Jay Scott

The appeal of the Friday the 13th cycle is difficult for any one who has not seen the movies on a Saturday night in a packed theatre to understand: they are an exercise in collective adolescent camp. As each victim falls to Jason's wrath, the kids cheer and laugh, and the gorier the death, the better. By the standards of that audience, part four is perfection: there are more gruesome homicides than Pauline had perils. [17 Apr 1984]

In terms of psychology, it's an abysmal failure, too real to be symbolic, too symbolic to be realistic. [25 May 1990]

Silly, moronically entertaining horror film. [25 June 1985]

In David Lynch's film, the Elephant Man has become a drooling Latex monster. There is nothing wrong with Hurt's performance - it is quite moving - but there is a great deal wrong with a movie that adds insult to injury by unconscionably holding back the revelation of the make-up. [04 Oct 1980]

Rob Reiner's not up to it: when the movie is meant to be romantic, the tone is frequently mushy and sexless, and when it's meant to be anachronistic and satiric, it's vaudeville-vulgar.

Army life sugar-coated in self-serving memoir. [25 Mar 1988]

Ruthless People is a farce rather than a satire and it's far less ambivalent toward the behavior it depicts than All in the Family was - it actively encourages the audience to tee-hee over people being horrible to each other. Dale Launer's script is often extremely funny, especially when Midler is around, but it's an extended sick joke that doesn't realize it's got a disease. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

The specifics of Hill's movie - and despite its straining for universality, it is all specifics - come approximately a decade too late; in the wake of Who'll Stop the Rain and Apocalypse Now (and even that great B-movie anti-war movie, The Big Red One), it sinks like an insignificant stone. [24 Oct 1981]

The movie stands or falls with Newman, and it does neither: it coasts. His acting in the second half is safe and self-assured, while his acting in the first - watch for his announcement of his erupting integrity - is not only shy of good, it's downright bad. It would be ironic but predictable if he were to win an Oscar for his weakest performance in years. [17 Dec 1982]

Hurt is so good at capturing the charming and chilling Ned that he almost makes up for the film's two primary weaknesses: Kasdan's inexperience and a message of significant unpleasantness. [28 Aug 1981, p.P17]

The reach of this sprawling, ambitious epic often exceeds its grasp. It has something in common with its hero. [5 Dec 1981]

With a lot more insight and a lot less hagiography, it could have been a real movie. [18 Jun 1993]

Thanks largely to Petersen, Manhunter does occasionally evoke the peculiar pleasures of Harris's novel, and it does get under the skin, but only because the picture amounts to an aural mugging: the soundtrack, credited to The Reds & Michael Rubini, is Tangerine-Dream-styled electronic offal cranked up to rock concert decibels. [15 Aug 1986, p.D11]

The technical packaging of his picture is terrific - with its high-tech Manhattan and its split screens and slow motion, Dressed to Kill is - but the goods it opens to reveal are shoddily second-hand. [26 July 1980]

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]

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

Teenmeister John Hughes, begatter of Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, has permitted Planes, Trains and Automobiles to be promoted as his first "adult" feature, but it's actually a re-run of a movie he wrote in 1983, National Lampoon's Vacation, another primitive cartoon for the kinds of adults who find Neil Simon too sophisticated. [27 Nov 1987]

But at heart, the terrain mapped by Map of the Human Heart is emotionally shameless; it's a forties movie tossed into the nineties. It should find a lot of fans. [14 May 1993]

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]

This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]

The performances in Cutter's Way are devastated by the script. [18 Sept 1981]

Piously posing as providing a public service, The Krays is little more than an artsy simulacrum of America's Most Wanted. [25 Jan 1991]

The trouble with Body Double is not that it sets "new lows" in the treatment of women or anything else, but that a stunningly original talent has willingly hitched itself to a derivative vision. The person De Palma really degrades is himself. [26 Oct 1984]

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]

In The In-Laws, there is nothing to keep Alan Arkin and Peter Falk from becoming one of the most enchanting comedy teams in movies - nothing except direction, script and cinematography. [20 Jun 1979]

Because it attempts so much more than Excalibur, the disappointment of Knightriders cuts deeper. Romero wants to tell the tale, to comment on it and to relate it to the present; he wants to bring contemporary satirical life to the myth, a service he performed cannily for the Dracula legend in Martin. [18 April 1981]

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]