John Hartl

Too long, too predictable.

The script’s weaknesses are difficult to ignore.

Handsomer and funnier than the original, Young Guns II is still a mediocre brat-pack western. It lacks the attention-getting novelty of the first film. [01 Aug 1990, p.E1]

Neither the actress nor her director disgrace themselves, and Curtis does suggest a commitment to her character that goes above and beyond the limitations of the script, but they've both done more interesting work. [16 Mar 1990, p.26]

It's a pointless, $30 million mediocrity with a disengaged star-director at its center. [15 Jun 1990, p.3]

After a sprightly credits sequence in which the animated Pink Panther takes over conducting duties for Henry Mancini, while helping Bobby McFerrin doodle with the Panther theme Mancini composed 30 years ago, it's mostly downhill. It's been 10 years since the last Panther installment, yet Edwards seems exhausted.

A dumbed-down remake.

Crass and depressing drama.

Long before the final battle, the movie runs out of steam. At two hours, it's just too long. But taken as a guilty pleasure, it's tolerable. [19 Apr 1996]

What the film does have going for it is a ghostly atmosphere that leads to a few surprising developments, including some color effects and a charmingly off-the-wall musical number.

Whether or not you're a fan of De Jong's earlier work, Drop Dead Fred is clearly an extension of it. There's even a touch of Peter Pan and Wendy in the relationship between Mayall and Cates ("He's like my best friend, and yet I'm scared to death of him"), who has a ball with the role.

This jokey fantasy-comedy is so formulaic that even its wittier lines and casting choices aren't enough to overcome a numbing sense of deja vu. [21 Dec 1994, p.E4]

As recent horror movies go, The Guardian isn't terrible - it's more suspenseful and coherent than Nightbreed or Leatherface, and Friedkin's flair for the genre does surface here and there. But it's hard to care about the outcome when the people are such sticks. [27 Apr 1990, p.20]

Ultimately there's more guilt than pleasure to be found in The Craft. [03 May 1996]

Part of the problem with "Fallen" is the relentless dumbing down of Nicholas Kazan's script. [16 Jan 1998]

The movie jerks tears shamelessly, it smugly mocks the political and fashion trends of the early 1970s, its characters make no sense at all, and it even makes fun of senility. [27 Nov 1991, p.C1]

What rescues the movie, time and again, is the strength of Jones' and Jackson's performances.

The plot tries too hard to incorporate elements that drift toward melodrama.

Compared to such current television shows as ''Sex and the City" and ''Action," this menage-a-trois tale seems downright tame.

Crowe gives the kind of thoughtful performance that suggests what Mystery, Alaska could have been if it had stayed in focus.

The chief distinction of the picture, and what makes it more guilty pleasure than patience-tester, is Pakula's strong visual sense, which is reminiscent of his work on "The Parallax View." [16 Oct 1992, p.3]

While writer-director Frank Darabont often fails to make King's story plausible, that's no fault of the actors. The performances are the movie's strong suit.

Ricochet is gruesome, contrived and often laughable when it's trying hardest to be thrilling. But the exaggerated antagonism between the two central characters keeps it from becoming dull. [05 Oct 1991, p.C3]

The picture is part slapstick comedy, part tearjerker, but the mixture rarely works, and sometimes it's actively irritating.

If you plan to build an entire movie around a whining boor, his whining should have some accuracy or wit. His boorishness should at least suggest complexity, some motivation beyond the obvious. [09 Sep 1994, p.H32]

Blackboard Jungle created this genre (and most of its cliches) more than 40 years ago. 187 doesn't add much more than outrage and resignation. [30 Jul 1997]

Not a conventional love story, and perhaps it's not a love story at all. After more than two hours, you're left wondering what it is.

There's so much blood, sweat and craziness that you stop laughing with first-time screenwriter Harry Bean's script and begin laughing at it. Long before it reaches the fever pitch of a hysterical finale, you may also find yourself looking at your watch. [12 Jan 1990, p.21]

As Walton, D.B. Sweeney recalls Richard Dreyfuss's UFO-obsessed family man in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's a sweet, semi-looney dreamer who all but invites the aliens to take him, and his performance is the most appealing thing about the picture. [12 Mar 1993, p.3]

A slickly contrived studio product, as insincere as it is ineffectual. [12 Oct 1990, p.28]

They've simply turned the book into an anything-goes burlesque with such a contemporary flavor that even 1990s street slang is permissible. [12 Nov 1993, p.D27]

Arty slow motion, deliberately distorted photography and even bits of animation are tossed into the stew with the same abandon that Oliver Stone brought to the story Tarantino wrote for Natural Born Killers. But Avary's movie lacks the strong performances and quirky humor that made Reservoir Dogs more than just another low-budget exercise in excess. [09 Sep 1994, p.H29]

