Jay Scott

As long as it remains within the carefully constructed, peaceful and innocent cosmos of its opening, it's nonpareil. When it goes to war, it goes to hell. [18 Dec 1992]

Everything Terms of Endearment's detractors accused Terms of being: a synthetic, manipulative tragi-comedy with performances more appropriate to a proscenium arch - or to a drag show - than to the wide screen. And yet, there are moments in the movie of high comedy and sequences of searing truth. At its worst, Steel Magnolias is vastly inferior to Designing Women; at its best, it brings to mind (but never equals) Tennessee Williams. [20 Nov 1989]

Eating Raoul is often very funny, but it guns down its targets (hot tubs, taco stands) without revealing anything new about them - it's broader than parody, less pointed than satire - and it crudely manipulates the audience into congratulating itself on its own hipness. [15 Oct 1982]

First Blood is a gung-ho action flick fast enough and brutal enough to become Stallone's first non-Rocky hit; on the profound sympathetic levels it seeks to address, however, it is an emission of profound stupidity. [22 Oct 1982]

YET another movie about a woman who is Trouble, French director Louis Malle's lushly shot Damage wants to be Last Tango in Paris for the nineties, but it is structurally and psychologically so unsound - despite several excellent performances - that it is less arousing than soporific. [22 Jan 1993]

Fort Apache, The Bronx, set primarily in a precinct house, is the S & M Barney Miller... One comes away from the film exhausted, both by the excess of incident in the script and by the reality in which the excess is so obviously grounded. [7 Feb 1981]

The Black Stallion Returns is not a magic monument - it's only a terrific film for kids. [26 Mar 1983]

Two great beginnings disappoint in the end. If the novel is a dying form, film treatments are the poison. [21 Sep 1981]

Graham Baker, a British director of television commercials, makes a debut that is technically auspicious, and Robert Paynter and Phil Meheux, the cinematographers, have approximated the rich, chocolaty chiaroscuro of The Godfather saga. Does anyone care? [24 Mar 1981]

Altered States can be accused of many things, but never of harboring a new idea. Because the script's lessons have been drowned in fruity religious imagery, Altered States is at most an accomplished horror film, the kind of stomach-churning movie to which people like David Cronenberg aspire. [23 Jan 1981]

Predictable and maudlin. [14 Oct 1985]

The premise of Child's Play, in which the murderer is a much-merchandised doll patterned after cartoon characters known as Good Guys, is long overdue. Unfortunately, the package in which the present arrives is often too little, sometimes too much, and always too late. [11 Nov 1988]

This is insubstantial stuff, light as laughter, and every bit as fleeting. [13 Feb 1982]

The Mosquito Coast is a work of consummate craftsmanship and it's spectacularly acted, down to the smallest roles (Martha Plimpton as a classically obstreperous preacher's daughter, for example), but its field of vision is as narrow and eventually as claustrophobic as Allie's. [28 Nov 1986]

The problem with Paradise Alley is that it has been made by the character Stallone was playing in Rocky: it has the cinematic mind of a 14-year-old in the glossy body of a major movie. [14 Nov 1978]

National Lampoon's European Vacation is directed by Amy Heckerling, whose career began with the spunky if not inventive Fast Times at Ridgemont High and continued with the inventive if not spunky Johnny Dangerously; this time, she's responsible for a picture that's neither inventive nor spunky. [29 July 1985]

Robert Downey Jr., the kid who holds his own against James Woods in "True Believer", gives Chances Are what charm it has, but there's no saving this mystical romantic mess. It's fitting that the sexy and funny Downey has been cast as a soul trapped in another body - in Chances Are, he's imprisoned in a sitcom that's all situation and no comedy. [10 March 1989]

Despite some fine performances, what should be a crystalline epic is a sloppy and sentimental tale of family life. Sterling performances in a leaden script. [05 Oct 1990]

The movie, directed by Marek Kanievska (Another Country), does have an ending, but it belongs on a lectern. It mechanically begs a lengthy list of questions in favor of a finger-wagging warning that purports to reveal the fate lying in wait for those who play with snow indoors, along with the rewards assigned to those who study hard back East, where it only snows outdoors. [6 Nov 1987]

When Christine's on the warpath, she foams at the grille. But her movie doesn't do right by her snottiness. Her movie, never scary but campily entertaining for about an hour, loses compression toward the end and the grumpy old thing finally sputters to a stall - gets flattened, poops out. [09 Dec 1983]

The Dark Crystal sees through a dark crystal: There is much to marvel at, but there is much that is obscure, and much that may not be there at all. [17 Dec 1982]

Runaway Train, which could have been Kurosawa's Wages of Fear, has been re- written by a committee and does not explore the theme so much as hold it up for ridicule: Runaway Train is an also-Ran. [23 Dec 1985]

The film is primarily an excuse for Chase to demonstrate that though he may be a movie star he has yet to learn how to create, let alone sustain, a character, and for director Harold (Caddyshack) Ramis and screenwriter John (National Lampoon's Class Reunion) Hughes to demonstrate that some movie stars get the colleagues they deserve. [2 Aug 1983]

The plot is squeezed dry in this bloody Valentine from Hollywood and becomes annoyingly predictable. Thriller stumbles on its own success

And despite the technically impressive quality of the soundtrack, the movie, directed by Karel Reisz, misses the music. [4 Oct 1985]

Miss Fonda has thought to make a thriller out of that unthrilling process. [12 Dec 1981]

The first half of Firstborn is a first-rate domestic melodrama, faultlessly acted by all concerned, though you may wonder if the interactions would not have been a bit more compelling had the invading force been a bit less obviously, obnoxiously evil. The second half goes over the edge into a Hollywood hell. [26 Oct 1984]

Mostly, Cuba is boring. [24 Dec 1979]