Jay Scott

The one surprise, in a product purposely designed not to surprise, is the performance of Connie Stevens as Yvette Mason, the good-looking but aging and overweeningly vain "fun" teacher every high school student has run across ("I love your hair, Miss Mason," cracks one of the coeds, "all 300 pounds of it"). Somehow, Miss Stevens pulls a character out of cotton candy. [11 June 1982]

An absurdist comedy such as The End, with the tone teetering from slapstick to sorrow, is quite another matter, requiring a sophistication Reynolds simply doesn't have. [27 May 1978]

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]

In the race to make that great rock and roll movie in the sky, Eddie and the Cruisers is a pit stop. [24 Sept 1983]

Documentaries show us what can be seen; fiction features, to qualify as art, should visualize for us the usually unseen. Benny's Video, in which the thought processes of the characters are never delivered to the camera, is all surface. Its implicit claim is that by doing nothing, it is doing everything. But there are times, and this is one of them, when less is merely less. [27 Mar 1993]

The larger budget has given Scanners a high-gloss Hollywood look, the editing is occasionally elegant and the special effects, which consist mostly of imaginative ways of turning actors into meat, provoke from the audience the desired response ("Oh, yuk]"), but he is careful to keep the violence within currently accepted boundaries. [19 Jan 1981]

The kind of schlock that is impervious to criticism. Take it seriously and you look like a fool; evaluate it on its own comic-strip terms and you are reduced to talking about costumes and special effects. [04 Apr 1979]

If you have missed Janis Joplin, and if you have looked forward to Bette Midler's debut in a role she seemed born to play, you should leave the theatre at that precise moment. Almost everything else in and about The Rose, except a few concert sequences and the occasional occasions when Miss Midler falls out of character and into her stage persona of The Divine Miss M, is infuriatingly tedious, depressing, pretentious, obvious and downright pushy. [10 Nov 1979]

In concert with composer Bill Conti and scriptwriter Larry Gelbart, Neighbors has become a hyper insult festival in which four people pointlessly humiliate each other in a variety of increasingly vicious ways. Sample dialogue: "Leave that warthead alone. C'mon, we've got cesspools to suck." It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Shavian wit of The Gong Show, for the genteel grace of Saturday afternoon wrestling. [19 Dec 1981]

Sad to say, poor old Nightbreed fails even as failure - it's bad, but it's not memorably bad. The odor it emits is less the stench of an eternal hell than the stink of a passing purgatory. If nothing is forgiven by the time you've done your time in the theatre, all is certainly forgotten. [20 Feb 1990]

The picture is an inventory of film noir effects and attitudes, but Wenders has nothing new to say about the style, about the period, about Hammett or about the creative process. The Hammett case can be closed: a case of massive esthetic masturbation. [18 Sep 1982]

Any chance the film might have had is trashed at the outset by Chase's disengaged style of non- acting and blas approach to pants-dropping. [28 Dec 1981]

Overboard is overdrawn and overblown: a lean romantic comedy has been enveloped in obesity. Garry Marshall's direction is worthy of a not very good television sitcom and John A. Alonzo's appalling cinematography gives the picture the appearance of having been shot through a cloud of mosquitoes. [18 Dec 1987]

Had the film version of Pet Sematary, adapted straightforwardly by King himself from the novel, and directed with horrifying ineptitude by Mary Lambert (Siesta), been any good, it would have been a sizzling shockeroonie, in that it deals, to borrow King's italicized style, with things best left undealt with, notably resurrected murderous children and the terrors instilled by terminal illness. [24 Apr 1989]

The Golden Child is certainly not a Michael Ritchie movie - the talented director of Smile and The Candidate is never more than a referee in the war between the special effects and the star. The special effects win, which is no victory, but the star is not knocked out. [13 Dec 1986, p.F5]

The relationships between the characters are designed to climax in the slaughter, but by then the static images, the lack of rhythm and the paucity of intelligence (Heaven's Gate is simultaneously without subtlety or clarity) have taken their toll and the movie is unsalvageable. [21 Nov 1980]

Flashy Talk Radio offers little but babble: A mindless, hollow look at a sad symbiosis. [21 Dec 1988]

The only memorable facet of The Blue Lagoon (at the York) is the visual prowess of the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros - but here the photography, unlike his work in Days of Heaven or Kramer Vs. Kramer, is too great. It's all there is, and its monumental beauty overwhelms the fragile orchids-and-jockstraps pastoral of the narrative, with its faux naif philosophy. [12 July 1980]

This film is all shiny inspirational veneer. It leads you to issues but it won't let you think...It may be good for you, but it's not entertainment. And it may not be good for you: lurking at the penumbra of the film's sunny celebration of brotherhood is the faint but unmistakable shadow of anti-Semitism. [26 Sept 1981]

House of Games is so bad it seems reasonable to conclude that God was out of town and Mamet's muse was in a coma. [16 Oct 1987]

Sadly, 2010 is not going to make it any easier for the uninitiated to grasp the reasons its predecessor thrilled a generation: the only people 2010 is likely to thrill are the agents of the actors in the cast. [7 Dec 1984]

In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]

This is the kind of pitchur where if somebody gets his foot blowed off (somebody do), it makes everybody laugh, yuk yuk. Rip Torn (he's a sheriff) says, "The only thing worse than a politician is a child molester." It's mighty fine to get that kind of perspective. Makes you realize Extreme Prejudice ain't so bad after all. [24 Apr 1987]

Most of the time the film is simply stupid; not offensive, just silly. [03 May 1983]

There are two movies in Superman III, one a witless and obvious and often cruel comic strip, the other a blithe and subtle and often amusing exercise in middle-brow camp. Not only do the two halves never come together, they are in active opposition. [17 June 1983]

The manipulative Star Wars-style score is the only novelty on tap in Silverado, which has a plot too drearily complicated and arid to summarize and an attitude almost unbearable in its dryly smirky assurance that it knows what you want from a Western, which is to say, action that never quits, emotion that's never felt, characters that are never real and situations that are never sensible. [10 Jul 1985, p.S7]

To report that Always will make you cry is not esthetically saying much; slicing up onions has the same effect. Leslie Halliwell's one-word summation of the forties version applies to Spielberg's update for the nineties: "icky." [26 Dec. 1989]

Casting Eastwood in a friendly, bumbling, light romantic lead is like asking Ethel Merman to sing a lullaby: in the end, nothing is forthcoming but overkill. Clint Eastwood was already famous for that. [16 June 1980]