Jay Carr

Hook touches neither fantasy nor soulfulness nor yearning. Mostly, it's benign spectacle in which the actors keep yielding the camera to some expensive playground or other. Hook is neither wistful nor primal. It's film's most expensive wind-up toy. [11 Dec. 1991. p.53]

Far too long, but its rambunctiousness is engaging, propelled by Stone's virtuosic quick-cutting.

Runs out of helium and lands pretty heavily after its airy beginning.

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

Alda's work as a writer on M*A*S*H didn't go to waste. His script delivers a lot of laughs - patently related to TV sitcom, but laughs all the same. Betsy's Wedding is fun, and LaPaglia is a find. [22 Jun 1990, p.43p]

Shirley Valentine only intermittently captures the wistfulness and tough-minded humor Collins is so good at dispensing. The rest of the time, it's far from bracing. [22 Sept 1989, p.31]

The reason to sit through its uninspired, formulaic moves, however, is its half-dozen spectacular fight sequences.

A strong ending might have obscured the mediocrity in the writing, or at least diverted us, but the ending is sentimental where it needed to be hard-edged and comically merciless. For a film about people hurtling forward, Rat Race is pretty pedestrian.

Blew its chance to be an epic drug opera. It's only nostril-deep.

It's technically sophisticated and intermittently engaging, and its showdown is more than up to genre standards. But fresh it isn't. [19 July 1996, p.G4]

They're a far cry from the Coen brothers, or even the Polish brothers, but Josh and Jacob Kornbluth emerge intact from their first filmmaking venture and score more hits than misses in this comedy.

Director Roger Donaldson seems a bit too obviously caught up in the slick technology of zapping us with mayhem and death to allow Thompson's gritty viciousness to take root. [11 Feb 1994, p.41]

Dangerous Beauty is a costume drama that hasn't quite decided whether it wants to exist on the level of serious historical drama or trashy entertainment. [20 Feb 1998, p.C6]

Hughes succeeds more than he has any right to in Uncle Buck because he's able to override sitcom cliche with generosity. It's a smart idea to let Candy play feelings instead of just fatness and bluster. For a movie that isn't really that good, Uncle Buck is surprisingly likable. [16 Aug 1989, p.77]

Director Kevin Reynolds has difficulty stitching his material together and imparting to it a workable rhythmic scheme, making it more than once seem earthbound. This isn't the Robin Hood it could have been. Its pulse is too erratic. Still, it does give us a handsome and often entertaining new take on Sherwood Forest's most famous straight arrow. [14 June 1991, p.29]

While it's altogether smaller in its ambitions and achievements than Singleton's terrific "Boyz N the Hood," it at least allows Janet Jackson to emerge as a sympathetic presence, more credible than most pop singers making movie debuts. [23 July 1993]

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.

A supernatural thriller that is neither super, natural, nor thrilling.

The Big Lebowski isn't quite up to the level of the Coen brothers' best films - "Miller's Crossing," "Fargo" and "Barton Fink." But second-level Coen brothers can be funnier than first-level almost everybody else. [6 March 1998, p.D5]

Most of the time Things Change makes you marvel at how fresh a mob comedy can seem in the right hands. [21 Oct 1988, p.49]

Leviathan may be mediocre, unoriginal, boring and nauseating, but it probably won't be the worst sci-fi we'll see this year. [17 Mar 1989, p.46]

The most uncomprehending sequel of the last few years. It shows no awareness at all of what made the first film work so surprisingly well. What little emotion it summons is superficial and sentimental. The rest of the time it falls back on dumb farce and embarrassing Brit-bashing, climaxing with a vacuous chase scene. And this in a film that's supposed to be more mature than its predecessor. [21 Nov 1990, p.37]

Mostly it's Paredes' imperious - then surprisingly generous - high-handedness that carries High Heels. [20 Dec 1991]

There's too much control in it and not enough danger.

Karmic influences or not, the new "Mighty Joe Young" works. This is one remake that isn't trying to make us forget the original, but seems rather to embrace it and bring it into the present in solidly crafted, family-friendly fashion. [25 Dec 1998, p.C9]

Walter Hill's "Wild Bill" is a too-literal evocation of the played-out frontier experience. It's imaginatively shot and bravely and even iconically acted by Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickock, but it's numbed and numbing. [04 Mar 1996, p.32]

Muppetmaster Jim Henson has done a good job of translating the Turtles - and their 4-foot-tall rat guru, Splinter - into animatronic form. [30 Mar 1990, p.28p]

In short, the film isn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve and bring conviction to its focus on feelings. It's written with enough dexterity and wit to make you buy into it. [29 Jan 1999, p.C4]

No less than the first film, this new effort is both disarmingly sweet and politically appalling. [13 Apr 1990, p.48p]

Less than memorable.

