permanently bummed-out pot-smoking brother. Clemenson alone fills the screen with the kind of individuality that makes you steadily deepen your belief in his character. But he's not enough to keep Bad Influence from degenerating into a ludicrous turn-off. [09 Mar 1990, p.27]

Entertaining set pieces, the lively give-and-take of Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner and a playful affection for old Westerns carry Maverick past some soft spots and emphasize its adult wit and intelligence. [20 May 1994, p.49]

There's something elegiac in Redford's spy who knows he's a dinosaur but still has a few moves left.

Honeymoon in Vegas is a sweet but tepid comedy so short on real goofiness that when you do encounter some, you tend to be inordinately grateful. [28 Aug 1992, p.49]

The sterling and reliable Strathairn brings stoic dignity to the husband's role, young Mazzello takes advantage of the chance to show more here than he did in Jurassic Park and Curtis Hanson's direction is expeditious and unpretentious. But River Wild is a Streeporama, and Streep at the flood tide is something to see. [20 Sep 1994, p.61]

An efficient, good-looking production that amounts to the kind of safari with which Disney's customers will feel comfortable. [23 Dec 1994, p.53]

Single White Female is a frustrating proposition. It has impact, given its two stars. But it spends a lot of time trying to get its footing, find its tone and rhythm. Surprisingly, Schroeder has trouble pacing a film any one of a dozen Hollywood hacks could have handled more sure-handedly. [14 Aug 1992, p.41]

Could have been -- and should have been -- richer and more resonant. It's Hollywood Babylon Lite, only TV movie-deep. But at least it's tangy.

Robinson's impassioned decency and coruscating invective make "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" a high-minded, invigorating mess. [19 May 1989, p.47]

A lively and affectionate cross between an infomercial and a genuflection.

Derivative and flawed. But it does throw off a few sparks.

The Lost Boys is schlock, but it's juicy schlock. [31 Jul 1987, p.34]

What sets Tequila Sunrise apart is its layering, its existential dimension. The characters played by Gibson and Russell have been sanded down by a kind of fatalism we normally associate with characters in French gangster movies. There's more than one facet to them. They're entertaining. And urgent. Even when they're just going through routine genre moves, they put laid-back spin on them. [2 Dec 1988, p.29]

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

I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.

It's one of the year's most unforgettable exercises in pointlessness. [16 Sept 1994, p.62]

Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.

Although perhaps inescapably derivative, the film rides its cast's warm and vibrantly meshed energies - to say nothing of its gender novelty. It's filled with heart and muscle as the women tired of being scammed, slammed and rammed deposit the exploitation film in new realms of payback. [06 Nov 1996, p.D1]

It's much closer to a European film in sensibility than to one of Hollywood's factory products.

The strength of Jacob's Ladder is that we never know what the next scene will be. But that's also its weakness. We don't feel involved with the characters here. We just feel jerked around. Jacob's Ladder, finally, is bummer theater. [2 Nov 1990, p.73]

The film has mood and feeling, but it can't take the material that final mile into the inexplicable. [10 Jul 1992, p.35]

Bitter Moon would be a camp classic if it weren't so dispiriting watching Roman Polanski cannibalize and then finally parody himself into narrative and artistic collapse. The film's big problem is that it's so totally devoid of the sexual energy it needs to traverse the gantlet of perversity through which Polanski sends it. [15 Apr 1994, p.94]

It's funny and charming most of the time, thanks to Brenda Blethyn.

Amusing Made doesn't quite measure up to expectations.

There's an engagingly homegrown quality to much of the footage.

There's justification for Hearst's bitter reflection that her real crime consisted in surviving. There's also some intelligent work in Patty Hearst. Still, it's more pat and less disturbing than you feel it should be. [23 Sep 1988, p.56]

Isn't as funny as it is crude, and isn't as crude as it is labored.

A solidly crafted, suspensefully written, powerfully acted little juggernaut.

Henry & June is a gorgeous film, one aimed at the intelligent and discriminating. As iconography, it's a stunner. But it would be better off as a silent. It's an example of talent and intelligence determined to do everything right, only to have almost everything come out wrong. [05 Oct 1990, p.53p]

Stone's film rolls off the screen with affection and authority, even when Morrison's life enters its sodden, bummed-out finale, and Val Kilmer does an uncanny job of identifying with Morrison. [01 Mar 1991]

Bait ends up seeming pretty wormy.

Something to Talk About is one of the summer's very few adult movies, and while it's flawed and meanders into slackness, it also offers kinds of rewards few studio movies do. [4 Aug 1995, p.49]

A juicy and gratifying teacher movie (a genre to which I'm partial). The joy in performance shared by Connery and Brown is the big reason.

Stark, haunting, epic, and mournful, The Claim is a mountain of a film.

