John Hartl

Crowded, cornball and too busy for its short running time, The Hollars nevertheless generates a few moments of grace and reflection.

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

The movie is a model of clear, precise storytelling, of state-of-the-art technique used to advance a story rather than show off.

The Last Boy Scout is no worse than Lethal Weapon, and it's slightly more tolerable than Hudson Hawk. The action scenes deliver, the storyline is efficiently handled (if utterly unoriginal), Wayans is an appealing foil, and Willis' wiseacre personality fits the character he's playing. [13 Dec 1991, p.35]

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

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

What gives Betsy's Wedding distinction is the writing and casting of an initially peripheral figure, an unnervingly polite young gangster played by Anthony LaPaglia, a television and off-Broadway veteran making his big-screen debut. [22 Jun 1990, p.25]

Despite the miscasting of the central role and quite a lot of lackluster dialogue, the story proves again to be almost foolproof. The fight sequences are explosive, the physical production is impressive, and the supporting performances are full of juice.

Perhaps only the committed Coen fan, however, can be entirely pleased with Sam Elliott's incongruous appearance as a Dude-worshipping character called The Stranger, or with the tired kidnapping plot, which plays like an unnecessary leftover from other Coen movies. For all its strong points, The Big Lebowski will have as many detractors as fans. [6 March 1998]

Mangold ultimately can't displace memories of "An Angel at My Table," "Lilith," "The Snake Pit," "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" and other, stronger accounts of young women placed in mental institutions.

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

Loses touch with its characters.

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]

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

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

But they all end up spinning their wheels under Deran Sarafian, whose action-movie credentials include Jean-Claude Van Damme's "Death Warrant." He tries to establish a tongue-in-cheek attitude that seems as borrowed and clueless as Stephen Sommers' script. [4 Feb 1994, p.D28]

Even as you question the central premise, Brooks makes you want to buy into it.

An indigestible blend of sentiment and gross-out humor, Cadillac Man is an appalling choice for Robin Williams to have made at this stage in his career. [18 May 1990, p.28]

The animation is smooth and occasionally quite expressive, the character voices are well-chosen, and the pacing (songs aside) is confident. For young moviegoers unfamiliar with the Camelot story, this could be an option. [15 May 1998]

Crass and depressing drama.

Unfortunately, director George P. Cosmatos, who took over when Jarre was fired as director, emphasizes action over character. [25 Dec 1993, p.C2]

Gitai, a veteran documentary director, refuses to find an easy resolution to the story, and that will frustrate as many people as it pleases.

Utterly lacks the spark that makes caper movies fun.

Great dragon, dumb script. And pity the poor actors who have to deal with that situation. [31 May 1996]

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

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

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.

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]

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]

A dumbed-down remake.

Mortality rather than morality has become the central theme, and McMurtry and Bogdanovich address it with rare grace and compassion. [28 Sep 1990, p.3]

Dennis the Menace is essentially a live-action, 90-minute Roadrunner movie in which Dennis is the Roadrunner and Matthau and Lloyd take turns playing Wile E. Coyote. It's a lot funnier when it's seven minutes long and the tortured Coyote is made from oils, ink and paper. [26 June 1993, p.C5]

Achingly sad and dismayingly familiar.

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]

Exists in some kind of limbo, between hard-core porn and European art film, and it's not likely to satisfy fans of either.

Quite shameless in imitating its predecessors.

While Jennifer 8 won't surprise anyone who's addicted to whodunits, it's not a great disappointment either. It occupies that middle ground inhabited by so many thrillers that keep you interested only as long as they're in front of you. Out of sight, out of mind. [6 Nov 1992, p.20]

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

This stupefyingly unfunny attempt to create a midnight cult movie stars Judd Nelson as a talentless stand-up comic who becomes a celebrity when he grows a third arm out of the middle of his back. [26 Mar 1992, p.E2]

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

There's not much any actor can do with material as woeful as this. Pierce seems as charmless at the end of First Kid as he is in the early scenes, while Sinbad seems lost without a stand-up shtick. [30 Aug 1996]

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.

Unfortunately, Martin is the only perfection in the movie, which is plagued by a screenplay by Andy Breckman (Arthur 2) that slows down the pace by telegraphing every formulaic development. [29 Mar 1996, p.F6]

For a brilliant approximation of the man himself, watch Downey in this film. This is a performance created out of equal parts talent, hard work and love. It's uncanny. [08 Jan 1993, p.3]

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."