Ford and Pfeiffer deliver craftsmanlike work, but the film steadily unravels as Zemeckis tries to ratchet up the suspense.

Poison Ivy isn't that much of a film. But part of its charm is that it doesn't pretend to be. It is, however, a great showcase for Drew Barrymore, as bad-news jailbait. [26 Jun 1992, p.29]

Before long, it runs out of steam, playing like the pilot for a TV sitcom called "Baby Knows Best." [13 Oct 1989, p.37]

Involvingly acted, surehandedly crafted.

Sequels and fun don't often coincide, but this time they do.

Good enough, but only just. It's got the hardware, but neither the characters, the imagination, nor the resonance one had hoped for.

Popcorn is a "Phantom of the Shlopera" - the kind of corny B-movie midnight campers can sink their plastic fangs into. [01 Feb 1991, p.21]

It plays like a pilot for what I imagine will be network TV's first all-gay sitcom.

It's not hard to take, but neither does it go anywhere really interesting, nor do the characters much involve us. The curious thing is that it had every reason to register as something more detailed and specific than the flatly generic thing it is. [23 Apr 1993, p.50]

There's no comic edge at all to Sister Act. It's all Whoopi and the three sisters, battling plastic writing and chintzy production values, convincing you that filmmaking this pedestrian ought to be declared the eighth deadly sin. [29 May 1992, p.34]

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]

One of the big problems with Romeo Is Bleeding is its voiceovers. Gary Oldman, as the crooked cop protagonist, drowns in them like quicksand. [4 Feb 1994, p.54]

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

Nicholson, Hunt, and Kinnear will win you over as they turn the film into a valentine to New York's walking wounded.

As it is, Behind Enemy Lines will satisfy only those in search of a rousingly, if simplistically, patriotic bloodbath.

French Kiss is a French miss. It's got the settings, but it has little magic, less charm and almost no chemistry between Meg Ryan's heartsick American innocent and Kevin Kline's shady Frenchman. [5 May 1995, p.57]

You expect virtuosic technique from Spielberg, and it's there, in spades. What you don't expect is heartfelt romanticism. But that's there, too... Always is a terrific-looking throwback to those large-scale '40s cinematic stews of romantic longing. [22 Dec. 1989, p.43]

Life with Mikey is awfully easy to take, thanks mostly to Fox's breezy charm. [4 June 1993, p.51]

Cadillac Man isn't perfect, but it's got enough peppy lowlife turmoil under its hood to pass most of what's on the road these days. [18 May 1990, p.77p]

The Shadow is more a triumph of window-dressing than cinema. It's dress-up, not drama, but it's a pile of style. [01 Jul 1994, p.49]

Fusco's script undercuts whatever freshness it may have brought to its view of Billy the Kid with a steady stream of howlers, most of which involve Kiefer Sutherland, as the sensitive member of the gang. [12 Aug 1988, p.24]

Sweet, but slight. [20 Oct 1995, p.52]

With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.

It's too psychically flat and dramatically inert. Instead of reinvigorating a Hollywood classic, Burton only takes it to camp.

For all the care and craftsmanship that have gone into Hoffa, it's a superficial film. [25 Dec 1992]

Quest for Camelot is easy to sit through and reasonably entertaining. Certainly it should satisfy its target audience. But Warner really needs to journey more boldly toward a personality of its own and offer a real alternative. [15 May 1998, p.D5]

What saves the film is the charm and earthy humor the actors wring from the spectacle of these four guys getting an early jump on their midlife crises.

A smartly crafted throwback to the gritty Manhattan crime melodramas of the '40s .

It's a small film, and a far from perfect one, but it allows her (Theron) to extend her range as no previous role has done.

The same underdog formulas and sunny disposition that turned it into an unexpected Thai box-office hit should win it friends here, too.

Tombstone is a big Christmas pudding of a neo-Peckinpah Western that doesn't quite hang together and is a bit too self-conscious about its looks. [24 Dec 1993, p.23]

Visually, Fat Man and Little Boy is almost obscenely beautiful. But while Joffe's eye is magnificent, his dramatic instincts are flaccid. [20 Oct 1989, p.79p]

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

All Dogs Go to Heaven" has the right spirit, and its warmth will offset what for small kids might be some scary moments. But it does seem skimpy and warmed over. [17 Nov 1989]

The attempts to supply heart are never more than synthetic, but Schwarzenegger, as the good guy with the good genes, and his goofy sweetness lift Twins into the win column. [9 Dec 1988, p.33]

Daring to be low-key and even a little old-fashioned, Wide Awake is a well-intentioned film that steers clear of cheap sentimental miracles and reassuringly holds out a vision of growth and healing measured in small steps. [27 Mar 1998, p.D8]

This ponderous, mostly empty exercise at least has ambition. It wants to be more than the usual gangsta zap. But about the best that can be said for it is that it dresses well. [25 Feb 1994, p.48]

It brings an enlivening wit to a comedy of culture collision.

