Johanna Steinmetz

While entertaining and often genuinely frightening, thanks to a remorsefully blue cast to the cinematography, this thick stew can be tough to swallow under Tony Maylam's bumpy direction. [3 May 1992, p.C7]

A rash and prurient tale, full of the sort of stylish venom that could almost elevate it to artful kitsch. Almost. [29 May 1992, p.C]

Though it does know how to hammer home a point, Hardware doesn't always have matching nuts and bolts. It has an anarchic quality, a jolting, disorienting rhythm that makes us unsure of time frame in certain stretches and of motivation in others. [14 Sep 1990, p.I]

It helps if you think of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" as sort of a "Sesame Street" for teens. Beneath the self-aggrandizing plot, the rock music, the dudespeak and the humor lurks a smattering of knowledge. The premise is spectacularly silly, but harmless. Bill and Ted are a couple of woolly-brained teens who spend so much time dreaming about the rock band they're going to start that they are about to disqualify themselves from a public education. [20 Feb 1989, p.7]

Veteran director Arthur Hiller keeps the vehicle galloping along with a sure hand, careful not to let any of it sink to a fatal level of believability and always on the prowl for whatever wit can be harvested from any gizmo at hand. [17 Aug 1990, p.B]

The setup is so startlingly unlike the rest of True Colors, so moody and visually ambiguous, that it hits you both with the force of the moment and with regret for what this movie might have been. [05 Apr 1991, p.D]

The surreal is appropriate to a story based on fantasy, but the unevenness in tone here makes watching ''The Boy Who Could Fly'' a little like hitting airpockets in a puddlejumper.

It's corny, cussed and carnal.