"Chances Are is a sweetly likable little romantic comedy that would be even more likable if it didn't require the season's most massive suspension of disbelief. [10 March 1989, p.32]

Cruise is believable as an athlete; and the cocky bravado he emits to impress his girlfriend (played with matching complexity and maturity by Lea Thompson) has a fetching sense of lift, too. But his vulnerability is what's most refreshing and ingratiating about Cruise's Stef. [05 Nov 1983]

But, fittingly, it's the kids who carry this outing. They're led by Sean Astin, who's rightly more of a dreamer than the others. Jeff B. Cohen engagingly handles the most cliched role, the fat kid who keeps stuffing his face. And I couldn't help wondering if Ke Huy Quan, who played Indy's sidekick in the Temple of Doom, knows that not all movies are made in caves. In any case, you can relax. The Goonies is entertaining despite its calculated flavor. [7 Jun 1985, p.61]

Never lets down, even if depth of character always takes second place to depth charges.

What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel.

German director Uli Edel's film of Last Exit to Brooklyn, while honorable, just doesn't roar off the screen the way the novel roared off the page. [11 May 1990, p.33p]

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]

Albert Finney's name on a cast list is a guarantee of pleasure, and there's much to savor besides in Suri Krishnamma's A Man of No Importance. [03 Feb 1995]

Just what Gooding needed to restart his stalled career.

Kazan's dislocating strategies carry Dream Lover past a few stumblings and credibility lapses, ushering us into Ray's debilitating alienation, imprisoning us with Spader in Ray's projection of his fantasies onto a woman he realizes he knows nothing about. "Dream Lover" is a thriller that demonizes women more cleverly and slickly than most. [20 May 1994, p.52]

The performances are disarming and Mumford is the kind of comedy that grows on you if you give it a chance.

A film that begins with a train wreck and then, figuratively speaking, becomes one.

I'm not sure that I really want to see "Scream 3,'" but Craven, Williamson, and the screamers certainly bring this one off by not only slapping all their cards on the table, but insisting we admire the way they play them.

What Gibson gives us is a portrait of a man behaving gracefully under several kinds of pressure, some of it shamefully unfair. It's a solid acting achievement, and his directing, which never calls attention to itself, is right on the money, too. The Man Without a Face is an affecting evocation of a man of principle who teaches a boy what's important. [25 Aug 1993, p.53]

There's a layer of grim comedy in Butterfly Kiss. But what's exciting about it is its gritty way of remaining so uncompromisingly bleak in its psychopathology. [7 Jun 1996, p.58]

Isn't always on the money, but when it is, it really is.

To have been the film it could have been, crazy/beautiful needed to be messier.

Kindergarten Cop finds Arnold up to his old tricks, which will be exactly what his fans will want to know. But it's tough on kids and may make more than a few feel uncomfortable. [21 Dec 1990, p.51]

The coolest animation in town.

Although Warlock doesn't muster enough of a charge to shoot for genre classic status as Sands subsides, it does have a degree of interplay uncommon in such outings. [19 Apr 1991, p.43]

It's got all the energy and idiomatic rightness one could hope for, but, dramatically speaking, it lacks a knockout punch. The violent ending in an alley is flat. One reason may be that the boxing-card scam seems musty and dated. Winkler's got the right friends on camera, but you're never as interested in the story as you are in the characters inhabiting its sunless atmosphere. Night and the City is a qualified success. [23 Oct 1992, p.27]

Oleanna slips to the level of a crass political cartoon, not an examination of human conduct embracing its problematic complexity. And after the first meeting blows up in his face, you can't believe the prof and the student would meet again alone in his office. There's nothing bringing them and keeping them together except the playwright's need to play out his scenario. [11 Nov 1994, p.47]

The Man with Two Brains has moments, but they aren't inspired. [04 Jun 1983]

There's always something touching about the diligence with which Schwarzenegger soldiers through his assignments. There's a play of intelligence and decency in his eyes that exists quite independently of his bashing. Of the Hollywood tribe of virile fists, he's the one who seems most sensitive. [17 Jun 1988, p.31]

The kind of richly layered film that Hollywood seldom attempts, much less brings off. But it's more than brought off here in grand, solid style and beautifully crafted detail.

Captures just enough behind-the-scenes flavor to qualify as a light, bright divertissement.

Stephen Frears' Hero is a slyly entertaining reinvention of the old newspaper comedy - Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, William Wellman's Nothing Sacred, Howard Hawks' The Front Page - on the altar of TV. In an image-dominated age, what does the concept of heroism mean? Not much, once TV gets hold of it, Hero says. But it's peachy, not preachy, celebrating energy, resourcefulness and cheerful amorality. [02 Oct 1992, p.45]

Miguel Arteta's Star Maps is an uneven first feature, but what's good in it is very good. It's got invigorating rawness to spare, making its low budget work in its favor. [22 Aug 1997, p.F5]

Seems so preoccupied with genuflection that it never achieves its subject's heart-pounding immediacy.

The new Stuart Little is OK, but it's never so charming that you forget you're watching a manufactured object.

Rich as it looks, it lacks the feverishness of Goya's art.

The film is rightfully carried by Nico and Dani and under Gay's artful helmsmanship it's carried with remarkable sympathy and believability.