The film never drags, but one of the enjoyable things about it is its way of taking its time letting us get to know and savor the characters.

The Crimson Rivers could teach many an American thriller a thing or two about sophisticated creepiness.

Dragonheart has what it needs at its heart - namely, the dragon. The rest of its story, about a disillusioned knight joining forces with the world's last dragon to help peasants overthrow a tyrannical 10th-century king, has a warmed-over quality. [31 May 1996, p.47]

Far and Away is a throwback to the handsome but stodgy historical romances Hollywood used to make, and it can at least be said that it's more ambitious than most of what we'll see this summer. [22 May 1992]

The techno-wizards at Industrial Light & Magic really knock themselves out here, but Casper is more serviceable than magical. [26 May 1995, p.85]

Great Balls of Fire is little more than just a whole lotta fakin' goin on. [30 June 1989, p.41]

Individual performances...are flavorful and simpatico.

Bummer theater.

The schizoid Gang Related is too heavy to be light and too light to be heavy. [8 Oct 1997, p.F3]

The film's flaws seem unimportant, and it passes the big test, making you want to find out what happens to these characters, even when what does happen is predictable.

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

Despite its conceptual shortfall, is worth seeing, if only to update yourself on what can emerge from a keyboard these days.

In short, My Fellow Americans is too much like the bland, numbing political campaigns of which we're still trying to clear our heads. [20 Dec 1996, p.E6]

There's no getting around the fact that the movie is pretty ponderous. The problem is that its writers and producers haven't really expanded or deepened the basic Conehead setup - they mostly drown it in more time and money than it ever had the first time around. [23 July 1993, p.42]

Sometimes trips over its own contrivance, especially at the ammo-ridden end.

Seems to be going through a series of motions so obviously virtual that it makes you wish that the filmmakers had stayed away from the computer keyboards entirely and stuck with the rotting tape look.

Lewis delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as the child-woman who wears tube tops and polyester and matter-of-factly tells the other woman that Early doesn't really whip her. [03 Sep 1993]

The important thing is that Hurley looks smashing in her succession of red outfits.

The reconstituted Vanishing is a pretty banal proposition. [05 Feb 1993, p.27]

A second-rate novel and a second-rate movie, in which some interestingly faceted acting can do only so much. [28 Sep 1990, p.46p]

Like the earlier film version, this one often exchanges the dark poetry of Golding's writing for action and connect-the-dots social anthropology, but it's crisp, taut and involving nonetheless. [16 Mar 1990, p.39]

Although it's the first time Hank Ketcham's mischievous kid has been brought to the big screen after a few TV versions, the film has the air of a weak, warmed-over sequel. [25 June 1993, p.51]

Less elliptical and more down-and-dirty than Lang's interesting debut film, ''The Well,'' this one tumbles through Sydney's academic and alternative poetry circles and is built around a lesbian private eye.

A story about the ravages of one war on a single man's soul and psyche becomes an eloquent plea for peace.

Although Species benefits from a new generation of computer-generated visuals, it can't hold a tentacle to Alien. Alien was more old dark-house thriller than sci-fi. Species turns into just another day in the LA pest-control biz. [07 July 1995, p.28]

It has a few laughs, but it also has a lot of dead air, and barely any plot at all. In sporting terms, it's no home run.

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]

Reminds us that the human dynamic can do a lot that explosions can't, even when the film flirts with formula.

It's warmer and fuzzier than the first film, though every bit as tedious.

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.

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.

Blurs the line between black comedy and black hole.

Lots of sex, but little joy.

The B-movie is still very much with us.

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]

Ready to Wear has entertaining bits, but for a film about people converging on Paris to increase the hysteria and anxiety levels, Ready to Wear has surprisingly little urgency. [23 Dec 1994, p.48]

A space shot worth taking.

Rarely has a movie that looked so good on paper fallen so flat as the aptly named Charlotte Gray. It's not a bad movie. Bad movies have more flavor.

In the end, it's simple warmth and sincerity that make this ensemble piece so disarming.

Washington and the others score in this predictable but rousing film where the big victory is over attitudes.

It's thoughtful as well as funny, and you never want to take your eyes off Barkin. [10 May 1991, p.27]

There's been talk about Van Damme deepening his excursions into acting. Wisely, though, he keeps Timecop on a comic strip level. [16 Sep 1994, p.72]

Risks seeming too earnestly therapeutic for its own good. But what makes My First Mister a successful feature directing debut for Lahti is the emotional veracity it summons.