The director is Paris Barclay, a graduate of Harvard, music videos and rewrite jobs on other studios' scripts. Unfortunately, his directing debut is little more than an idea for a movie. [13 Jan 1996, p.F7]

Most of the picture plays like a collection of action-movie cliches, much like the facetious catalogue that Timothy M. Gray recently compiled in Variety under the heading "Blueprints for blockbusters: Let's go, c'mon!" [2 Aug 1996]

Unfortunately, Kevin Anderson, the former Steppenwolf actor who was so impressive re-creating his stage role in Alan Pakula's film of "Orphans" and impersonating Bobby Kennedy in "Hoffa," can do absolutely nothing with the braying, sexist yuppie who rents the apartment out to Broderick and Sciorra. [1 May 1993, p.C9]

It takes a special actor's grace to survive a script as lame as My Fellow Americans, and James Garner has it. Without appearing to break a sweat, Garner makes each grotesquely desperate attempt at humor look smooth and assured. In his hands, everything seems funnier than it is.

Neither Spader nor Amick can get past the generic nature of the characters they're playing, nor can they make up for Kazan's timid approach to their supposedly steamy love scenes. The nude Spader is so carefully draped and arranged that he could be posing for a soft-core parody, while Amick resorts to doing an impersonation of a haughty 1940s glamour queen. [6 May 1994, p.D31]

It may take more than Caro Diario for Americans to acquire the Moretti taste. [21 Oct 1994, p.H42]

Carrey's performance, and Forman's lively attempts to ask serious questions about the nature of comedy, keep it interesting. Certainly it's never dull.

What a dynamite cast. What a savvy director. And what a soggy comedy they're all stuck in. [02 July 1997, p.E5]

Like "American Beauty" without the fangs - or the magic.

While it's no breakthrough, this may be the best of Disney's popular Ernest comedies starring Jim Varney as an amiable moron in the Jerry Lewis tradition. [11 Oct 1991, p.23]

This sports comedy starts out as a rowdy delight in the tradition of "Slapshot," but it loses its sense of the outrageous and quickly turns ho-hum.

They're obviously smart people, but they end up painting themselves into a corner with this cast. Stern, the hammiest of the lead actors, is allowed to dominate the early scenes, and he rarely lets go. His bug-eyed act is getting stale, as is Aykroyd's tendency to walk through roles like this. The freshest element here is Wayans, who gets top billing in the ads but somehow winds up seeming like a supporting player. [19 Apr 1996]

Despite all of the personalized Wenders touches, it ultimately resembles many a top-heavy, star-laden, special-effects-driven production from the major-studio assembly lines.

Presented as a Vietnam War comedy, Operation Dumbo Drop steadfastly refuses to be funny. [28 Jul 1995, p.D3]

The special effects are quite impressive for a low-budget production, although the classiest thing about it is the voice of Welles, whose verbal dramatization of the Martian invasion still chills. [27 Apr 1990, p.20]

MTV veteran and first-time director Jim Yukich makes the most of the flashy if uneven visual effects, which usually have a state-of-the-art quality but occasionally look as phony as matte paintings in 1950s biblical epics. [04 Nov 1994, p.I39]

Big effects; threadbare story.

(Herron) just doesn't make the case that this book was worth filming.

Utterly lacks the spark that makes caper movies fun.

As a vehicle for Grammer, the movie seems a comfortable fit. But why bother with a big-screen part if it can't match what he's been doing for some time on Frasier? [01 Mar 1996, p.F3]

How many dead spots does it take to kill the genuinely funny moments in a romantic comedy? This question gets a severe workout in writer-actor-director Eric Schaeffer's second film: an alternately charming, predictable, hilarious and tedious exercise that holds your interest for about an hour. [8 March 1996]

The script resembles an especially anemic Afterschool Special. [12 Oct 1990, p.22]

Simply can't sustain interest for much of its final hour.

The casting was spot-on in “Dollhouse”; here it seems haphazard.

Franco makes the most of his showy scenes, and Garrett Clayton (known for “Teen Beach Movie” and other shows from the Disney Channel) is a convincing hunk. But only Christian Slater’s lonely voyeur suggests what “King Cobra” might have been.

My Father the Hero can be enjoyed as a travelogue (cinematographer Daryn Okada makes the Bahamas look especially seductive) and as the blandest, most nonthreatening kind of date movie. [4 Feb 1994, p.D19]

Cobbled together from so many sources that it never develops a narrative drive of its own.

Simplistic on one level, indecipherable on another, it's a most peculiar muddle.

The final scenes, which suggest an earnest science lesson presented by a weepy extraterrestrial in an alien planetarium, play like the work of an amateur filmmaker.

While Bounce may mark a sophomore slump for Roos, it's hardly the worst date movie out there.

Neeson might as well have phoned this one in.

The script is a minefield of ideas that need more work.

A few startling touches.

