Jay Carr

Beneath its glitz, poses, and pub crawlers and club prowlers, it's an old-fashioned morality tale.

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.

Writing ignites miracles in Henry Fool, and Hartley's exquisite control over his compositions and pacing makes the outrages, biological and otherwise, funnier than you might believe. [01 Jul 1998]

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.

it's an OK genre movie, providing an honest quota of scares and carried by Hoffman's way of alternating stoniness and warmth as the guy in the anticontamination suit. [10 Mar 1995, p.49]

Risky Business is the sleeper of the summer. It's a refreshing change from the usual dumb teenage ripoffs, the slickest American film since "Trading Places" and "War Games," and a strong directorial debut for Paul Brickman, who knows his way around teen fantasies. [05 Aug 1983]

This one is a tensely clammy screw-tightener about an ex-con (Gene Nelson) pressured to become part of a bank heist. No cop ever chewed a toothpick better than Sterling Hayden does here. [07 Jan 1996, p.C31]

There are so many wonderful moments in Trixie and so few films like it that you wish Rudolph had given it a few more rewrites.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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.

Lane does know how to photograph his own interesting, large-eyed face to potent effect. He's an appealing talent, and Sidewalk Stories is a likable film. Beyond novelty value, it also finds modern ways of making contact with the very real feel for poverty that was so much a part of the early Chaplin films. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]

As engaging as it is ungainly and scattered.

Doesn't make nearly the ripple it could have made.

It's a much better bad movie than the first one. It isn't often in Hollywood that a director gets the chance to go back and essentially remake a failed film but Lambert, refusing to let sleeping cadavers lie, gets the job done this time. [28 Aug 1992, p.50]

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

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]

While Q & A derails, it's still marked by a love of language and a genuine civic passion that isn't afraid to face ugly facts, and of how many films can that be said? [27 Apr 1990, p.29p]

A firm, ringing yes and no on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The best thing about it may be that it will lead many back to read -- or re-read -- the book.

Doesn't quite rank with the films that bracket Heckerling's pop-culture high priestess status

You won't feel raped by it, but you well may feel that it's too ideologically earnest for the porn crowd and too hard-core for serious audiences.

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]

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

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]

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 Accused is far from a perfect film, but it's got a terrific performance by Foster, a pretty good one by McGillis, and Lansing's knack for casting women's issues in a form that makes people go see them at the movies. [14 Oct 1988, p.49]

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

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]

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.

Isn't much more than ''Baise-Moi'' in business suits as they deconstruct sisterhood with an expense account, but their duets sizzle.

It never really chills you, but then it never insults you, either, and it's more affecting than you expect any film based on a Stephen King novel to be. [22 Oct 1983]

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]

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

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]

The immaculately crafted film that just sits there and refuses to come to life.

As cumbersome as most films in this subgenre, Angelina Jolie makes it watchable.

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

He's (Willard) a one-man storm of escalating inanity, and he's hilarious.

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

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

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]

Can't outrun its very visible limits.

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

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]

Its pile-driving succession of set pieces comes at you with numbingly relentless efficiency, presumably in the hope that you won't notice or care how dumb it all is.

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

'Trainspotting'' Lite.

Despite the heavy-handedness, isn't awful enough to be a hilarious howler. But neither is it good enough to become the tropical noir it could have been.

Lots of sex, but little joy.

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]

If you walk in with your expectations at a suitably low setting, you won't walk away disappointed.

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]

The characters, in short, are never given enough dimension, enough chance to develop the individual tics and eccentricities on which this kind of comedy thrives.

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]

It's not that the film is devoid of honestly earned laughs here and there. The problem is that there are too few of them and that the film can't connect them.

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

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]

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]

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

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]

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

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]

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]

Efficient, but in the end quite pedestrian.

What Fatal Instinct seems to overlook, though, is that erotic thrillers such as "Basic Instinct" and "Fatal Attraction" do a pretty good job of parodying themselves. Rather than really develop any of their setups, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner seem to think it's enough simply to cite the originals. [29 Oct 1993, p.51]

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

In the end, it's much ado about not very much, certainly not enough to catapult Bass into a film career, but probably enough to satisfy 'N Sync fans.

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

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]

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

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

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]

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]

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

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

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.

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]

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]

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]

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

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

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]

Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]

A gorgeous screenful of period eye candy.