Isn't as dark as ''Heathers'' or as witty as ''Clueless,'' but it's at least pointed in that direction.

It hasn't got a brain in its body, but it's fun to watch.

The question facing the target audience for Scary Movie is whether the funny bits will be enough of a payoff for sitting through the tedious stuff between them.

The Baby-Sitters Club is far from an unalloyed success, but it offers more pluses than minuses and is both gentle and instructive. [18 Aug 1995, p.50]

Von Trier's The Idiots is both lively and juvenile.

A mildly diverting gay-straight odd couple comedy that has just enough bright one-liners to carry it past its plot structuring.

Avalanches are nothing compared to the deadening touch of the stereotyping and audience-insulting simplicities in the scenic but brain-dead Vertical Limit.

While Memoirs of an Invisible Man has its moments - like so many Chevy Chase movies - you spend an awful lot of time waiting between laughs. [28 Feb 1992, p.28]

The script and direction are her real enemies here. Sleeping with the Enemy is a vehicle with too many manufacturing defects. [08 Feb 1991, p.39p]

Just Cause is a textbook example of one rewrite too many. [17 Feb 1995, p.38]

Although dated, it's not a bad musical.

You can't help cheering on Shallow Hal. That and the fact that it's not at all politically correct. It's something better. It's big-hearted, and it's funny.

Slick and outrageous and subversively funny, Doom Generation is the kind of date movie that will tell you perhaps more than you want to know about your date. [03 Nov 1995, p.46]

There's some terrific music in "Blues Brothers 2000," but you have to sit through a lot of tedious overkill to hear it. [06 Feb 1998, p.F5]

Brown and Dennehy aren't teen-age, they're not mutants, they're not ninjas, they're not even turtles, but they're just as entertaining the second time around, and of how many sequels can that be said? [10 May 1991, p.30]

In short, when Buffy starts getting fangy, it stops being tangy. It gets all serious and earnest and flops as a teen-age love story and as a vampire thriller and even as a parody. It's not even a "Fright Night," much less a "Near Dark," and only hints at a "Lost Boys" ambience. [31 Jul 1992, p.38]

Ultimately, the kids carry this manipulative tear-jerker. They're warm, lively charmers.

If you liked the earlier ''Mummy,'' you'll probably like this one. In fact, at many points you'll probably think you are watching the earlier one.

Martin makes Bilko's roguishness endearing, and entertaining enough to carry the film even if it is essentially an overextended half-hour sitcom episode. [29 Mar 1996, p.105]

Mindless glitz-o-ramas don't get any snazzier.

Disappoints.

There are many things that Better Than Sex is better than, although sex is not among them. It is better than a root canal, an IRS audit, or a rained-out ballgame.

Cool killers - Kitano's stock in trade - do not necessarily make for cool movies.

Richard Attenborough's Chaplin is little more than an illustrated crash course on Charlie Chaplin. But, while superficial, it at least avoids disgrace. [08 Jan 1993, p.25]

Nichols is a director who cleanly sculpts his scenes, leaving no intention or action vague. Maybe he should have allowed for a little more ambiguity. [10 July 1991, p.51]

Light on its feet and reveling in its deviousness, it stays one step ahead of us .

Pee- wee's Big Adventure is a shrewdly observed, deftly executed looney tune. [9 Aug 1985, p.42]

Cries out for the brisk pacing of a Sturges or a Wilder. As is, it's too lumpish, languid, and lukewarm to hit even the guilty pleasure zone.

The romantic stuff is tepid. Luckily, his onscreen buddy, Hall, never strays far. Coming to America is at its best when they're playing off each other, and not just as the prince and his buddy. [29 Jun 1988, p.69]

Although 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a classier failure than Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, the glum truth is that both are lost at sea. [09 Oct 1992, p.85]

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

It's heady in the beginning, chaotic throughout, and numb with the suddenness of the Internet economy's plummet at the end.

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

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]

Grant is surrounded by terrific comic performances from Robin Williams, Tom Arnold and Jeff Goldblum. Director Chris Columbus bolsters them with lively, robust pacing, turning Nine Months into a comedy of pregnancy that tests positive. [12 July 1995, p.41]

Neil Jordan's High Spirits wants to be a supernatural comedy. But it isn't super, it isn't natural, it isn't high, and it isn't spirited. [18 Nov 1988, p.33]

While visually handsome, Oscar is terminally sluggish. [26 Apr 1991, p.71]

Kevin Costner's epic Wyatt Earp literally and figuratively gives you more of the legendary lawman than any of the other famous movies about him. [24 Jun 1994, p.47]

It falls far short of the lighthandedness, whimsy and feeling it needs to override its slightness. You keep wanting to like it, to match the good will coming out of the actors, but the writing keeps shoving its fabricated nothingness in your face. [09 Dec 1988, p.36]

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

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

Figgis's film doesn't match its reach.