It starts with a flyboy roasting franks in the exhaust of a combat jet and never lets up, giddily puncturing all those wartime flying hero movies and throwing in a heap of movie parodies besides. Either way, the pacing is jetstreamed and the level of inventiveness is sky-high. [31 July 1991, p.25]

This sequel, ruled by the commercial imperative to not tamper with a highly profitable franchise, mostly just goes through the motions, essentially replicating the first outing. [19 Nov 1993, p.93]

Kinetic, fizzy, delivering more bounce to the ounce than anything out there right now, "Rumble in the Bronx" is my kind of mindless fun. [23 Feb 1996]

When the chemistry isn't there - and it mostly isn't - the actors and film seem merely self-indulgent, despite the obvious devotion with which She's So Lovely was made. [29 Aug 1997, p.C3]

There's almost too much there, but the three-hour-plus film permits the kind of detailing that not only brings the storytelling to life, but sometimes persuades us we're breathing to its rhythms.

The ensemble quality is high and likable, even if Baumbach's inventiveness as a writer falters after the film's sweet, savvy beginning. [12 June 1998]

The script is too eager to rush to the high-concept payoff without providing dramatic or characterizational underpinning. [26 June 1992, p.34]

Isn't always easy to sit through, but it repays patience. It's an honorable film, and it earns its undertow of poignancy derived from.

The New Age plays like "Night of the Living Dead," only with better clothes. [23 Sept 1994, p.52]

To get right to it, Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close isn't anywhere near as sublime and magical as his "Wings of Desire." In fact, his new film about angels is sort of a mess, collapsing under the weight of too much plot and too little poetry. That being said, I hasten to add that it's my kind of mess. [28 Jan 1994, p.47]

Breathes fresh life into old formulas.

The Comfort of Strangers seldom makes sense, and the bizarre behavior often seems arbitrarily trowled on from the outside as opposed to something bubbling up from within. The best that can be said for it is that its maze-like ways at times intriguingly replicate the mazelike streets of Venice [12 Apr 1991, p.82]

The film belongs to Donohue's cool, toothy slinker, who sports instant fangs when she lures a pimply student into her bath and later shimmies deadpan out of an art nouveau urn when the snake-charming record starts its amplified grooving. [11 Nov 1988, p.61]

Screenwriter John Hughes, making his directing debut, is at his best when he empathizes with the sensitivity in the ugly-duckling Ringwald and Hall characters. [04 May 1984]

Mo' Better Blues has problems. Lee hates being compared with Woody Allen, but it looks as if he's going to do what Allen did in trying a new kind of film until it works. [03 Aug 1990, p.29p]

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

The film is more interesting as a phenomenon than as a movie. [27 Feb 1981]

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]

The Neon Bible doesn't always supply the depth or underpinning its images demand, but there's nice work in it, and it won't bore you. [19 Apr 1996, p.55]

It's all prefab stuff, rendered acceptable by the sunny dispositions of the performers and the Jamaican location shots. You really have to love bobsledding, or Jamaica, or both, to love Cool Runnings. [1 Oct 1993, p.55]

State of Grace is a high-powered, luxuriantly textured Irish gang movie that you keep watching, convinced that at any moment it's going to come together and really grab you. It doesn't. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]

Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]

Tone is everything here, and the film never loses the smiling poise and benevolence that help you buy its gauzy plot as the three sashay through it. Douglas Carter Beane's script is witty as well as buoyant, which is a big help. [08 Sep 1995, p.99]

Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Leo Bassi - tumble with zest through a daisy chain of sexual capers. But while warmly energized, their carryings-on also seem a little generic.

The sheer intelligence and independence of spirit in Driver's busy eyes almost carry The Governess past its structural limitations. [07 Aug 1998]

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]

Warm, intelligent, humane, The Bear is everything you could hope for in an outdoor adventure. [27 Oct 1989, p.33p]

Essentially, it's 90 minutes of mostly disarming nothingness. [10 Dec 1993, p.59]

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

A solid two-bagger, not a home run.

'Titanic'' was a case of a cheeseball story riding terrific effects. The Perfect Storm is in every important way deeper.

Hard-driving and propulsive as it is, the film is unable to hide the fact that Woo seems not only to be repeating himself, but parodying his earlier films on a much bigger scale, more crudely and coarsely.

It's too fragmented and diffuse to ever bring its parts together in any really satisfying manner.

Tearjerking aside, Untamed Heart reminds us of the bravery it takes to love. That's the ultimate source of its appeal. [12 Feb 1993, p.50]

All sword and sorcery movies are parodies, but Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" is the best intentional parody that hardware-heavy genre has ever seen, piling conventions from other genres on top of it until the screen seems a multilayered deli delight...Entertaining and ingeniously resourceful, it's a virtuosic comic-strip movie. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

Aims its big, bold mother-daughter conflicts straight at the heart by way of the tear ducts, and connects.

Wonderfully cast and slickly directed, but so crudely written.

