Michael Wilmington

I.Q. has a commendable idea. Brains aren't everything. You should follow your heart. Fine. Agreed. But just like E=MC2, you gotta prove it. With brains and heart.

Girlfight, for its skill and theme, will please many. It's a shame it's no knockout.

No period of Italian history has produced more great movies than the WWII years . But, Malena romanticizes and even sentimentalizes those years.

Overall, The Brothers is glossy fun, but it should have given us more ideas and energy.

So stunningly shot and visualized--and scored so hauntingly well by Anja Garbarek, the daughter of saxophonist/composer Jan Garbarek--that it works even if you don't pay attention to the story. Maybe it works better that way.

By translating the voluptuous Elizabethan sensibility to the drier post-Edwardian era, and then cutting much of the play's great rhetoric and poetry, McKellen and Loncraine actually flirt with ennui rather than excitement. [19 Jan 1996, p.C]

A classy but over-contrived topical thriller about bomb plots and anti-government groups.

Has a remote feel. It sometimes impresses but never soars.

Strong, hard, dirty, funny, moving atmospheric and laced with scabrously musical street dialogue.

The movie doesn't really jell. Glossy, good-looking and well-produced, it affects you and even sometimes moves you, but it doesn't really convincingly connect.

The kind of movie that gives sequels a bad name, even though, strangely enough, it's better than the 1995 hit that spawned it.

An independent American art film that seems to be masquerading as Victorian-era pornography--and it's not quite as interesting or provocative as that description might make it sound.

The movie contains its moments, charms and felicities-even its sharp stings of pleasure and pain. [20 May 1994]

Completely successful or not, films like Saudade do Futuro are needed. And we need people like the Nordestinos.

As beautiful as all the film's technology is, it needs more real human beings around - to pull the switches, man the pumps and scuttle through those corridors.

A bawdy comedy that convincingly celebrates the resilience of the urban poor and the power of friendship in the teeth of despair.

Serial Mom is a typically funny and cheerfully outrageous John Waters' comedy about the conjunction of suburbia and hell, perfect families and serial killers. [15 Apr 1994, p.C]

Though I wouldn't call He Loves Me a total success, it's smart, intriguing and quite ambitious, a first film by a talented young filmmaker that displays superstar Tautou's gifts in an eerie new light.

It's a big, smiley, free-floating blimp of a comedy: a farce about reluctant fatherhood that could use some parental guidance. [12 July 1995, p.N16]

It's an engrossing peek at an era that now seems as meteoric, crazy and distant as the Roaring Twenties.

Just because a movie was inspired by real life and has good intentions doesn't mean it can't wind up as phony as a three-dollar bill.

In this defiantly ridiculous movie, David Zucker, of the old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Airplane! movies, once again unleashes on the world the sexiest (and dumbest) 66-year-old accident-prone cop in the history of the movies, Leslie Nielsen's Lt. Frank Drebin. The jokes still come at you in a dense Hellzapoppin' blizzard. But more of them seem crude, mean-spirited, a little sour.

Director Richard Rush is one of the more talented and mysterious figures in American filmmaking. But though it has been 14 years since his last feature (the 1980 live-wire classic "The Stunt Man"), his new movie, The Color of Night, is sometimes just as hip, lively and blast-your-eyes funny as ever.

A big, creepy dollhouse of a movie--a sometimes engrossing shocker with a surprise ending that isn't especially shocking or surprising.

Like the cerebral palsy-stricken Irish artist Christy Brown of "My Left Foot," Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning role, Ami is forced to fight such overwhelming odds to express himself that his very limitations become an aid to his vision.

It's an extraordinary performance in an often brave and intelligent film that, unfortunately, tends to collapse around him in the end -- just as the world of Kline's character, tweedy but likable William Hundert, deconstructs around him.

Kika is kind of a mess. But it's a charming, stimulating, talented and ingratiating mess, none-the-less.

The movie overflows with action, slapstick and cliches, but the cliches never impede the action, and the slapstick is so expertly performed, it doesn't annoy you -- much.

The men here are negligible, but all the actresses are good -- especially Dunst, who shows a previously unrevealed gift for blending cold conservative roots, starchy appearance, forgiveness and unexpected redemption.

Tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact.

Democracy might not really come from a bottle of shampoo, but "Beauty Academy" teaches us that, sometimes, mascara really matters.

It's a misfire--but a fascinating, magnetic misfire, a film full of first-rate talents forced into absurdity, struggling to bring believability to nonsense. [22 September 1995, Friday, p. C]

Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.