The sad thing about Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart is that it fails in every important respect, yet is in no way cheap or exploitative. [20 Sep 1990, p.81p]

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]

Neither the film nor the play has figured out where to go with Barry Champlain once it plants him at the center of his can-of-worms microcosm. We're never bored by his whiplash flailings, but on screen, as on stage, we can't help asking ourselves to what end they're being deployed. [13 Jan 1989, p.46]

The best thing about the film is the way it allows Richard Pryor to rise above the demeaning buffoon roles he's been playing for the last few years and finally play a character with dignity and style. [17 Nov 1989, p.89]

An example of a film that begins with a provocative idea and then runs itself into the ground with clumsy structuring.

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a nonstop gross-out contest of absolutely no socially redeeming value at all, unless you happen to value laughter. Ford Fairlane is funny garbage. [11 Jul 1990, p.41]

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]

His (Green) new gross-out comedy is crude and stupid, but just as often rudely funny. It doesn't so much push the envelope as shred it.

Although expertly directed by Bill Duke, Deep Cover becomes the cinematic equivalent of a drive-by shooting, posing as community uplift. [15 Apr 1992, p.91]

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

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

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]

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]

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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

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

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

As he proved in his screenplay for Moonstruck, John Patrick Shanley has an ear for New Yorkese and a soft spot for eccentrics. Both are in evidence in The January Man, but what could have been an offbeat, original cop movie fails because Shanley can't meet the more conventional requirements of the genre, such as plotting, characterization and suspense. [13 Jan 1989, p.47]

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

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]

A sweet, visually handsome sermon, but it's too dramatically bland to convert even the converted.

There's a whole lotta latex goin' on. The trouble is that not enough else is going on.

Gets by on the watchability of its young stars.

Perhaps a little more back story would have given Levitch some dimension and given us a bit more incentive to commiserate with him. As it is, a little Levitch goes a long way. [20 Nov 1998, p.C4]

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]

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

Never earns the rollicking life affirmation it's after.

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'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]

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

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]

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

Isolated offbeat moments aside, The Mexican mostly fires blanks.

While Last of the Mohicans is an eyeful - how could anything shot in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina not be? - it's mindless, meticulous in its externals, taking refuge from awareness by clinging to Cooper's distortions. In the end, it'll be remembered for its three S's: Stowe, Studi and the scenery. [25 Sep 1992, p.27]

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.

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

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]

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

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

Sonatine is less stylish and affecting than Fireworks. Its deadpan satire becomes indistinguishable from numbing slack as the waiting game is played out.[17 Apr 1998, p.F7]

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]

Dogged allegiance to blandness.

The film musical is at the moment an even more devitalized art form than the Broadway musical. But Moulin Rouge doesn't revive it. It only rearranges the bones.

Although idiotic, The Evil Dead at least is propelled by energy and enthusiasm. It's scarier than many a more pretentious effort, and not everything in it is borrowed. [8 Oct 1983, p.Arts1]

Doesn't so much strike a lot of sour notes as fail to strike the right ones.

For a while, Light Sleeper hangs together promisingly. But when Dafoe's character meets old flame Dana Delaney, the plot spirals into preposterousness involving a sinister Eurotrash client, and the film also gets away from Schrader, who isn't a deft enough director to conceal or minimize the flaws in his script. [15 Sep 1992, p.71]

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

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]

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]

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

Any ESPN commercial at all leaves it in the dust when it comes to imaginative firepower.

Fallen is a more than usually ambitious but ultimately failed attempt to merge a supernatural thriller and cop-chase movie. [16 Jan 1998, p.D6]

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.

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]

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]

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]

Although dated, it's not a bad musical.

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

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

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]

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.

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]

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]

Captain Ron is an inconsequential but inoffensive little comedy dedicated to the proposition that inheriting Clark Gable's yacht can be a real problem. A throwback to the plastic Disney family comedies of the late '50s and early '60s, it's at least trim and shipshape, if never inspired or original. [18 Sep 1992, p.56]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

The Fan isn't a strikeout, but it doesn't exactly knock the cover off the ball, either. It's more like a soft pop fly, taking its time before settling very predictably into a waiting fielder's glove. [16 Aug 1996, p.D3]

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]

Might give you a few decorating ideas if you happen to have been wondering about a home bomb shelter, but it's a thriller that doesn't thrill.