While the film grabs us on cue with its sudden strikes that end with blood dripping from the monster's dragon fangs as it zips back into the dark, it's also true that predictability robs the thrust and counterthrust of the purely visceral impact it once had. The monsters just aren't that scary anymore, and so the film mostly just sits there, gloomy and inert, sunk in exhausted myth, looking and sounding Wagnerian but feeling underpowered despite its diversionary moves. [22 May 1992, p.29]

There's a lot to like in Mr. Holland's Opus, even if you find yourself wishing it had been more artfully written, directed - and trimmed. [19 Jan 1996, p.58]

Feels a bit flat and underdeveloped.

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

There's always Witherspoon, swimming upstream and never letting it slow her down. Blindingly purposeful, she's a perky blond tornado. Marilyn Monroe would not only have cheered her on. She'd have learned something.

It'll be a test of whether Cruise's star power and De Palma's ability to seduce audiences with visual style can compensate for a fundamental hollowness at the center. Mission: Impossible plays like a project trying to become a movie and not quite making it. [22 May 1996, p.63]

You're hooked enough to keep watching, even if the characterizations veer toward the two-dimensional.

American Pimp, if not quite a self-serving orgy of self-justification, can hardly be thought of as a searching look at the skin trade.

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]

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]

More outrageousness, less sentimentality and eagerness to please would have been welcome. But while The Ref isn't falling-out-of-your-seat funny, it uncorks a steady supply of laughs. It's a throwback to those Disney movies of the '80s that used to star Bette Midler. And it strikes a blow against forced holiday jollity. [11 Mar 1994, p.67]

A confident and promising directorial debut, one that has the feel of an experienced director to it, from the hypnotic unfolding of scenes to the finely observed character details.

Turbo-charged wallbanger with the IQ of a tire iron. But it jumps off the screen with the mindless panache of a good bad movie.

It's more than science, more than biography, more than metaphor. Fusing all three and linking them to a profound human dimension that never cheapens the man or his macrospeculations, it ties them to shared human destiny. As Morris' elliptical style circles and deepens its themes with each pass, A Brief History of Time turns into film's own expanding universe. [14 Sep 1992, p.50]

Warm, smart, and funny!

Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]

Although there's nominally a lot of action, the film doesn't exactly abound in narrative pulse. But its portraits and textures take up a lot of the slack. [16 Aug 1996, p.D5]

Disclosure is a classic guilty pleasure. You won't be proud of yourself in the morning for having watched it, but you won't be able to take your eyes off it while you do. [9 Dec 1994, p.53]

Child's Play is junk fun. [09 Nov 1988, p.95]

Object of Beauty is another zap-the-yuppies outing, more elegant than most, and sophisticated, too, but hollow and on the whole charmless as it leaves us uninvolved with the spectacle of cash-strapped John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell holed up in a posh London hotel, living on room service and dodging the manager. [19 Apr 1991, p.42]

Under Siege is dumb formula stuff, sensory jolts by the numbers. [09 Oct 1992, p.89]

Avildsen's - and the screenplay's - blatant manipulations make Freeman's job harder. To his credit, Freeman not only sustains the level of fever pitch at which Clark operates throughout, but succeeds in making him seem admirable, if not exactly likable. A well-meaning steamroller is still a steamroller. Are people who question Clark necessarily wrong? And why, for instance, do the students have to be presented with an either-or picture of Mozart and gospel music? Why can't they have both? The script to Lean on Me plays like something written by the Reagan administration. It supplies a rationale for white-controlled governments to ignore the educational needs of largely black school districts that need funding most. With Freeman breathing inspirational fire, Lean on Me is never dull. But it sidesteps some troubling questions. [3 March 1989, p.43]

It takes us nowhere we haven't been before, except geographically.

You couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror movie. What you could ask for is a better script.

Remains a frustratingly opaque study. There's something missing, namely Kaufman.

Filled with fun, style, and ensemble give-and-take, the peppy Love and Other Catastrophes restores one's faith in sex, lies, and videotape. [11 Apr 1997, p.C7]

It's a handsomely crafted revisionist Western that effectively destigmatizes the legendary Apache raider, reveling as much in political correctness as in its sunset-tinted red sandstone. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

Its attributes and achievements are modest, but its arias, duets, and ensembles are engaging all the same.

Its protagonist haven't enough emotional substance to carry them through the long, darkly lit introspective sequences.

Despite the revival of narrative vigor accompanying Licence to Kill, you will perhaps sense that I find it too sane, too engineered. Preposterousness seems an integral part of the James Bond universe, which I'd hate to think was turning rational, falling into step with the '80s by abandoning fancifulness. Mercifully, Licence to Kill isn't altogether stripped of excess. [14 July 1989, p.65]

Despite its lush photography, Green Card has the texture of peanut butter. It's more romantic than comedic, but there isn't an abundance of either. [11 Jan 1991]

What goes on when Li isn't fighting the bad guys isn't worth discussing; it's that stupid.