It's a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes it's after.

The role sounds like a sentimental trap, but Penn doesn't fall into it. It's a sensational performance, and he illumines a movie that sometimes seems in danger of descending into modish Hollywood political correctness.

Melodrama triumphs. But here's at least some muted applause for a fine cast and filmmakers trying to confront the real world and its shadows.

Disappointingly, X-Men: The Last Stand slides back between the first two episodes. It's not stuporous, and it's not super.

All too obvious, all too easy, the sort of tongue-in-chic L.A. comedy that mistakes glibness for high style, heartfelt pop choruses for wisdom.

Takes a fascinating true story and turns it into a conventional cop thriller, hoking up the provocative three-generation saga of the LaMarca family.

More than "Natural Born Killers," it's a real deconstruction of the whole love-on-the-run crime genre: drab, grim but effective.

Gives us a lot to enjoy and something most studio movies don't even try for: an attempt at the richness, density and sheer contrariness of life.

Sweet-tempered, good-looking, goofy and not too sharp. The movie doesn't make much sense and neither does Danny, played by Welsh heartthrob Rhys Ifans.

The movie A Good Man in Africa contains the book's funniest, saltiest scenes, but it's less controlled and assured. [09 Sep 1994, p.C]

Though one can question the movie's quality as a documentary -- Broomfield is a dogged but often annoying interviewer, and Churchill's photography is sometimes slapdash -- Aileen raises such troubling issues that it stays, hellishly, in your mind.

A movie best suited for a lazy afternoon or a languorous night, particularly if you're a Francophile. Charming, glamorous, emotionally suggestive but slight, it's full of beautiful and colorful people.

Mary Reilly is a thinking person's horror movie, done with such obvious intelligence and artistry that it feels strange to watch it and be so unmoved. [23 Feb 1996]

Following in the footsteps of "Thelma & Louise" and all the other fugitive comedy-drama-romances, "Manny & Lo" can't quite convince us it really belongs. Paradoxically, it's because much of the movie rings so true, that some crucial parts of the story ring so false. [30 Aug 1996, p.J]

Though it's sweet and likable to a fault, it's also a movie that never seems heartfelt or deep.

This overrated backstage TV nostalgia comedy, set in 1954, does boast standout performances by Peter O'Toole and Joseph Bologna as characters modeled on Erroll Flynn and Sid Caesar. [07 Nov 1997]

It's the equivalent of our "Gone With the Wind," Russia's "War and Peace" or, to take a more modest example, South Korea's "Chunhyang." Sheer ambition and grandiose make the film interesting -- up to a point.

A gentle film, not very controversial despite its gay content, Chop Sue is valuable as a record of beauty and obsession, much less interesting as a human document.

It's another slick-and-quick muscle car of a movie, racing along for a couple of hours, taking you nowhere as fast as it can.

Koepp, an often ingenious writer, should have followed King's example and covered his tracks better. If he had, Secret Window might have been as good as "Stir of Echoes," and not simply a mini "Misery" and a not-quite "Shining."

Seethes with cruel lust and brainy fancy.

Proves, unhappily enough, how U.S.-style media politics is spreading around the world.

A movie meant to explode off the screen -- and it's at its best when those explosions are going full blast.

One of the most discouraging things about many big studio movies is the way they waste resources, mainly talent and money. Pushing Tin manages to waste an excellent cast, a glossy production and what initially seems to be a bright, funny script. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

As a director, Buscemi is drier than he is as a performer: more quietly funny, less intense and sometimes weirdly compassionate.

It just doesn't swing (or bop), but the stars always click. [15 Jul 2005, p.C8]

The movie, one of those surprise-twist detective stories, doesn't really stand up to scrutiny in the cold light of the theater lobby.

Airheads loses its guts and spark halfway through.

No revelation, but it’s a more honorable, interesting effort than many of the crass, dopey recent big-studio schlockfests like "Say It Isn’t So" or "Tomcats" that tell similar coming-of-age tales.

Kazan does have his father's fierce erotic curiosity, that sense that once you unravel a story's real lusts and greeds, you've solved it.

A bloody strange movie--and a surprise. Who would have thought that you could put together an anthology of "extreme" Asian horror featurettes by three cutting-edge Asian directors where the most tasteful, restrained contribution was the one by Japanese mad dog moviemaker Takashi Miike?

It's a bit too muddy, dismal-looking and smoky to beguile us, too fixated on filth and too dreary-looking to really shock us.

Almost as uncompromising, and sometimes as funny, as "Dollhouse" or "Happiness."