The script seems flimsy and disposable when compared with such similar takes on the subject as "Analyze This,""The Sopranos" and the upcoming "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai."

It's "The Hustler with poker and without soul...For all its flash and occasional sizzle, "Rounders" is a disappointment.

Its pretensions eventually undo it.

This could be the year's most pretentious Hollywood film.

Story. Character. They used to mean something to George Lucas.

Instantly disposable ...Gooding appears tobe losing the momentum of his Jerry Maguire Oscar win two years ago.

The movie is such a mess that it seems to have been assembled from pieces randomly picked from the cutting-room floor.

(Smith) seems out of his depth in this talky, rambling religious satire.

Just because you can make a movie in a day doesn't necessarily mean moviegoers should take an hour and a half to watch it.

Curiously bland and flavorless.

A sophomore writing-directing effort from former film critic Rod Lurie.

It doesn't generate enough laughs to make up for the fact that you never figure out what he (a misogynistic USA Today columnist played by Richard Gere) sees in her (a dizzy small-town hairdresser played by Roberts). Or, for that matter, what she could ever see in him.

This fuzzily illustrated sermon is mostly an attempt to prove that the internal combustion engine is obsolete, and that oil companies everywhere are conspiring to wipe out alternative methods.

What began as a feature-length toy commercial instantly disintegrates into MTV fodder. [22 Mar 1991, p.24]

Begun by screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson (Grumpy Old Men), Jack Frost ended up taking four credited writers to finish - and still it's a derivative mess. [11 Dec 1998]

The odd couple here is just as charmless, and their adventures are equally unfunny. When the filmmakers try to get sentimental about the relationship, you'll either be rolling your eyes or thinking about heading for the exit.

"We're in Twin Peaks here," says the only surviving teenager in town. It's a lame attempt to create class by association. Unlike David Lynch's kinky series, the creators of Freddy's Dead couldn't care less about the movie's interchangeable characters. The actors are often hard to tell apart; some are just worse than others. [14 Sept 1991, p.C5]

A supernatural thriller that would like to be the new Exorcist, this hapless film has a promising villain and a sympathetic hero, but their confrontations are mostly anti-climactic. [02 Sep 1995, p.F3]

Time-travel movies don't come much dopier than Freejack. [18 Jan 1982, p.C5]

Much of the time, for all the leering effort she puts into portraying this demonic tease, Barrymore just seems to be playing dress-up. She also needs a more responsive co-star than Gilbert, who gives a one-note performance in the part that should be at the story's center. [29 May 1992, p.18]

It's no more obnoxious than the original, and in several ways it's more interesting. [08 Apr 1995, p.C7]

Toy Story approached toy frenzy from the toys' point of view while craftily exploring the media-driven delusions of that Turbo Man-like doll, Buzz Lightyear. Jingle All the Way had that kind of potential, but somewhere along the way the filmmakers lost all perspective. [22 Nov 1996, p.F7]

Cute and daffy enough to make your molars ache, Bakery in Brooklyn is the kind of romantic comedy that lacks all conviction.

Child's Play 2 is perfunctory, disagreeable and patience-trying. [09 Nov 1990, p.24]

Tokyo Decadence includes what may be the only near-death experience ever played for laughs in a movie. [15 Oct 1993, p.D26]

Unfortunately, the recycled plot is still the driving force here, and the movie becomes increasingly frantic trying to accommodate it. In the end, Raffill can't bring this dummy to life, but he does try.

There's only so much a director can do to dress up a sequel as ill-conceived and impoverished as this one. [30 Aug 1991, p.24]

The best that can be said of this campy but witless time-travel thriller is that it's acted with some authority. [12 Jan 1991, p.C7]

Unfortunately, he's working from a cliche-choked, insensitive script, written by Gary Goldman (``Big Trouble in Little China'') and Chuck Pfaffer (``Dark Man''), that makes a point of stirring up old prejudices.

The cast of "Ladybugs" is good-natured enough, but Dangerfield is reduced to reading lame one-liners about "drag races" as his future stepson hops in and out of a dress. Brandis is never allowed to have much fun with the complications that result from pretending to be a girl, and his best friend (Vinessa Shaw) barely seems to notice when he reveals that he's been deceiving her. What should have been a wild door-slamming farce never really gets started. already are turning from brown. [28 March 1992, p.C5]

Unfortunately, everyone's trying too hard to recapture the original's wry tone, and Culkin lacks the gawky, impish charm that Billingsley brought to Shepherd's childhood alter ego. [06 Jul 1995, p.E1]

The dumbest, goriest bone-cruncher of the season: an unnecessary and Arnold-less sequel to the Schwarzenegger science-fiction hit of three years ago. [21 Nov 1990, p.C3]

Unfortunately, Craven's constant emphasis on cannibalism, child abuse and incest adds up to more unpleasantness than thrills. [02 Nov 1991, p.C3]