A humane alternative that makes the phrase family values mean something. [14 July 1995, p.33]

By the end, we're left with a feeling of depletion rather than resolution, which may have been Gray's intention.

Every now and then, Benny & Joon makes you think it's going to finally take off, but it never does. It looks good but has credibility problems even on the level of whimsical fairy tale. [16 Apr 1993, p.86]

In the end, Holy Smoke crashes and burns.

In a dismal summer for movies, Osmosis Jones is a fresh breath of foul air.

This 19th Bond installment is passable, but only just.

The liveliest, most original family values film of the year so far.

Intermittently engaging but inescapably overextended.

In short, Permanent Midnight is about what you would expect from a mild-at-heart movie that wants to titillate with a fallen artist story that has a wholesome outcome. [18 Sep 1998, p.D9]

Exuberantly mixing live action and animation, it's a high-energy dream teaming that shrewdly takes advantage of the chance to goof on Jordan's temporary retirement from basketball and unsuccessful fling at baseball, and even more winningly exploits the antic wildness that always distinguished Warner Bros.' bouncy Looney Tunes. [15 Nov 1996, p.D1]

For all its Himalayan aspirations, "Little Buddha" is shallow and superficial.[25 May 1994, p.69]

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

It's intelligently crafted, above average for this presumably dying genre, and if you can get past a couple of potential credibility problems, you'll find it absorbing. [23 Mar 1990, p.45]

Few directors lavish as much tenderness upon life's bruised survivors as Kloves does, and many a more prominent director has failed to find in the dust-choked West Texas plains the wistfulness with which Quaid and Ryan fill their most solid and shtick-free work yet. [05 Nov 1993, p.42]

This good-hearted but undersupplied ensemble piece is only appetizer-deep.

The Shipping News is good news, but not as good as it could have been.

A solid, humane, old-fashioned film in the best sense of the term.

A brilliant production of a mediocre play.

''The Silence of the Lambs'' was a classic; Hannibal is only a good movie of its type.

The season's brightest piece of counterprogramming.

As baseball movies go, Little Big League is a bunt single. Metaphorically speaking, it knows how to put the bat on the ball, though it's too lightweight to knock anything out of the park. [29 Jun 1994, p.83]

Ultimately, the film's self-censoring will to sweetness and innocence is even more fatal than the flimsiness of the plot. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

First Knight, despite its unfortunate title, is not a stupid film, just a mostly flat and talky one. It's gorgeously crafted and filled with goodwill, but it's more admirable than genuinely compelling or moving, much less ablaze with conviction. It's got the trappings, but not the inner fire. [07 Jul 1995, p.27]

Who's Harry Crumb? has a beginning bright enough to make you hope that John Candy might at last have his first good movie role since Splash. But no. Who's Harry Crumb? crumbles into yet another slack, witless misreading of what makes Candy an appealing performer. [03 Feb 1989, p.43]

Traveller is a little too rosy and pat, but it clambers its way to entertainment value all the same. [2 May 1997]

A steadily engaging and winningly humane film that loves its characters.

Is a chamber romance, in that there's nothing grand or sweeping about it, but it's got all the style it needs to go with those glorious Tuscan settings.

Wind is quite content to keep things at the visual and visceral level, and on that unambitious but highly photogenic plane it's a handsome piece of salt-water escapism. When those sails start popping as they're slapped with gusts of sea air and the tacking gets intense, Wind gives you an adrenaline-filled ride. [11 Sep 1992, p.37]

The reason Bread and Roses works as well as it does is that as didactic as it sometimes gets, its heart is always bigger than its ideology.

The sequel goes down the tubes by spreading itself across four time zones and inviting comparison to the original by spending most of its time back in 1955, where another mess must be set right. [22 Nov 1989, p.35]

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

It's the cinematic equivalent of one of those prop guns where you pull the trigger and a little flag comes out of the barrel, waving gaily.

At times, there's no escaping the schematic nature of what's unfolding - such as the buddies' horseplay, and an ending that seems tacked on. But Savoca makes it all happen with a charm that overcomes the lapses in the script. [04 Oct 1991, p.44]

A Very Brady Sequel is a little like the meatloaf prepared by Alice, the Bradys' maid - padded, but palatable. It walks a line between evoking the old TV show and kidding it and it's as surprisingly lively a sequel as the original was for a big-screen treatment of an old TV staple. [23 Aug 1996, p.F4]

Despite the heavy-handedness of "The Night We Never Met," you feel there's a good New York comedy in Leight's future. "The Night We Never Met," although better than "Slaves of New York," isn't quite it. [30 Apr 1993, p.52]

The film doesn't match the novel's adrenaline level, but is in every other way more stylish and intelligent...Smart, sexy, provocative entertainment. [30 July 1993, p.25]

A bittersweet world, and it's frankly one to which we've been before, but seldom do we see it rendered with such exquisite, if pained, craftsmanship.

A slight but diverting series of set pieces.

A lame little flat liner.