Packs so much hell-for-leather action, gorgeous Moroccan scenery and eye-popping Industrial Light and Magic visual effects into its two hours that, after a while, I began to get tired of it.

Makes compromises itself, but only because of its small budget and its director's mixed dark-and-rosy vision, at once cynical and sentimental. Yet at least it has a vision -- of both life and cinema.

If Hollywood is really a dream factory, then it's the movie moguls and movie stars who live that dream to the hilt. In the late 1970s few lived quite as large as Robert Evans.

The film is De Palma's tribute to film noir, to Paris and to the cinema itself.

You either go for a movie like this or you don't. But though I didn't like it much, I've got to admit that The Descent is a nerve-jangler.

Sometimes one performance makes a film worthwhile, and Junebug has one: an astonishing, moving portrayal of down-home innocence and optimism by Amy Adams.

Strikes me as something of an elaborate mistake, a wasted opportunity and a script Hartley should have discarded. But I liked it anyway.

As bizarre, provocative and almost deliberately off-putting an indie picture as anything that's popped up in theaters recently.

The King simply unsettles and bothers us -- and it finally misses both the true terror and the twisted redemption it needs for its wicked song, a would-be "Heartbreak Hotel" of horror, to really chill our spines.

It's not that the movie is bad; it's merely uninspired and relatively clueless about Kaufman.

The Statement is an older man's film, and compassion is one of its strengths; Jewison and Caine make us feel pity and terror for the victims as well.

Even if you enjoyed the mean, funny 1995 John Travolta-Elmore Leonard crime comedy "Get Shorty"-and many of us did-this forced sequel isn't likely to help you repeat the experience.

There's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

Robin Williams is such a great comic virtuoso that it can almost hurt to see him straining to pump life into a conventional, uninspired, sometimes-goofy big-studio comedy such as RV.

M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's visually stunning but oddly cold and sparkless adaptation of the much-prized David Henry Hwang play. [08 Oct 1993]

Like an episode of "Friends" where the entire cast has been given aphrodisiacs and locked up.

It's still strangely remote, only fitfully romantic, never really convincing.

The late U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono and his widow and successor Mary Bono have spent a good deal of time trying to save it. It's a hard task, but the film does suggest there's more to the sea than meets the eye.

This is a better movie than the vacuous "Insurrection," thanks largely to a sympathetic screenwriter, longtime "Trek" fanatic John Logan ("Gladiator"), and a crew (headed by Patrick Stewart's Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and Brent Spiner's android Data) determined to go out in glory.

Despite Fiennes' splendid moodiness and Tyler's radiant vulnerability, despite lovely settings... this movie is dull.

Hoodwinked treats "Red Riding Hood" as a detective story we've never really understood until now, with nuttier motivations, more complex characters and a screwier climax.

An offbeat, poetic piece that eschews the terse, hard-boiled style of the standard cop movie or TV show for something softer-centered and more nakedly emotional.

Carrera's style is hard-hitting, lucid and technically superior (if unimaginative). El Crimen del Padre Amaro eventually moves and stirs you, even if it often resembles those steamy Mexican TV dramas/soap operas called telenovelas.

The script isn't really good enough to worry about whether it's being over-directed; in fact, E. Elias Merhige's over-direction is one of the best things about this movie--along with Ben Kingsley's grimly unstoppable killer-of-killers, Benjamin O'Ryan.

In some ways it's not a film that surprises us much. But it's a notable directorial debut anyway -- smartly written, very well cast and skillfully done.

One funny movie - for at least half the time.

There are better holocaust dramas than Grey Zone -- "Schindler's List" for one, and due later this year, Roman Polanski's magnificent "The Pianist." But few will disturb you like The Grey Zone -- mostly because it won't try for tears.

Another of many recent Hollywood plotless wonders.

The movie isn't quite spry, warm or hip enough to carry out its very ambitious serio-comic agenda. Even for an ace like Levinson, Belfast is a long way from Baltimore.

While the movie is never dull, its romantic fodder doesn't do justice to any period at all.

Begins like a house afire and then fizzles out into a quasi-supernatural dead end.

This time around, the razors are a little duller, the clicks not as slick, the patter not as snappy.

Something that gets your motor racing briefly, but which you've seen all too often.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, the co-stars of Out to Sea, keep fooling, beguiling and surprising us. Nothing can sink or ruffle them. Even with substandard scripts or dubious projects, they remain one of the greatest comedy actor teams the American movies have had: two longtime stars with formidable talents who complement each other perfectly. [02 July 1997, p.2]

The film is not exactly a documentary, and not quite a period horror movie either. But it has elements of both. At its best, it's hypnotic and provocative.

