Jay Scott

There is no acting to speak of (and to speak of Cruise's performance at all would be embarrassing) but there is a point of view. This is yet another Ramboesque instalment in the current American obsession with might making right. As a movie, Top Gun is negligible and near ridiculous; as a cultural phenomenon, it is sobering and faintly frightening. [16 May 1986, p.C5]

Mostly, Cuba is boring. [24 Dec 1979]

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]

Slickly-made parapsychological murder mystery featuring a solid performance by Faye Dunaway as a fashion photographer who sees murders in her mind's eye. [06 Sep 1978]

By removing the delicacy of the technique and the adept use of flashbacks, and by explaining the characters in the lexicon of Psych. 101, what was once an unconventional and unforgettably terrifying thriller has become a conventional, mildly scary melodrama. The Vanishing has gone up in Hollywood smoke. [08 Feb 1993]

Hook's cast is admirably adept at getting across what little boys are made of. [22 Mar 1990]

The script, based by Ephron herself on her own tua culpa memoir of her marriage, is spread wide, but the film never goes deeper into its subject - estrangement and adultery - than a bent dipstick. Heartburn is gentrified Neil Simon. [25 July 1986, p.D1]

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]

John Carpenter, unable to decide what kind of movie he wants, alternates between his thriller-hardware mode (Escape from New York) and his touchy-feelie mode (Starman). The result is that adults may fall asleep in their seats during the dreary chase sequences, while children are going to holler "Ick!" and escape to the candy counters during the mushy stuff. [28 Feb 1992]

Buffy The Vampire Slayer should be a mess, but it's not. It's a mini-comic triumph, and although it's technically a teen movie, it's in the tiny genre of sophisticated, darkly funny teen films such as Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. [4 Aug 1992, p.C1]

Stylistically, the sleek Slamdance, a beautiful yet ominous black lacquer box of a movie, is a U.S. approximation of Diva - every chic frame is aggressive and eye-catching. But it is also what Less Than Zero wanted to be, an expose of the emotional desert at the west end of the U.S. nation. [28 Dec 1987]

In past celluloid lives Eddie Murphy has been responsible for a handful of the most popular movies ever made, which explains why he has been able to bring Coming to America to your neighborhood theatre with its misogyny, technical ineptitude and witlessness intact.

There is a dearth of novelty in Young Guns II, but screenwriter Fusco proceeds as if the material were not familiar and seems to be having a hell of a time exposing it to an audience of teen-agers who wouldn't know John Ford from Ford Fairlane. [03 Aug 1990]

It's got thrills and chills and one of the most elegantly conceived monsters in the history of movies.

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]

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]

There is precious little story. Instead, there is a promiscuous profusion of images, a rant of optic free association that makes Ken Russell's Tommy appear a marvel of well-rounded narrative... A trip movie, in the old sixties sense, but it's a bad trip, a numero uno bummer. [17 Aug 1982]

Mel Brooks, the writer, director and producer of History of the World, is an ecologically sound filmmaker, a staunch adherent of recycling. If you laugh the second or third time, you defend the repetition as a variation on a theme; if you don't laugh, the charges are self-plagiarism and lack of imagination. [13 June 1981]

The first 20 minutes owe too much - much too much - to Animal House & Co., and the last 20 to The Graduate, but in between there is an uproariously crude and vigorously funny effort to squish the teen genre into the confines of classic French sex farce.[14 June 1985]

Predator 2, an alien-monster movie that is racist and violent, not to mention atrociously acted and ham-handedly directed, has everything going for it a bad movie needs to be dismissed with a quip. But this is too ugly to be funny about. [23 Nov 1990]

Perfect betrays itself in the end, but until it does, it's an unexpectedly thoughtful consideration of "lifestyle" journalism, which by nature allots to the unknown a sudden but ephemeral celebrity, and which too frequently takes advantage of naive subjects eager to lower their defences. [7 June 1985]

In The Dead Pool, Dirty Harry is downright dusty. The erstwhile right-wing San Francisco homicide inspector has mellowed so much in the fifth installment of his adventures that he's become the darling of the liberal Bay Area media and he seems almost bored by blowing people away. [13 Jul 1988, p.C7]

Laughter, tears and Bette Midler: Santa's done a whole lot worse. [23 Dec 1988]

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]

A sadly miscalculated affair, a frigidly uninvolving interlude of torpid romanticism: welcome to Shivering Heights. [08 Nov 1982]

White Nights is too ponderous to have the pizzazz of trash and too dumb to have the insight of art - it's a lumbering behemoth of a film in which the extraordinary talent of its one authentic star, Mikhail Baryshnikov, is exploited in a Cold War cartoon that suggests a musical adaptation of Ayn Rand's anti- Soviet novel, We The Living. [22 Nov 1985]

On film, Bennett's bouncing brainchild is Richard Attenborough's Workout Tape, love story attached; the specificity is gone. The 16 auditioning dancers could be any people or all people. [11 Dec 1985]

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]