Heart and Souls is a sweet but wispy little comedy of ectoplasm that doesn't give its engaging stars quite enough to do. After a while, you're grateful for the special effects that let the film's quartet of suspended souls fade smoothly in and out while Robert Downey Jr. pretends to let them take turns inhabiting his body. [13 Aug 1993, p.45]

A Knight's Tale, will either repel you or win you over. It won me over.

Slickly directed by Joel Schumacher, who sees that each and every button in this unabashedly manipulative film is pushed hard, Falling Down could have been deeply disturbing if it weren't so cartoony, so determined to glibly escape the moral consequences of the vicarious white-rampage fantasies to which it caters. [26 Feb 1993, p.25]

In both senses of the word, Posse is a colorful outing that fills a real gap, a film you can respect as well as enjoy. [14 May 1993, p.45]

It's got flaws, but, more important, it's keenly felt and it boils off the screen with urgency. [13 Dec 1991, p.66]

Frankly, Mermaids is the kind of movie that needs the strong personalities of Cher and Ryder, and is lucky it has them. They put the movie over. It has a weak script, and the direction by Richard Benjamin - who had two predecessors on this project - is so reticent as to be almost absent. There's almost no pacing or shaping to speak of. [14 Dec 1990, p.53P]

A deft, elegant, melancholy tapestry of flawed outreach, and the big reason it succeeds is Podeswa's courage in dispensing with a lot of exposition and trusting the audience - and the faces of the actors - to fill a lot of what otherwise would be gaps.

It's no meal, but it'll tide you over.

As a performer, Murray moves through the film with a lovely doomed aplomb. And his quick verbal wit is almost enough to pull Quick Change off. But as a director, his inexperience costs him. His camera isn't as quick as his tongue. [13 Jul 1990, p.29]

A big, handsome throwback to star-powered historical costume movies.

Natural Born Killers is going to be a love-it or hate-it film. But it's an important film. Pumped up, jumped up, yet asking the right questions, [it] is more than an attention-grabber. It's a grenade pitched into the media tent. [26 Aug 1994, p.51]

Sabrina is a nice try that doesn't quite strike the romantic pay dirt it's after, but you won't walk away from it empty-handed. [15 Dec 1995, p.61]

A few of the sequences are bad enough to be funny, especially the ones involving Sheen skulking around alien central in a red jump suit, falling down a lot, as if directed by Ed Wood. [31 May 1996, p.52]

Oliver Stone's Wall Street plays like "Platoon" in civvies. It's a good bad movie, unable to muster the moral firepower of the earlier film, but entertaining on the level of a big, bold, biff-bam-pow comic strip that likes high-profile high-rolling more than it perhaps realizes. [11 Dec 1987, p.45]

Ends with a fizzle, not a bang.

Despite the fact that Doc Hollywood isn't exactly brimful of surprises, it's awfully easy to take because it seems a throwback to the kind of formula movies studios used to grind out by the bushel in the '30s and '40s, relying on a squad of accomplished secondary and character roles to flesh them out agreeably. [02 Aug 1991, p.41]

In short, the film lacks the social context that would have enabled Death Becomes Her to take on invigorating breadth and bite. It needs more of the malicious zest that Streep's character has. Its last half is as hollow as its first half is funny. [31 July 1992, p.33]

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Isn't what you'd call a probing film, but it's a slick and savvy one.

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]

A sweet, gentle film with a personality problem. The problem is that it hasn't got enough personality to keep from being overwhelmed by the echoes of other films it evokes. [21 July 1989, p.21]

My Girl is a pleasant surprise. It's sweet, offbeat and ultimately slight, but likable nevertheless for the emotional integrity it maintains in its story of a girl coming to terms with the death of someone close to her. It's one of the few American movies that tries to be honest about death and give kids credit for being able to cope with it, and that alone makes it recommendable. [27 Nov 1991, p.23]

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

Never mind that it doesn't always work or that the film's two halves never quite mesh. The Cable Guy essentially is a genie escaped from a bottle, except that the bottle is a TV screen. [14 June 1996, p.59]

Pictorially, Alive is breathtaking. But there's no real exploration of character or primal drives. [15 Jan 1993, p.48]

Visually, the film is at its most interesting when Scott's camera rises over Osaka and photographs it in ways that make it look like a modular electrified Lego city with neon and plexiglass trim. We get the feeling that in Osaka we're staring the near future in the face. But if Scott has gone to Osaka in search of a new Blade Runner, he comes up with nothing more than an Asian French Connection II. Many exchanges play like truncated pieces of scenes that originally existed more fully. And the film's frequent nocturnal motorcycle revvings don't have the panache of The Warriors, much less The Wild One. [22 Sep 1989, p.31]

It offers pleasures of a kind that fewer and fewer films even seem to remember, much less aspire to.