Good in many ways, full of talent and intelligence, and marks the debut of a promising young American writer-director, Dan Harris.

The movie loses its magic by the time the solution is revealed.

Erratically acted and, at times, clumsily written.

Turns out to be a Hollywood sequel of surpassing silliness and wasted talent.

Slender but surprisingly smart and pleasing.

Overall, King Arthur sinks into a grim, gray torpor - though it's an odd, not unentertaining movie. The approach is different, if not edifying or convincing.

Pseudo art can be fun, though, even if it doesn't quite awaken all your senses.

Almost nothing new to offer -- despite its good actors, flashy visuals and well-textured New York gloss and grit. But there are teasing hints of another, better movie buried inside somewhere.

Between the two Murphys, "Metro" is no waste of time. But it's no life-enhancing experience either -- unless you're into trolley-hopping, perp-snuffing and vows of vengeance. "The Nutty Professor" proved Eddie Murphy still has it, 10 times over.

The Theory of Flight is built from the kind of material that either soars or crashes with audiences. And here, it doesn't quite hold together. But if the film, as a whole, never takes flight, the actors do. Watching them bicker and sail up is so delightful, you only wish their vehicle could keep them aloft longer.

Fun to watch it may be, but it's shallow fun. Like the drugs and booze the characters keep using -- and even the sex -- it's a passing pleasure.

Wayne's World 2 may not be much of a movie, but at least it's funny. And, hey, what else does it have to be? What do you want from a movie? Blood? Rock on, Wayne. Party hearty, Garth. [10 Dec 1993, p.A]

It's just another case of mourning over what might have been.

A cranky failure with brilliant moments.

While it's done well enough here - written smartly, staged crisply and acted to the hilt - it doesn't last, except as a brief virtuoso piece for three players.

A somewhat bewildering and unsatisfying film that nevertheless contains more inspired moments and brilliant scenes than many movies we call successes.

A wildly improbable story that neither Newman nor co-stars Fiorentino and Mulroney, for all their panache and chemistry, can make much sense of it.

I don't think it will seriously disappoint longtime fans, but it made me itchy as I watched it unfold in ways that the comics never did when I read them in the '60s.

This is a movie where you can get drunk on the B2], sloshed on the scenery. But perhaps not quite drunk enough. [11 Aug 1995, p.C2]

There is a thrill in seeing them wooing and pursuing each other through the streets of New York, a city that here again, for a while, becomes a movie isle of joy.

Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension. The story loses us at precisely the moment it should put us in the vise.

As is often the case in Loach's films, all the acting is exemplary. Padilla, who learned English only shortly before making the film, is a natural actress, a smoldering presence.

There's something too slickly contrived and hollow about this film. It's a yuppified wish-fulfillment piece dangling between real world and fairy tale, and it's mostly the actors --especially Lindsay and Elaine Hendrix (as the conniving publicist who is trying to marry Hallie and Annie's dad) -- who manage to bring it off. [29 July 1998]

Good action movies live on style and excitement. But they also need credibility, and in Hostage, ALMOST a good genre piece, plausibility keeps getting slaughtered.

Don't expect a lot, and you'll probably enjoy Happy, Texas, as I did -- mostly. At the very least, Steve Zahn will make you laugh.

An erratic but enjoyable sci-fi action movie with an extremely bent sense of humor. [09 Aug 1996, p.F]

A second-rate nightmare: the Reagan generation meets Leatherhead with flickers of brilliance drowned in blood and snobbery, a corpse dressed by Bloomingdale's.

Dark as it is, the humor makes it work, especially Greene's typically witty and compassionate portrayal of Mogie.

Harsh Times, is almost a good, salty urban thriller.

For sheer laughs, Willard and Piddock take the trophy.

The movie is dedicated, in a nice touch, to early Farrelly fan Gene Siskel. And Gene was right: The Farrellys are often very funny filmmakers. .

I liked the idea of the movie more than the movie itself -- though sections of it are mind-blowing.

Thanks to the actors and the way the movie lets them loose, it's often funny or moving at all the right moments.

An outrageously unlikely prison action movie made with lots of eye-catching pizzazz and undeserved expertise.

Bopha!, a movie about emotional and political turbulence tearing apart the family of a black South African police officer, is good, but a little disheartening. Not because of the injustice and misery it reveals-but because you want it to be better.