The Dead Pool is not a subtle movie or a bloodless one, although it does manage to put its own twist on the usual car chase sequence. [13 Jul 1988, p.59]

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]

Petrie's directing debut - he had been a scriptwriter - is proficient and assured from the technical standpoint, but he's unable to overcome the essential preposterousness of his screenplay. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

Lori Petty gives her enough scrappiness on screen to make her a lot of fun to watch. When Tank Girl isn't playing like "Road Warrior" meets "La Femme Nikita," it plays like "The Crow" meets "The Brady Bunch," and it's the ultimate spring-break movie. [31 March 1995, p.57]

Although we're only two weeks into 1989, we've already got a movie so resoundingly awful that it's bound to stand the test of time and emerge as one of the year's worst. [13 Jan 1989, p.48]

Despite its good looks and expertly turned performances, it trivializes Kafka and his work. The simplistic optimism behind it is more terrifying than anything we actually see on screen. Sitting through Kafka is like watching somebody staff a suicide hotline by telling callers to just lighten up. [21 Feb. 1992, p.28]

It's more of a throwback to one of the first SNL movie spinoffs, Steve Martin's "The Jerk." It's loaded with physical comedy and enlists Farley's SNL foil, David Spade, to serve as Abbott to Farley's Costello. Farley plays the blimp on uppers, Spade plays the pinched little know-it-all nerd with a chip - a computer chip, probably - on his shoulder. What mostly keeps it going is the sheer gusto with which Farley throws himself into the clowning. It's passably entertaining if you don't think about it too much - and to see it is to realize that it works mightily at getting you to not think too much. [31 March 1995, p.59]

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]

Neither as rollicking nor as wild as one had hoped, but Tyler's tongue-in-cheek noir goddess transcends cliche and the screenplay's other shortcomings terrifically.

Red blood, white sands and a blue Corvette are the real stars of "White Sands," the slick new Roger Donaldson thriller that's more about its plot convolutions than its characters, and more about its visuals than either. [24 Apr 1992, p.85]

The script by Ian Abrams puts them through strictly formulaic moves, but it has flashes of wit and it's even literate. [10 Sept 1993, p.47]

It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]

With Carrey hitting a career peak, this Grinch doesn't steal Christmas; it restores the season by helping energize us enough to make it through the whole thing.

A Good Man in Africa has its sensibilities in the right place, and sometimes its wit, too, but its shenanigans can't mask a certain shortfall. [09 Sep 1994, p.53]

Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do. After a long dry spell, Brooks is back on the money with Spaceballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.33]

As engaging as it is ungainly and scattered.

Little more than a screenful of boy meets boy, boy meets baggage, boy loses baggage.

You're never unaware of the calculation underlying this Jetsons movie. Still, it succeeds in teleporting the clan to the movie screen. [6 July 1990, p.61]

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]

Richard Attenborough's film version of the long-running Broadway musical hit A Chorus Line not only avoids the disaster that many had predicted for it, but is often surprisingly effective and enjoyable, transcending its troubled history. [20 Dec 1985]

A comic vehicle for that valuable Australian export, Rachel Griffiths.

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.

The 'Burbs begins promisingly, as if Joe Dante is going to yank a Steven Spielberg film into Blue Velvet depths. Once the premise is laid down, however, the film deflates and empties with alarming speed. [17 Feb 1989, p.88]

When the plot turns coy and arch as Alfalfa falls in love with a kewpie doll named Darla, however, the film turns insufferable. [05 Aug 1994, p.48]

John Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano starts out so brilliantly, so hilariously, so imaginatively, that even as it's cracking you up, you begin worrying that the rest of the film can't possibly be that good. Sure enough, it isn't. In fact, it deflates pretty alarmingly. But at least it has that beginning. [9 Mar 1990, p.27]

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

Washington and Jolie earn their stripes here, but more texture would have resulted, I think, in more terror.

It's absorbing, although draggy.

The result is a megabudget "House Party" -- amiable, colorful, filled with glamour and style. [01 Jul 1992]

Sweetly macabre charmer.

This one is nearly as bad as it gets, suggesting that all the wrong people were wielding the sledgehammers here.

It's mostly just buddies-bonding-over-bullets stuff. [29 Jan 1993, p.24]

But despite the vibrancy of its images and the exquisiteness of its craftsmanship, Jefferson in Paris doesn't often light a fire under its material. [07 Apr 1995]

The film is content to remain at the level of the mildly entertaining, with no real surprises and not much sass. [04 Dec 1992]

Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]

while not without pleasures, I Love You to Death essentially seems a film in search of a tone. [06 Apr 1990]

May not emerge as the biggest disaster of the holiday movie season, if only because we haven't yet seen all the other year-end films. But it is a huge high-energy misfire, bringing Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Crowe to earth with a thud.

