John Hartl

The script earns a few points for trying to deal with the puzzles inherent in time-travel stories, and it's not surprising that the author is John Varley, who has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for his science-fiction novels. But he needed a more inspired director than the plodding Michael Anderson. [15 Mar 1990, p.D5]

This installment is essentially the same mix as before, with only a better-than-average cast to recommend it. [30 Sept 1995, p.F7]

Stuffed with touristy images but not enough dramatic substance to make any of them count.

Were expectations running too high for this "erotic thriller" from legendary director Richard Rush, who hasn't completed a movie in 14 years? Or is it really the full-blown fiasco it appears to be?

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]

The sad fact is, this 90-minutecharade - like almost every movie ever made that features "Silent Night" on the soundtrack - will be showing up on late-night television every Christmas Eve into the next century. Talk about your nightmares before Christmas. [5 Nov 1993, p.D32]

The sparring couple at its center are played by Naomi Watts, a fearless actress who seems game for anything, and Matthew McConaughey, who just seems off his game here.

Essentially a mugging contest masquerading as a science-fiction farce, My Favorite Martian suggests that nothing really changes in the universe of bad Disney comedies. [12 Feb 1999, p.G7]

As welcome as a race riot on Christmas Eve, this excruciating comedy is destined not to become a year-end television perennial. [02 Dec 1994, p.I32]

The new "Magoo" ends with a statement that it doesn't mean to slight near-sighted people or prejudice anyone against them. But so few of the sight gags relate to Magoo's near-sightlessness that the apology is baffling. [25 Dec 1997, p.26]

Hardly anyone comes off looking good in this glitzy and faintly ludicrous melodrama. [16 Feb 1990, p.34]

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."

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]

There's no emotional pay-off when the characters change under pressure. The audience never knows enough about them to care when they demonstrate bravery or resourcefulness, and there's no chemistry between the people who are supposed to be deeply attached to each other. [06 Oct 1990, p.C7]

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]

The Next Karate Kid is harmless as children's entertainment, but for 104 very long minutes, there isn't a recognizable human being in sight.

Unfortunately, the script by Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (a husband-and-wife team who previously collaborated on "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle") eventually throws out all ambiguities and endorses Field's actions, even suggesting that her husband and Mantegna's policeman just aren't committed enough to seek justice...It's a revolting development in a transparently manipulative movie, created by people who clearly know better. [12 Jan 1996]

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]

So consistently unexciting, so monumentally unconvincing, so silly. [28 Sept 1990, p.22]

Linda Blair and Leslie Nielsen deserve better than the scattershot script for Repossessed, a desperate spoof of The Exorcist that generates perhaps two belly laughs, three well-earned smiles and about 287 groaners. [29 Sep 1990, p.B7]

Production values could not be cheaper for a major-studio film. An extended woodsy scene with a collapsing cabin, supposedly set in the Wenatchee National Forest, so obviously makes use of tiny models that you expect the artifice to become part of the joke. It never does. Like so much of Black Sheep, it's a missed opportunity.

Stardom just doesn't have enough anger or conviction to carry it to a satisfying finish.

Loses touch with its characters.

Has a cute idea. Which it promptly runs into the ground.

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.

So campy...may be good for a few laughs.

A Boring Young Couple.

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

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

Underwhelming thriller.

Quite shameless in imitating its predecessors.

The travelogue-style photography is soothing, the bodies are pretty and the music isn't offensive, but feature-length movies can't survive on the ingredients for a standard airline commercial.

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]

Stone Cold may be the morally bankrupt nadir of what is so far one of Hollywood's worst years. [17 May 1991, p.3]

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]

The script by David Stenn (21 Jump Street), which also includes a hoary subplot involving blackmail, a kidnapping and a guilty family secret, is essentially a way of tying together a collection of familiar-looking music videos that are so loosely connected to the story that they have about the same impact as commercials. [19 Oct 1991, p.C7]

Fire Birds reduces it all to kiss-kiss-bang-bang, and the implication that a few theater-rattling explosions will turn the enemy to toast forever. The only blessing is that it runs less than 90 minutes.

The Museum of Modern Art has committed Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to its permanent collection. This spin-off, which has none of that film's brutal energy, won't be joining it. The state of Texas ought to sue the makers of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III for defamation of character. [13 Jan 1990, p.C5]

Maybe there's a serious movie to be made about professional soldiers who can't thaw out now that the Cold War is melting. But The Fourth War plays like Laurel and Hardy's Tit For Tat in slow motion. [23 Mar 1990, p.24]

Blind Fury is cheerfully stupid, deliberately cartoonish and always self-mocking. [17 Mar 1990, p.C5]

It's so much a Wayans vehicle that at times it seems like one long close-up of his gold-tooth grin. [24 March 1995, p.H24]

The sexual sadism that ruled in the first Hellraiser has been largely replaced by tiresome confrontations between the toymakers and Pinhead, who responds to their sputtering oaths with the most sensible line in the movie: "Do I look like someone who would care what God thinks?" [9 March 1996, p.F3]

This wildly overpraised Belgian mock-documentary might have been a lacerating 10-minute Swiftian satire of the media's never-ending thirst for blood. Instead, it's a 95-minute reiteration of the obvious that manages simultaneously to offend and bore. [11 June 1993, p.24]

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]

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]

Director Renny Harlin and his writers, Robert King and Marc Norman, appear to have spent many hours watching bad pirate movies, and they seem determined to repeat every pieces-of-eight cliche. [22 Dec 1995, p.G8]

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]

One doesn't expect much of Bosworth or Seagal, but Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke have, on occasion, been mistaken for actors. That becomes increasingly difficult to remember as this expensive, interminable vanity production waddles toward its predictable conclusion. [24 Aug 1991, p.C5]

It's neither scary nor original. In fact, it's something of a chore to sit through. [27 Oct 1990, p.C3]

The director, Jon Turtletaub, completely misses the character-driven appeal of the Karate Kid series, and there's no Macauley Culkin in this cast. The movie is saddled with a junky visual style, haphazard editing and occasional out-of-focus shots. Much of it looks like very bad television, although the toilet jokes and a running gag about laxatives and instant diarrhea may be a little raw for the Disney Channel.

As skiing comedies go, this one is no easier to endure than Hot Dog - The Movie or Snowball Express. Maslansky instructed his writers to come up with a script to go along with the title he'd dreamed up, and every character, comic twist and plot development seems tortuously manufactured and insincere. [10 Feb 1990, p.C7]

The Glimmer Man is just as foolish and formulaic as it sounds. [05 Oct 1996, p.C3]

The year is still young, but it's not likely to yield a more profoundly vacuous movie than Wild Orchid. [28 Apr 1990, p.C5]

Lambert relies so much on gore and mean-spiritedness that the actors can't help looking glum; they're clearly being ignored by a director who seems to have lost touch with all the human elements in the story. The movie is ultimately as lifeless as most of its characters end up being. [28 Aug 1992, p.28]

Only very small children are likely to be satisfied.

Full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing, End of Days is the loudest and least of the year's end-of-the-world movies.

Misbegotten comedy-drama.

Just doesn't live up to its title.

Self-conscious clunker.

It's hard to think of a single memorable line from Restaurant, even a memorably bad one.

With any luck, Body Shots will quickly slide into video obscurity.

In short: Don't expect a lot of laughs.

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

Broad, obvious and thuddingly unfunny, Drop Dead Gorgeous makes almost every previous "mockumentary" look like a work of genius.

The audience for Digimon is small children.

If you've seen one "Scream" rip-off, you really have seen them all.

Utterly unnecessary sequel.