This is a movie that really has little to offer but performances and ideas. For a while, that's enough.

A stylish, nasty, very well-done Belgian horror movie.

Its fascination may be limited to those already very familiar with his works and collaborators - and his sensual, highly subjective style.

Jersey Girl is an oddity, hard to dislike but impossible to buy.

Jade, like many another recent erotic or techno thriller, is packed with talent, polished and technically dazzling. But, daring as it might seem in its sexual content and exposure of bad behavior among the mighty, it's curiously soft at conveying what these characters really believe. [13 Oct 1995, p.J2]

It's interesting - in its own let-it-all-hang-out, shaky-camera way.

Underneath, it's a flashy crock-another piece of self-congratulatory formula wish-fulfillment masquerading as hip. This would-be "inside" comedy about not selling out sells out in virtually every scene.

It's a depressing story made even more of a downer by the absence of any Stones-performed music from their prime '60s years.

The subject of Iraq haunts and divides us so much these days that a film like Laura Poitras' documentary My Country My Country is valuable, no matter its level of achievement.

Muppets from Space has silly gags and cute cosmic fish swimming around in its space. It just doesn't have the right awe and wonder -- except, perhaps, for the children who should be its prime audience. Adults, beware -- at least this time.

It's a movie that starts off nicely, offers two marvelous performances (by James Coburn and Mick Jagger) and then slowly, unaccountably loses itself.

The movie tries hard to duplicate the original's mood and story, but, like Gere or Lopez, is too much of a visual knockout to rope us in.

Disturbingly lightweight and emotionally risk-free.

Jolie and Banderas are two hot actors, in many senses of the word, and their scenes together have a lewd excitement.

The whole film, in fact, seems too fast for its own good. It plays like a synopsis, jumping from scene to scene, grief to grief, and it doesn't let us relax into the various worlds it's creating.

The movie -- directed in such a frenziedly self-conscious style you often wonder whether the camera will topple over on his actors.

A promising film rather than a fully realized one.

Always watchable and cinematically lively, but it never quite engages the emotions -- despite torrents of sentimentality and would-be heart-tugging scenes interspersed with the carnage.

More spirit and grace and less blood and guts may be what Passion needs.

So-so. [23 Jan 1997, p.9B]

The movie may lack a lot of things, but it doesn't lack comic timing--or, in its own way, a nose for the news.

Likable as it is, suffers from that modern big-movie vice: overkill.

It has ideas as well as jolts, themes as well as special effects, characters as well as gore. But, as adapted by writer W. D. Richter and director Fraser Heston, these Things seem disappointingly diminished, squeezed and stuffed into a box too small.

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

Everything about the movie is overscaled, overbrutal, overbroad, full of holes. Yet there's something cheerful and wacky about it; it's a light-hearted blood bath.

The talk and plot twists both have a flavorless, perfunctory quality.

Despite its good performances--Minns, Lumbly, Shelby and Best, as well as Plummer--South Central lacks a certain juice, heat and life. It doesn’t boil with the energy you’d expect from a gang picture, and it doesn’t have the density or rich atmosphere of a Boyz N the Hood, Do the Right Thing or New Jack City.

The movie is like a big, smug, sunny ball of fluff, batting around in a crystalline cage. It's bright and well-meaning, but there's little to grab onto or feel. Not even the presence of those expert actor/farceurs, Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, give it any real presence or bite. [20 Dec 1991, p.16]

The Bedroom Window engrosses you in theory more than practice. As a thriller, it has elements that many recent Hitchcock pastiches have lacked: interesting characters and a somewhat complex plot. But perhaps this story simply looks good by contrast. The movie also lacks sheer juice and voltage. [16 Jan 1987, p.C17]

London's Fang was, fundamentally, a loner and a killer; the movie Fang is a big, friendly dog, temporarily derailed into the fight game by snarling villains. That makes this White Fang, rather oversunny, overaffirmative, primarily a movie for children. But I liked it anyway, despite the softened tone, the coincidences, despite Hawke's constantly gaping mouth.

Witchboard is smarter, and better acted, than much of its bloody competition. But it isn't crazy or original enough to stand too far above them. It's makers and its monsters alike deserve the same salutation: Better luck next time. [16 Mar 1987, p.8]

It's a mixed bag; parts of it are awful. But it has, and needs, only one major defense: It's full of Grade-A rock 'n' roll, rousingly well performed. It moves, it swings, it jumps and vibrates. It's a musical. [05 Nov 1990, p.F10]

The film now seems less urbane and innovative, more coldly flashy and bluntly affected -- full of sound and Furie, signifying little. [2 June 1987, p.Cal-1]

It’s a low-budget production with major-league acting by Mary Steenburgen, Holly Hunter and Alfre Woodard. It’s not directed sharply enough; Thomas Schlamme is particularly weak on the fight scenes.