She-Devil has its moments, thanks chiefly to Meryl Streep's way with the comic role of a la-de-da writer of romance novels. But devilishness is precisely what it lacks. Unlike "The War of the Roses," the other marital vendetta comedy opening today, She-Devil hasn't got the courage of its nasty convictions. [8 Dec 1989, p.59]

Quite apart from wringing the last molecule of vividness from his freewheeling roster of loose cannons, he brings to his direction of Martin a finesse shared by only a few of the directors who have worked with the comedian-actor.

More machine than mean, although it's anything but a smoothly running operation.

Mostly, though, Lynch fills the screen with a lot of cynically off-putting and sadistic violence. In place of incident, character and a bemused view of small-town life, corrupt beneath its cherry-pie surface, we are essentially asked to witness torture - mostly of Laura Palmer, as her troubles lead her to self-destruct with drugs and promiscuity, including a couple of side trips to the Canadian bordello known as One-Eyed Jacks. For all the violence in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," that film maintained a comic dimension. The violence in "Wild at Heart," for all its extravagance of gesture, was hollow - stylized, not real...Here, there's no comedy, nothing surreal, just wave after wave of titillation. Except that it doesn't titillate. It depresses. There's no psychic charge on any of it. It proceeds from no artistic conviction, just from a cynical desire to squeeze a few more bucks from the already overworked corpse of Laura Palmer. It shows how quickly a creative impulse can be exhausted - from quirky originality toying with humanity's darker impulses to dispirited quasi-porn. [29 Aug 1992, p.23]

Too bad The Kid gets bogged down in its sentimental manipulations. It has more going for it than you might suppose.

Strenuously as it tries, and pulse-poundingly successful as the embassy rescue scene is, Rules of Engagement never engages us.

Essentially, the film's strategy is to fight predictability with bonehead amiability, and on this level it's a crowd-pleaser. [27 Dec 1991, p.28]

This one is hollow and caves in on itself, growing wearisome and posed, ending in a burst of salvational violence and a coda of sentimentality masquerading as transcendent toughness. [13 Jan 1995]

It's a charmer.

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]

Runs dry amid the cactus and sagebrush, but Graham's cartoony take on angelic unstoppableness makes us not mind so much.

Brightly sidesteps the cliches that cling to the genre like barnacles and reinvents a lot of the old moves.

The film never quite hits a sure-footed stride. The fictional love story stays fictional. But ''Pearl Harbor'' delivers the main event.

In short, Nowhere needs more humor, more wildness. Its pandemonium is only on the surface - which could have been the premise of a really humorous take on teen chaos. But it doesn't push the envelope as much as Araki's previous films. Although it gives his pop sensibility a vigorous workout, Nowhere is Araki's Mallrats. [06 June 1997, p.D6]

Landis spends too much time in the realm of the cartoony, where he's clearly comfortable, and less time in the area of the suavely insinuating, where any vampire movie really lives. Innocent Blood is pumped-up, but anemic. [25 Sept 1992, p.34]

There's nothing really awful about Angels in the Outfield." But it never becomes more than an efficient, by-the-numbers reworking of the 1951 baseball fantasy about cellar-dwellers turned pennant-winners with a little supernatural help. [15 July 1994, p.41]

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]

It's a little too long, a little too corny, a little too packaged, but its warmth and regenerative energies make it a winner. [03 Jun 1994]

Last Action Hero is a spectacularly uneven movie. Its action is hectic, but scattershot and mostly pretty empty. On the other hand, it is entertaining in surprising ways. [18 Jun 1993, p.41]

Scott makes it easy to overlook the conventionality beneath his sometimes overdone but almost always enjoyable combination of atmosphere and propulsiveness.

Provoke us into examining whether the onus is on the man for turning it into a commercial proposition or the woman for agreeing to his offer.

Even allowing for differences in national styles, Kikujiro sprawls and stumbles. It's a road movie that turns into its own detour.

A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a sturdily crafted but only mildly amusing goof on Kevin Costner's 1991 Sherwood Forest outing. It further confirms that Mel Brooks has lost something off his fastball since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. [28 July 1993, p.22]

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]

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is sweet but dumb and clumsily executed, with its central character overdrawn and undermined, and the adults mostly written off as geeks. What the film needs is some of the troublemaking spunkiness Roxy showed when she left town. [12 Oct 1990, p.30p]

Dramatically speaking, The Caveman's Valentine is a dead end.

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

Juicy acting and an intense individual and communal commitment that seems to boil up from the streets carry Southie past its structural and technical limitations. [28 May 1999]

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.

