Jay Scott

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

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]

Purple Rain is not a revolution. It's not even a good movie. What it is, is a cosmic letdown. [27 Jul 1984]

When Dune is not inept, confusing, ridiculous or unpleasant, it's boring. [14 Dec 1984]

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]

The Family is running from The Hun (Malcolm McDowell). The Family is not running as fast as I would like to have run from The Passage. [29 Mar 1979]

A rancid, violent police picture starring and directed by Burt Reynolds who, like bad news, is everywhere this year. [19 Dec 1981]

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]

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]

One more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, done badly, even if the novel was written by Stephen-can-do-no-commercial-wrong-King, is not what the world needs. [23 Apr 1993]

The daring ceases to be exploratory and turns, spitting and screaming, on itself. When Bakshi shows us an animated replay of the infamous 1968 pistol execution of a suspected Viet Cong sympathizer, he imparts to the event the grinning slapstick of a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote confrontation. It's as good a place to walk out of American Pop as any. [6 March 1981]

The manner in which the writer, Richard Matheson, and Jeannot Szwarc, in his glory days the director of Jaws II, conspire to tell the story should not only render the audience tearless, but speechless as well. [11 Oct 1980, p.E7]

Guilty of gross mellerdrammer & innocent of sophistication... Guilty of being dumber than WWF wrestling & innocent of hypocrisy about its cartoon violence.

The Black Hole isn't mediocre or even bad - it's dreadful...[It] looks, sounds and feels like a careless, cynically manufactured B-movie. Uncle Walt must be spinning in his cyrogenic vault. [24 Dec 1979]

License to Drive, directed by Greg Beeman and written by Montreal's Neil Tolkin, is not only stupid, a virtual requirement of summer teen exploitation movies, it's also nasty: it's been designed to turn its swooning target audience into a pajama party of neurotics. [08 July 1988]

This one is a big, big disappointment. [27 July 1987]

The Keep has opened just in time - if it had waited another couple of weeks, it would have been the worst horror movie of 1984 and there wouldn't have been anything to look forward to all year. [17 Dec 1983]

It's not fair in a film like this, a shambles from beginning to end, to judge the performances, but as Tom Cruise has now become a big star, something should probably be said of his characterization. Something. [21 Apr 1986, p.C12]

As should be obvious by now, Harvey Keitel is a lucky man indeed: how many actors, stuck in an atrocious film, have so many immortal lines? [20 Feb 1980]

Sitting through what is so far the worst movie of 1988 is enough to make any cuckoo's nest seem sane. [3 June 1988]

A two- hour-plus surrealistic bummer - it makes the audience feel as if it is coming down from a virulent drug. (The pacing, the images, the music and the endemic menace recall clinical descriptions of cocaine-induced paranoia.)...A disgusting, misanthropic movie.

Despite an inspired central section involving Robin Williams as the King of the Moon and Valentina Cortese as his Queen, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a near-disaster of Ishtarish proportions. [11 Mar 1989, p.C3]

The sadly unable De Palma hasn't raised Cain, he's been buried by him. [08 Aug 1992]

A technically slavish and totally atrocious Hollywood remake. [19 March 1993]

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 no reality here, and no style: Cocktail waters down the philosophy of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and serves it in a shot glass to hustlers. High school hustlers. [29 Jul 1988, p.C11]

A perverse, lame-brained thriller that is pornographic, misogynist and homophobic. If that makes it sound appealing, I should also add that it's silly, boring and intellectually insulting.

The first 48 HRS. was similiarly nasty and violent, and it too was emptier than the inside of an efficient bell jar, but it was funny. Eight years later, director Walter Hill can find nothing to laugh about - the violence in this appalling picture is played out in a mirthlessly misanthropic vacuum. [8 Jun 1990, p.C1]