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.

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

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]

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]

Although his (Jarmusch) films have moments of sly obliqueness, they leave us feeling stranded in underdevelopment. This is the case with Night on Earth, which is launched on a promising conceit - nocturnal taxi rides in five cities around the world during the same time slot. By the time the film ends, we can't help wondering just who has been taken for a ride. [15 May 1992, p.85]

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]

Although Rush gives the film visual texture, he can't give it credibility or metaphorical dimension. Color of Night is nocturnal, but not much more. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

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

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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

Bait ends up seeming pretty wormy.

Never brings its potentially intriguing plot strands into focus.

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]

Appealing as he can be at playing loose cannons, however, Cage can only go so far before being mired in a script that generates stereotypes as quickly as it thinks it's knocking them down. [05 Mar 1993, p.64]

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]

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]

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 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.

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.

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

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]

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]

Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]

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]

Intermittently engaging but inescapably overextended.

More self-mockery is needed, less self-regard. [07 Apr 1995, p.90]

It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.

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

Don't Say a Word can be thought of as a case of Dial B for Boring.

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]

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]

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.

The film is gentle and carries a simple moral.

Franco Zeffirelli's reputation as a popularizer of Shakespeare stems from this gusty swirl of a 1968 production built around - and aimed at - teens. The uncomprehending looks on the faces of Leonard Whiting's Romeo and Olivia Hussey's Juliet only increase the film's demographic pull, as poetry is replaced with prettiness. [18 Jan 1991, p.32p]

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]

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]

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

A flimsy sister act.

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]

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]

Disappoints.

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]

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]

Degenerates into a lot of dull declaiming and attitudinizing, despite a sly tongue-in-cheek quality brought by a preening Stuart Townsend to the Lestat role he inherited from the utterly humorless Tom Cruise.

Rendering experience synthetic, replacing desperation with cuteness, Frankie & Johnny is Love Lite. [11 Oct 1991, p.49]

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

Wonderfully cast and slickly directed, but so crudely written.

The Edge is mostly corny macho mano-a-mano stuff, made watchable by spectacular scenery and a lot of understatement in Anthony Hopkins's performance and David Mamet's screenplay - until an overwrought ending brings it down. [26 Sep 1997, p.D7]

In both senses of the word, American Psycho wastes its women.

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

There are laughs here and there, and Graham and Klein aren't nearly as grating as what surrounds them. But there's no getting around the fact that far from seeming a labor of love, Say It Isn't So seems merely labored.

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]

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

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]

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]

Cronenberg hasn't so much filmed Naked Lunch as tamed it, turned it into entertainment, with oozy rubber bugs, big and little, that look left over from David Lynch's movie of "Dune," or the intergalactic dive from "Star Wars." [10 Jan 1992]

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

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]

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

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]

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]

A high-impact, high-powered mess that raises the bar for over-the-topness.

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]

Onstage, Noises Off was a riot. On film, it's in the salvage business, snatching a few vagrant laughs from a reworking that otherwise sinks like a failed souffle, reminding us yet again that farce onstage and farce on film are two fundamentally different constructs. [20 March 1992, p.30]

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]

Conspicuously short on the kind of texture that makes us feel we're watching real people living real lives.

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

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 climactic explosion is too obviously a rigged gunpowder charge, and it becomes a metaphor for the film's mistake of diminishing the frantic motion that kept things fizzy and fun.

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]

In its zeal to counter the negativity usually found in depictions of Mormons, God's Army eventually succumbs to overearnestness, sentimentality, and cliche.

The B-movie is still very much with us.

The Graduate is not subtle in its writing off of the parental generation as hopelessly corrupt. [Review of re-release]

Von Trier's visuals are stunning enough to almost conceal the hollowness of his elliptical story. [03 Jul 1992, p.42]

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]

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]

The script is a little too clunky to serve Ricki Lake well, and Richard Benjamin's direction is a bit too sluggish to disguise her limited range as he crams this romantic fairy tale a little too forcefully into its predetermined mold. [19 Apr 1996, p.53]

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's hard to find the movie unpleasant, but it's hard to imagine it causing any strong reaction at all.

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

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

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

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

Has more ambition than the usual serial killer film, but curiously less urgency.

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]

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