What makes Love Affair fun isn't that its stars are offscreen lovers, but that onscreen they so obviously succeed at convincing you they're movie stars playing movie lovers, powering up the dream factory again, dishing out schmaltz like there's no tomorrow. [21 Oct 1994, p.50]

Pacific Heights is the hot fall thriller Hollywood has been waiting for. A slick, jolting successor to "Jagged Edge," "Fatal Attraction" and "Sea of Love," it beats the odds by inducing us to sympathize with a San Francisco yuppie landlord couple stuck with a tenant from hell. [28 Sept 1990, p.45]

Back to the Future III has no future. The reason is that it never works up much of a past as it sends its gull-winged DeLorean time machine back to the Old West. In effect, it goes back to the Age of Steam and runs out of gas. [25 May 1990, p.45]

A gritty, immediate, down-and-dirty satire with a down-and-dirty look.

Takes on provocative and stimulating subject matter, but can't bring it into satisfying dramatic focus, stranding three strong actors who are superior to their material.

It's lacking in eventfulness and drama, but there's a sweetness in it that places it a cut above most synthetic children's films. As a writer and director, Evans doesn't always know where to go with his material, but at least there's some feeling behind it, and this sometimes rescues it from its becalmed predictability. [7 Apr 1993, p.49]

It plays something like Robert Altman Lite. It's saved from writer-director Willard Carroll's increasingly forced linkages and made watchable by the resourceful acting of its ensemble, some of whom get more to work with than others. [22 Jan 1999, p.D4]

By now, Rocky of the drooping eyes and damaged brain has turned guru, emphasizing heart, soul and family ties when the evil promoter starts goading him and playing mind games with his protege. Stallone, said to be following Arnold Schwarzenegger into comedy, is starting earlier than anyone realized. [16 Nov 1990, p.78]

There's nothing really wrong with Agnes Browne, except a tendency to take a few easy, convenient outs.

It's good cornball mainstream sci-fi, as close to brand-name reliability as this genre gets. [18 Nov. 1994, p.47]

To paraphrase Andre Malraux, it invokes but it doesn't always supply, doesn't course strongly enough with the book's themes of blood and earth and dislocation.

A powerful and surehandedly crafted depth charge of a movie.

One could argue that ''Lock, Stock'' and Snatch are essentially the same movie - crime comedies marked by an outlandish visual style. Which raises the question of whether Ritchie has the range to do anything else.

Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]

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

once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness. The big alley-fight scene between Piper and David, in which the former tries to punch some awareness into the latter and make him put on the X-ray sunglasses, is as contrived as it is brutal. And the ending isn't much. The acting has the good sense not to try to be anything more than two-dimensional, though, which keeps the entertainment value at a lively comic-strip level. As sci-fi horror comedy, "They Live," with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with "Terminator" and "Robocop," even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps. [4 Nov 1988, p.52]

Surviving Picasso is always intelligent and often entertaining, even when it perhaps inevitably takes on the character of an upmarket wax museum. [4 Oct 1996]

Staggeringly preposterous, yet not without a certain entertainment value. Except for the glasnost angle, there's nothing original about The Package, yet there's something amusing in its reminder of how the political assassination genre has come full circle since "The Manchurian Candidate."

A lot of striking pictures in this would-be feminist "Braveheart," but a film that's pretty flat and earthbound because of the limitations of the figure at its center.

Franken's feel-good inanities make you laugh, but the insipid script in which they're embedded lacks the courage of its satiric convictions. [12 Apr 1995, p.90]

While the film dutifully reproduces many incidents from the book, it lacks the spirit and vitality of its source. And - no small problem - it lacks McCourt's voice knitting the vignettes together.

The genius - and there is a cockeyed genius permeating "The Brady Bunch" - is that it nails the entrapment and anxiety beneath the happy faces as unmistakably as the films of Douglas Sirk did the decade before. [17 Feb 1995, p.41]

The buzz was negative on So I Married an Axe Murderer, but the buzz was wrong. Mike Myers' new comedy isn't quite as fresh and bubbly and goofy as "Wayne's World," but it's hip, lively fun, with only a slight bit of sag. [30 July 1993, p.29]

It's a lyrical, gorgeous, big-budget follow-up to "Like Water for Chocolate," and it's easy to take. It's easier still to fall in with the movie's openheartedness, its generosity of spirit. [11 Aug 1995, p.45]

Friday is funnier and funkier than "Bad Boys," more homegrown-seeming, less manufactured. It plays like "House Party" with attitude. [26 Apr 1995]

At its best, it will impale you on its raw urgency. At other times, it's a slog through long improvisations that never achieve dramatic liftoff.

If Return to Me is ultimately too bland and safe, it'll nevertheless serve as a calling card for Hunt's future directorial projects.

What the Hughes brothers have come up with is, to borrow another phrase from that bygone age, a penny dreadful.

I wish Blue Chips had pursued its indictment further up the food chain. But it brings off its tricky double mission, being entertaining while not letting anybody off the hook as it reminds us that amateur athletics is big business. [18 Feb 1994, p.39]

Particularly because Savini obviously feels a responsibility to the original, it's impossible for this new film to unfold with any sense of discovery or surprise. It's almost all just at the level of dutiful replication. [19 Oct 1990, p.35]

At times, the dead space in Escape from L.A. becomes impossible to ignore. But if it never quite becomes the wild ride it sets out to be, it's seldom boring to watch, either. [09 Aug 1996, p.C6]

While it preserves his baseball feats, it looks beyond them to clarify Greenberg's place in American culture.

