Jay Scott

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]

If Vice Versa becomes the hit it deserves to be - adults who accompany their kids will be glad they came along for the joyride - Reinhold may be able to flex artistic muscles that have been necessarily flaccid until now. [11 Mar 1988]

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]

Psycho III, directed by Perkins himself, is years behind the Hitchcock original in quality, it's light years ahead of Psycho II. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

A lark from start to finish. [1 July 1987]

It's an unpredictable, mesmerizing journey nearly every shady second of the way.

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]

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]

Polanski has always inspired comparisons to Hitchcock, back to Cul-de-Sac and up to Rosemary's Baby and beyond, but this is the first time he has intentionally set out to replicate the thrills, chills and laughter of Hitchcock's best work. He succeeds, but with a difference: the last half-hour, at once improbable and horrible and self-referentially satiric, is pure Polanski. [27 Feb 1988]

Taken as a psychological parable, Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst is thoughtful and provocative. Taken as a political parable, it is gallingly reactionary, but it is also right, in more than one sense of the word. [28 Oct 1988]

French Postcards is a minor, mechanical remembrance of insignificant times past - specifically, of days spent by (young) Americans in Paris. But it is also quite funny and the performers more than make up for the script's creaking joints: there is a freshness and vitality in the work of the largely unknown actors that is invigorating. [27 Oct 1979]

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 Doors is excessive, unsubtle, emotionally brutal and stylistically sadistic, but that's exactly right for the dark side of the sixties Morrison and his band embodied. [01 Mar 1991]

Inflated production numbers come lumbering ludicrously onto the screen like so many boozy pink elephants from a demented circus. [26 Nov 1980]

The violent but impressive Bad Boys doesn't waste much time getting down to business. Bad Boys is about a generation of teen-agers who have learned from television to want the biggest and the best, and it's about a generation in the process of angrily learning that it's going to be forced to settle for the littlest and the least. [22 Apr 1983]

The Dead Zone, from the book by Stephen King, a horror novelist whose prolific output is the scariest thing about him, is academic filmmaking all the way, a crafty Establishment tour de force. [21 Oct 1983]

Stand and Deliver honors its title; it's a good news movie in a bad news world. [15 Apr 1988]

The first hour of Club Paradise is enjoyable and more or less adult, thanks in large part to the comic contributions of Williams, O'Toole and the SCTV alumni. But he has not learned structure. Toward the end, the island having been tossed into a civil war invented solely to give the movie one of the helter skelter farcical endings Ramis and Reitman regularly affix to their films, Club Paradise falls apart like a piece of cheap luggage. [4 July 1986]

Technically, the picture is a mess, but the ineptitudes in the editing and cinematography actually add to the charm, and the Bushman family is wondrous to watch. The Gods Must Be Crazy II is an old dog sans new tricks, but the friendly mutt's familiar repertoire is varied enough to fill a few hours with undemanding fun. [13 Apr 1990]

Major surgery has been known to take less time and give more pleasure than this forgettable flick. [13 Oct 1990]

What advance publicity has been powerless to suggest is that Personal Best is an exceptionally well-crafted, thoroughly accurate, emotionally galvanizing piece of filmmaking, easily one of the most intelligent explorations of competition on cinematic record. What's best about Personal Best is a lot more than just personal .[5 Feb 1982]

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]

A patchwork quilt of clashing colors, but it's cozy and warm. [10 Oct 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]

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 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]

That it all works is a tribute to Stu Silver's gaggy but never vulgar script and to DeVito's imaginative direction, but the movie would be unthinkable without its trio of funny folk. [11 Dec 1987]

Kurt Russell has never seemed more clever, Mel Gibson more vulnerable nor Michelle Pfeiffer more goddess-like. Once upon a time, before the pictures got small and the hills were obscured by smog, the Hollywood sign read: "Hollywoodland." That was back when Tequila Sunrise, an intelligent, escapist epic for adults, wouldn't have seemed the anomaly it seems today. [2 Dec 1988, p.C1]