You keep waiting for it to go into orbit, to be really fizzy and outrageous, like the screwball farce it wants to be. Instead, the film settles for the merely serviceable.

For all its wide, open spaces, City Slickers II is mostly smoke and mirrors, but thanks to its humor and generosity of spirit, it's an enjoyable diversion in this summer of brang-yer-twang films. [10 June 1994, p.49]

There are times when "Star Trek V" seems padded and low-impact, but there are things to like, too. [9 June 1989, p.81]

The film is mostly Lemmon's in a quietly stunning performance you frankly didn't know he had in him. [27 Oct 1989, p.29p]

Isolated offbeat moments aside, The Mexican mostly fires blanks.

Robin Williams and Billy Crystal don't quite hit a dream team level of hilarity in Fathers' Day. They don't send you home empty-handed, either. [9 May 1997, p.C7]

Light It Up isn't a great movie, but it's a cut above most so-called urban thrillers.

It's "Beach Blanket Bingo" revisited, but with a Eurocast and more exotic locations.

With what doubtless are the best intentions, the film wants to do several things, and does. The trouble is that it doesn't do any of them very well. [07 Feb 1992, p.32]

As a flawed but lovably lionhearted woman, Barrymore triumphantly comes of age as an actress.

The kind of movie you can enjoy easily enough, as long as you don't think about it much.

Hocus Pocus is fun, as Dan Aykroyd used to say, within limits. [16 July 1993, p.40]

This version may not be as stylish or as sparkling as Richard Lester's 1974 outing with Michael York as D'Artagnan, but it's winningly rambunctious and pushes ahead in livelier fashion than the other versions. [12 May 1993, p.48]

Solid B-level stuff, better than most filmed King novels. [27 Aug 1993, p.81]

After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.

Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct is a slick, trashy, blatantly manipulative thriller that you won't stop watching once you start. [20 Mar 1992, p.25]

But Skin Deep hasn't the energy level or the inventiveness to sustain the demands of sex farce. There's only one sight gag as funny, involving glow-in-the-dark prophylactics. There's also only one role that's sympathetic. As usual, it's the Julie Andrews role of long-suffering wife, played by Alyson Reed. One last complaint: In the guise of being unflinching about dancing on the edge of outrage, the film reveals a mean streak involving cruel things done to dogs. Skin Deep spends what seems like a lot of time living up to - or is it down to? - its name. [3 March 1989, p.47]

She (Bullock) has a way of landing on her feet and remaining simpatico no matter how cheesy the script is. That's what happens here.

Cronenberg's direction is technically impressive, but he's better suited to stories based on surges of feeling between killers, not lovers. This M. Butterfly never takes wing. [08 Oct 1993]

Flipper, the latest incarnation of everybody's favorite dolphin, doesn't exactly make waves, but it's easy to take, especially when the underwater cameras are working. [17 May 1996, p.56]

The film works because Depardieu is relaxed enough to turn in persuasive acting that keep us from noticing how plastic the setup is. [4 Feb 1994, p.52]

You'll laugh at Bones a lot more often than you'll be scared by it, assuming you'll be scared at all.

The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.

Sitting through it is like waking up on Christmas morning to find a stockingful of styrofoam.

Gets by on the watchability of its young stars.

The film keeps being yanked back from nothingness by this or that clever sendup, delivered by a small army of invigorated performers who seem to push off from one another's energy levels.

The cop-out is mitigated by Allen's ability to impart a comfortable, lived-in quality to his roles, this one included.

To be blunt, Raising Cain is a thriller that doesn't thrill. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

The bathroom jokes in Gun Shy wear thin.

Part of the reason for the comic surehandedness is the obvious chemistry between Shannon, Ferrell, and director Bruce McCulloch.

Mostly plays like an artificial stupidity experiment. Zappy visuals aside, it's essentially a reactionary take on science, stemming from the movies' traditional belief that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a lot of knowledge is worse. Think of it as Faust Goes to the Lab, with an ambitious doc serving as Mephistopheles. [6 Mar 1992, p.30]

There's talent on view in Renegades, even if it's mostly subordinated to formula and marketing imperatives. [02 Jun 1989, p.33]

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

What makes it worth sitting through is the chance it offers to catch up on the technical advances since the last installment.

About everything is big in The 13th Warrior except the writing, which is microscopic.

It begins promisingly.... But the film has no center, succumbs to drift, and gets away from Hackford. [03 Mar 1984]

It works not because ridiculousness is concealed, but because ridiculousness on this scale becomes something else. Don't let anyone tell you that Stargate, lifeless script and all, isn't clunky fun, proudly trembling on the brink of classic camp. [28 Oct 1994, p.48]

Few actors apart from Williams could bring it off.