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]

Avoids the potentially suffocating pall of uplift hovering over its quite exhilarating story.

As generic as its title, but two things enable it to land: the basic likability of Mark Wahlberg as the wannabe protagonist, and the contagious energies in the rock concert sequences.

Unless you're on its let's-laugh-at-the-loonies wavelength, The Dream Team is singularly unfunny. The writing and direction are smugly vacant, behaving as if the basic concept is so innately hilarious that neither need bother fleshing it out with characterization and inventiveness. The only thing prodigious about The Dream Team is its cheap witlessness. It makes Rain Man look like King Lear. [07 Apr 1989, p.35]

'Trainspotting'' Lite.

Most of the time Ernest Rides Again is a one-joke - or, rather, one-cannon - movie, enough to raise grave doubts about the importance of seeing - let alone being - Ernest. [12 Nov 1993, p.47]

The most traditional of Hollywood romances, in that it's resolutely about nice people with nice problems.

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

Dutifully bleak, suitably oppressive, the film delivers Atwood's desolate who-owns-our-bodies? indictment with intelligence and probity. [09 Mar 1990, p.25p]

Invigorating excellence.

The trouble with Grumpy Old Men is the patronizing attitude -- ageism, really -- that takes a too-broad approach to their geriatric world and renders it plastic. It is too cute and sanitized to allow its performers much in the way of opportunity.

Johnny Suede is too devoid of content to sustain our interest. [19 Sep 1992]

Narrow Margin isn't awful. It's solid and adult, but plodding and dull, rather like a living room filled with the last generation's furniture - not old enough to be considered an interesting antique, yet fundamentally out of touch with the present. It's too reasonable for its own good. [21 Sep 1990, p.44p]

It's acceptable Shakespeare - no more arbitrary than most stage productions, especially the willfully anachronistic ones, or the ones with political agendas thrust upon them. [18 Jan 1991]

The movie seems destined to win a place in the nocturnal-cityscape-hell hall of fame. Its externals are brilliant, but The Hudsucker Proxy is virtually nothing but externals. [25 Mar 1994, p.52]

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.

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

(Washington's is) an astonishing performance, partly because it's so devoid of histrionics, and it has Oscar nomination written all over it.

Although it's more concerned with justifying its title than with making contact with any real subversiveness, criminal or cultural, Airheads is the kind of sweet fluff it's easy to say yes to in August. [5 Aug 1994, p.46]

The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare's story into a context that ultimately doesn't accommodate it.

The film's biggest problem, however, is its naive inability to understand that sex comedies, to amuse, must be about more than sex.

You'll see worse, but The Dark Half could have been darker. [23 Apr 1993, p.45]

The big difference between Luc Besson's "La Femme Nikita" and this big, slick remake is that this new film has less visual edge and is more sentimental. It's more upfront with the idea that Maggie, as she's called here, has feelings. Still, Fonda's at her most compelling in the early scenes. [19 March 1993, p.50]

What saves it is that it's lighter than mousse and is animated by a handful of engaging performers.

The Cutting Edge plays like the kind of date movie written by a computer, and not a very smart one...It makes shaved ice look deep. [27 March 1992, p.29]

Something is missing in Bounce, the muted dynamic of which calls forth a perhaps inevitably muted reaction.

A babe-athon, pure and simple.

Tomorrow Never Dies works too hard to keep the James Bond franchise going, sacrificing Bond's signature light comedy and stylish playfulness to become just another hectic action movie. [19 Dec 1997]

There's nothing major here, certainly nothing on the order of my favorite among Allen's retro workouts of the past decade, ''Bullets Over Broadway.'' But it's entertaining all the same.

It's an instant classic, in every way the equal of the great Disney animations of the past. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

Housesitter is the kind of sweet little user-friendly concoction that until very recently defined the term summer movie. It won't solve the environmental crisis or raise your IQ, but neither is it likely to promote brain damage, which immediately puts it miles ahead of, say, the presidential race. And, needless to say, it's funnier. [12 June 1992, p.29]

Anybody who's ever laced on toe shoes, or wanted to, will find something to take away from Center Stage.

Serendipity returns us, if only for a couple of hours, to the Manhattan of our dreams.

She's (Dunst) the big reason the film rises above instantly rejectable formula to campy pop.

It's got flashes of brilliance from Tom Hanks as an unstable comedian whose desperation gives his routines their edge. It's also got an embarrassing performance by Sally Field as a frazzled New Jersey housewife who, late in the game, confronts her resentful family and says, "I want to be a mom, I want to be a wife, and I want to be a comedienne." On the whole, Punchline does not wear its schizophrenia well. [7 Oct 1988, p.38]