Johanna Steinmetz

But while Downey is up to the material, and then some, the material is not up to him. The film plods along with the sort of creaky literalism that blunts its attempts at other-worldliness. It says something that Elisabeth Shue, in a bit part as Downey's frustrated girlfriend, has more presence than anyone else in the movie. Her sphere of real time and space is credible; the fantasy world the film attempts to create is not. [13 Aug 1993, p.C]

Shapiro has constructed a by-the-numbers script that telegraphs every plot twist with the exertion of its setups. We know that a hive of yellow jackets in the orchard, a carousel in the attic and Darian's fondness for horses will somehow make it into the final minutes of the film. It is hard to work up the curiosity to stick it out and find out how. [6 Apr 1993, p.7]

Stone Cold has a basic proficiency, despite some notably awkward edits. Director Craig Baxley paces the story well, and Walter Doniger's script follows the classic formula for the genre: the more evil the villains, the greater hero the star and the more justified the film's gore. [20 May 1991, p.4C]

Pyun obviously enjoys filming Armageddon, and Cyborg is visually interesting even at its most preposterous. Everything is in ruins, with enough scenes in burnt-out factories to give new meaning to the term "loft living." Still, the plot is hopelessly confused, there are cuts that don't match and scenes that move suddenly from full sun to late afternoon. [07 Apr 1989, p.B]

The ability to subjugate everything to the story is both Avildsen's strength and his weakness. Lean on Me, with its warts-and-all hero, its driving rhythm, its carefully calibrated climaxes, is a finely tuned machine. It also happens to be a steamroller. [3 March 1989, p.Q]

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]

One might wish - fleetingly - that Parents were a cuddlier film, if for no other reason than it deserves to be seen by the same numbers that flock to such inanities as "Working Girl." Instead, it is uncompromising in its mordant humor, part of an international trend towards uncomfortable, deeply satirical comedy that includes David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," Pedro Almodovar's "Matador" and Colin Gregg's "We Think the World of You." [7 Apr 1989, p.F]

It takes a while to get used to Mick Jagger as a paid predator, wearing a goofy helmet and spouting lines like, "Get the meat!" But by the end of Freejack, a fairly silly new sci-fi action thriller, rock star Jagger has made the role his own. [20 Jan 1982, p.C7]

In Madhouse, writer-director Tom Ropelewski doesn't so much serve up an idea as force-feed it down our gullets. It takes a game bird to sit through the entire movie. [16 Feb 1990, p.K]

As directed by the Briton Mike Figgis ("Stormy Monday"), "Mr. Jones" is a muscular sort of movie, imposing action on characters who are feeling much but actually doing very little. Figgis' constant camera cuts are almost as animated, as jazzy, as Jones' highs. The director shows a daring sense of rhythm in his edits and, for this story, anyway, it works. [8 Oct 1993, p.D]

Erotically charged American films invariably are spiked with criminal danger. So "The Lover" - a movie about a young French girl's sexual awakening in colonial Vietnam that relies entirely on cinematic effects to evoke the sensuality of its time, place and events - is refreshing evidence that we don't need fear to trigger arousal.

A play based on the most delicately nuanced interactions inevitably loses electricity as a movie. Worse, it becomes predictable. [28 Apr 1989, p.L]

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]

Son-In-Law is a comedy that outstrips its aspirations. It could so easily be a movie you're embarrassed to be caught laughing at. [2 July 1993, p.C]

Despite its title and promotion suggesting explosive action, Boiling Point is an almost leisurely thriller. It has less to do with Wesley Snipes' inner roilings than with writer-director James B. Harris' cool, sardonic view of criminology. [21 Apr 1993, p.C3]

As directed by Robert Mulligan, the stately pace here feels sluggish and the music is no elegiac Pachelbel's "Canon" but a medley of dreadful cocktail lounge piano and swooning strings. [21 Oct 1988, p.G]

Pirates is tedious round after tedious round of mutiny and rescue. Screen people are hanged and stabbed and garroted with great care, but there's nothing to put the audience out of its misery. [22 July 1986, p.5C]

The Joy Luck Club may be stylistically rickety, but Wang does a good job with the logistics of the movie, integrating multiple time periods, dialogue in two languages (English and Mandarin), two locations (San Francisco and China) and overlapping casts - several characters require two and even three actors to play them at different ages - to make a watchable whole. This is not a movie to be watched lackadaisically. Blink twice and you could lose the train of narration. [17 Sept 1993, p.C]

It's basically an anger film, a catharsis for problems we haven't learned to solve. As that, it does its job well, with humor and surprising grace. [18 Sep 1987, p.18]

Scheinman, whose long list of producer credits includes Stand by Me and Misery, makes his directing debut with a good sense of storytelling and a low-key comic style all too often absent in this kind of entertainment. [30 Jun 1994, p.28]

A scintillating thriller in which writer/director Gary Sherman takes some familiar sitcom elements and force-marches them in an unexpected and terrifying direction. [11 May 1990, p.D]

Who's That Girl? is sunny and harmless. Perhaps it's indicative that feminist hostility is taking a milder turn. Or perhaps the genre has gone Hollywood. [09 Aug 1987, p.6C]

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]

While Intervista will appeal mostly to the dedicated cineaste who can appreciate its many inside jokes, Fellini displays such a ravishing range of technique and assurance that even more casual moviegoers must view this film with awe. [26 Mar 1993, p.J]

Mayall`s hyper portrayal of Fred, while psychologically sound, is dramatically torture.