Larceny at its most labored.

Michael J. Fox seems a lot breezier and smarter than what's surrounding him in For Love or Money. It's an old-fashioned romantic comedy that's a little too old-fashioned as it clanks through its plot. [1 Oct 1993, p.52]

Although Crazy People would have been snappy fun in the '30s, or really wacky in the hands of a Preston Sturges in the '40s, it's pretty flaccid and pedestrian in Tony Bill's hands, not crazy enough. Still, it's on to something with those parodies. [11 Apr 1990, p.43]

Jungle 2 Jungle is surprisingly bearable. [07 Mar 1997, p.D5]

By placing all its faith in production design and high-powered computerized effects, and not enough where it really matters, namely character and atmosphere, The Haunting relegates itself to the slag heap of embarrassing claptrap. [23 July 1999, p.D4]

Efficient, but in the end quite pedestrian.

RoboCop 2 isn't brain-dead, and perhaps that should be enough in this summer of pummeling sequels. But it isn't. Not in an action movie. [22 June 1990, p.43p]

Fire in the Sky, the latest abducted-by-aliens movie, is no Close Encounters. It's hardly any encounter at all. [13 Mar 1993, p.10]

Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.

There's no getting around the fact that it's an uneven exercise that shows signs of having gestated too long. [04 Jun 1999]

The Disney people have taken such obvious care in making Return to Oz that it's a shame it didn't turn out better. It has its moments - mostly visual - but when it isn't a grim downer, it's largely inert. [21 Jun 1985, p.21]

There's always been room for rudeness in humor. In fact, it can be invigorating. But Bubble Boy goes through the motions of being outrageous when all it's really got is a rage to conform to formula.

A ton of fun, and then some.

The action is mostly witless and predictable. One measure of its desperation and lack of respect for its audience is the frequency with which it labors to wring humor from flatulence and excrement gags.

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]

Character is almost wholly subordinated to a blast-furnace rendering of the hell into which they're dumped. Seldom will you see so many US military body parts strewn around a movie screen.

A romantic fairy tale that's light and in several ways seductive, if not exactly filling.

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]

Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]

The film is almost as shaky as the science, but Nichols knows how to get the most out of what amounts to a one-joke comedy, and Bening works virtual miracles.

Judd is pretty much on her own - an assignment she mostly can handle with aplomb.

For all its propulsion (when it isn't slogging through would-be love scenes), Metro is unable to avoid seeming like yet another of the vanity movies that got Murphy into the career trouble from which he just extricated himself. Murphy vulnerable is more appealing than Murphy as supercop. [17 Jan 1997, p.D6]

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

Deserves a place alongside "Life Is Beautiful" and, yes, even "Schindler's List."

A fatally insubstantial film.

Kids who like the TV episodes will find more of the same here, and larger. [30 June 1995, p.53]

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

It's a ponderous but not unenjoyable comedy.

Fletch Lives isn't a total zero. Three, or maybe four, of Chevy Chase's wisecracks work. But everything else about the film is feeble and poky. Even its tastelessness lacks the coarse energy of vulgarity. It's hard to believe that the world has had to wait five years for this witless, insipid sequel to "Fletch," an original that's easy to top. [17 Mar 1989, p.45]

If you get dizzy watching Final Analysis, it may be because it's such a "Vertigo" wannabe. But director Phil Joanou is no Hitchcock, and Kim Basinger, its star, is no Kim Novak, even though Joanou poses and lights her in a critical lighthouse scene the way Hitchcock posed and lit Novak in that bell tower in "Vertigo." The big problem with "Final Analysis," though, is that Richard Gere's pivotal expert shrink is pretty easy to fool. Not until late in the film does he literally run to a library to learn about one of Freud's classic case histories. You have to suspend a ton of disbelief to buy the assumptions you have to make about him, starting with his gullibility. [7 Feb 1992, p.29]

Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]

For all its antic grasping it lies flatter on the screen than its graphic novel source lies on the page.

Three Fugitives isn't the total disaster that such remakes as "The Woman in Red" and "The Tall Blond Man with One Red Shoe" have been. It has moments, mostly having to do with physical comedy, of which Veber is a master. Mostly, though, you keep closing your eyes and wishing that when you open them, Nolte and Short will be gone, and Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard will appear in their place, as they deserve to. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]

The kind of film you've got to admire simply for the way it squares its shoulders and plunges into a message of unfashionable idealism.

It's not only the flattest film in which Williams has appeared; it's also the most anemic Levinson has directed. [18 Dec 1992, p.47]

The imagery is lush, but the story is pretty cornball, with an ending that can only be called pure Hollywood. Only the marvelous Cate Blanchett transcends stereotype.

A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]