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]

Although it's overly melodramatic and lacks the poetry and shading that could have turned it into a Latino Godfather, it comes considerably closer to that goal than last year's remarkably similar American Me, in which the central characters were never as carefully or sympathetically drawn. For all its flaws, Taylor Hackford has never directed a more interesting film. [28 May 1993, p.16]

This $80 million disaster epic takes us back to the simple, tacky pleasures of Irwin Allen's "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) and "The Towering Inferno" (1974), although Allen's blockbusters had more of a feeling for character and mythic resonance than "Daylight" ever demonstrates. [6 Dec 1996]

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

Love Potion No. 9 is no great shakes, but far worse comedies are routinely released without a second thought. [13 Nov 1992, p.28]

Unfortunately, the script is so hopelessly superficial that very little of this registers. It's the work of Eric Roth, who wrote the unspeakable Billy Crystal comedy, "Memories of Me," and Michael Cristofer, a playwright whose most prominent previous screen credit was the disastrous "Bonfire of the Vanities."

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]

Watching Phoenix in his last film, I couldn't help thinking of James Dean's final performance, as the cranky loner, Jett Rink, in "Giant." [12 Nov 1993, p.D3]

An OK debut effort, but like so many "Pulp Fiction" wannabes, it lacks freshness and energy.

The performances are more interesting than the convoluted plot. [24 Apr 1992, p.26]

Miscast and nervously directed. [11 Oct 1996]

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]

Judgment Night is almost completely lacking in conviction and originality. But Leary does a fair Dennis Hopper imitation, Gooding does his best with an insulting role, and the ending is witty enough not to give us the undying villain it leads us to expect. [15 Oct 1993, p.D27]

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

Cameos by Mel Brooks and Whoopi Goldberg add nothing, and there's not much of a storyline to stitch together the gags. [05 Aug 1994, p.E3]

Shanley demonstrates a fresh, giddy talent for visualizing his eccentric comedy ideas. [9 Mar 1990, p.20]

An Almodovar-like blend of laughs, drama and uplift, filled with the kinds of pop-art colors and pop-out performances that Almodovar loves.

The plot is so filled with inconsistencies and lapses in logic, especially during the desperate concluding reels, that it's difficult to take seriously its proposition that some people are born evil. [24 Sep 1993, p.D12]

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]

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.

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

Has its clunky and wince-worthy moments, it does explore some new territory, and there are moments when it's quite fresh and moving.

Although Stella is intelligently made and generally well-acted, there were plenty of dry eyes at a packed preview screening earlier this week. [2 Feb 1990, p.25]

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

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.

The idea may have sounded great in film school. As written and directed by B.W.L. Norton, that's where it should have stayed. Still, the music of the period is well-used, and Charlie Martin Smith, Candy Clark and Cindy Williams rise above the script problems. [05 Dec 1991, p.F3]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

Neeson might as well have phoned this one in.

Despite the anti-greed message, too much of For Love or Mone" is reminiscent of Fox's glib 1980s vehicles, especially "The Secret of My Success" and the TV series "Family Ties." Reportedly he's trying to break free of this syndrome, but at this point he needs a vehicle that would spell that out clearly. Too often this one plays like "For Love and Money." [1 Oct 1993, p.D18]

Jungle 2 Jungle is better than expected, yet not quite good enough. [07 Mar 1997, p.F1]

The more this new Haunting tries to impress with its state-of-the-art techniques, the more it recalls how much Wise accomplished with eerie lighting effects and mysterious noises on the soundtrack. [23 July 1999, p.F1]

Kershner never succeeds in creating anything more than a well-done carbon copy, self-consciously recycling themes and visual ideas from the first film while adding very little that he can call his own. If you've seen Verhoeven's RoboCop, there's no compelling reason to rush out and catch this talented imitation. [22 June 1990, p.22]

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]

(Ash and Russell) generate just enough tension to keep the audience interested.

The visual fireworks and catchy score just underline the extreme superficiality of the material.

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]

It manages to combine the least appealing qualities of several previous Hughes productions - the obnoxiousness of the central character in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," the tedium of the teen-age confessionals in "The Breakfast Club," the gimmicky plotting of "Home Alone." And it has nothing fresh to add in terms of casting, storyline or the kinds of comic insights about suburban life that sustain Hughes' best scripts. [30 March 1991, p.C5]

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]

Avildsen does a good job with all of these actors, and his re-creation of 1930s/1940s South Africa on sets in Zimbabwe and Botswana is convincing; his handling of squalor in the townships is particularly detailed and vivid. It's the best work he's done since winning the Oscar for the first "Rocky." But because of the script's shortcomings the result is only half of a good movie. [27 March 1992, p.22]

Final Analysis has the most convoluted plot about dreams, heights, murder, infatuation, Freudian imagery and a duplicitous San Francisco blonde since Hitchcock's "Vertigo." It's the kind of whopper that keeps you watching not because it's good but because you can't wait to see what the filmmakers will throw at you next. As it turns out, there's not much they won't try. In fact, by the time this cracked thriller reaches its hysterical finale, it's obvious that anything goes. [7 Feb 1992, p.22]

This may be the easiest installment in the series for parents to sit through.

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]

A thriller that fails on every level, it doesn't even make you want to find out what happens next. [26 Apr 1991, 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]

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

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]

You'll laugh, but you'll hate yourself by the time you're out of the theater.

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]

"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]