So the bad news about The Men's Club is that it leans heavily on cliche; the good news is that it treats the cliche with elan and it doesn't waste a splendid cast. [24 Sept 1986, p.4C]

Hocus Pocus is harmless, but it's about as much fun as celebrating Mardi Gras under the influence of candy corn. Director Kenny Ortega ("Newsies") keeps the material moving, but he seems to have no idea how to shape its odd mixture of lugubriousness, sentimentality and goofiness.

The Wedding Banquet benefits especially from the performances of seasoned Taiwanese actors Sihung Lung and Ah-Leh Gua as Wai-Tung's parents. [27 Aug 1993, p.C]

Director Lizzie Borden sticks to the business of trying to elicit natural performances from a cast that includes Off-off Broadway actors, actors with almost no credits and, among the men, some who are not actors at all. To a remarkable degree she has succeeded, particularly in the case of Louise Smith, who plays Molly. [13 Mar 1987, p.D]

Van Damme himself, a graduate of the blank-stare school of acting, is so without emotional inflection on the screen that his most affecting moment in this film, if one is to judge from a preview audience's reaction, is when he drops a bathrobe for a couple of seconds of magnificent gluteal exposure.

Fire in the Sky would seem more a candidate for a TV movie than a theatrical film. [14 Mar 1993, p.4C]

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.

Aided by a splendid, understated score, by Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, Brother's Keeper captures the story of how Munnsville saved Delbert from the slammer with probity and elegance. It also slyly suggests how the experience, even the presence of the documentary camera, socialized Delbert and his brothers. [26 Mar 1993, p.C2]

Thirty years after its premiere, despite being in black and white and despite the irritating lip-flap from the Italian penchant for post-dubbing dialogue, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 is a remarkably fresh film, a landmark of cinema that seems to defy dating. [07 May 1993, p.H]

It's corny, cussed and carnal.

Dolls leaves no cliche unmined, with the result that every scary moment is its own comic relief. [27 Mar 1987, p.L]

Badham uses faster cuts and cockeyed camera angles to give us Fonda's unsettled view of the world in the early scenes, then settles into a more conventional action vocabulary. He relies on stylish production design - Fonda's cell boasts a high-tech cantilevered bed - to suggest that this adventure is fantastic, even alien, to most sensibilities. (Besson used the opposite tack. His production design for the long training sequence of the film was naturalistic, his camera approaches quirky and alienated.) [19 March 1993, p.C]

Depending on the speed of your gag reflex, "+batteries not included" is either a 21st Century "Lassie" or the worst piece of smarm to come along since "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."

In a film which can't seem to decide whether it's comedy or drama, folksy or sinister, every scene is played for ambivalence. The result is a definite maybe. [23 Sep 1988, p.L]

Still, it's the bits and pieces of this movie, the eccentric asides, that rescue it-when they work. [1 Oct 1993, p.L]

Swayze is persuasive in his role as an Appalachian boy sufficiently assimilated to big-city life to have married a classical violinist, and Baldwin makes a slick, icy villain. But it is Neeson as Briar Gates who steals this movie. Wily, saturnine, exuding a bitter familiarity with failure, he paints a portrait of a man whose actions are simple but whose feelings are complex. The part offers few lines to play with, but Neeson inhabits the role physically, the twang and the scruffiness never betraying his classical training at Dublin's vaunted Abbey Theatre. It's an enduringly poignant performance. [24 Oct 1989, p.3]

Hyams' script may lack emotional thrust, but it's economical, and it tweaks the genre's traditional heroism, if only faintly. [21 Sep 1990, p.H]

With its old-timey special effects, multiple plots and silly humor, it scampers through its 102 minutes untethered to the demands of strict logic, continuity or character development. This film is just out to have a good time. Often, it succeeds. [27 Apr 1990, p.D]

While this production certainly ranks above Van Damme's prior efforts, it's still full of the sort of macho overkill typical of today's action genre. [09 Aug 1991, p.B]

While the actresses seem authentic in these interviews, they are forced and unconvincing in Jaglom's script, which centers on characters who might kindly be described as narcissistic Harpies. [21 Jun 1991, p.G]

The leap from pointing out the hollow values of advertising to a full-scale attack on capitalism is broad, and in trying to make it, Robinson falls into an abyss of speciousness. Nevertheless, his intensely personal style and vision mark him as one of the most promising filmmakers working in England today. [12 May 1989, p.G]

It's a dream of a movie, if only in the literal sense. The film means well; so it seems churlish to mention its total absence of originality. Care Bears poaches shamelessly on everything from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Androcles and the Lion," but its greatest debt is to Lewis Carroll, whose engagingly warped mind would surely recoil at this confection. [07 Aug 1987, p.Q]