Light of Day is a sympathetic, intelligent movie, with one great performance, but it suffers from the malaise rock 'n' roll is supposed to cure: inhibitions, a lack of spontaneity. [06 Feb 1987, p.4]

Despite the movie's ruinous cliches, Neeson puts some genuine anguish into his phonily written scenes as the '60s burnout. Bateman plays to him well, and Phillips, making her feature debut, has some funny moments in the flashy kook role.

Chevy Chase has not been on a roll lately, and to say that in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation he's funnier than in his last six movies combined may sound like high praise, until you remember those six movies. "Caddyshack II" alone almost throws them into the "minus" laugh range. But here, he does what he does best: flat-out slapstick and subversive tear-downs of his own smooth image. This sweet, goofball, manic middle-class daddy brings out his sharpest reflexes and he gets good support from D'Angelo, the bulging-eyed slob-in-excelsis Quaid, and from Questel and Hickey as his dottiest relations.

Jennifer 8 is smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it’s also too hemmed-in by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player’s skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes--because it’s in the exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

The boys are breezy; their companions glib and glittery. This big studio mix of bang-bang and badinage isn’t really a bad movie. But a lot of it suggests a fancy misfire: a super-powered evening at the town’s most expensive eatery, where everybody starts out psyched up to have Big Fun, and things start to slide. What happens? The food disappears. The music is too loud. The conversations are brittle, the jokes are pushed too hard, everyone laughs too much. And, at the end, in case your attention starts wandering, people start pulling out guns and killing each other.

Though it doesn't really work, there are enjoyable things about it.

Norman Taurog's The Caddy is a sometimes subpar 1953 Martin & Lewis golfing comedy enlivened by a Dean and Jerry duet on "That's Amore" and a snatch of their great stage act. [22 Jul 1988, p.23]

Midway through The Lost Boys there's a brief scene that suggests the magic and power it could have had. This scene suggests a fable of seductive evil-but nothing in the movie is ever half as evocative again. It's more lost than the Boys: a glossy fiasco with most of the real blood sucked out of it.

It's one of those movies that, however well it works now, might have been pretty bad with a different cast and director. It doesn't really transcend its genre; it just stretches it in amusing and sometimes surprising ways.

As a concert film, judged from the music, Sign O' the Times is near the top. As a movie -- carrying inside it the embryo of other movies -- it's not fully satisfying. But you sense it could be; however he stumbles, Prince gives you the impression he'll always, catlike, leap back. [20 Nov 1987, p.4]

We're No Angels proves that a great ensemble is no guarantee of a great movie -- but it also proves that the misses of the brilliant can still give you something extraordinary. [15 Dec 1989, p.F12]

The best thing about High Heels are the performances - [Victoria Abril]'s tense, voracious daughter, Parades' star-turn mother, the sinister Bose, the arrogant Atkine - and the lucidity of Almodovar's narrative style, which by now seems as natural as breathing. [20 Dec 1991]

There are misfires in Sucka, but there's also some funny stuff. Wayans shows a refreshing taste for self-mockery. [17 Feb 1989, p.8]

The Fourth War doesn't make much sense, but it's powerfully acted and beautifully directed. [23 Mar 1990, p.F4]

Like the movies its modeled after, it's shallow, frequently silly. But there's something about the mix--maybe something about Parillaud as the screechy, dangerous Nikita--that may make the movie a powerful engine of wish-fulfillment. [12 Apr 1991, Calendar, p.F-10]

It’s cute and high-spirited, and it shows some talent and verve. Watching it, you feel that Beaird is capable of something really good; even when his material goes stale and tasteless, there’s a joie de vivre in his direction.

In the end, even in the howling high frequencies and the nihilistic night, this R-rated movie misses its best shot. It doesn't talk hard enough. [22 Aug 1990, p.5]

Decline's redeeming grace is its jocular, damn-the-proprieties air and, for the first half, its staccato editing rhythm. It's damnation is most of the music and its relative avoidance of heavy metal's darker corners: the pith and point that Alex Cox gave punk in Sid and Nancy.

The movie has the same problem as Davis' Chuck Norris vehicle, Code of Silence. Starting in the semi-realistic framework of the '70s cop movies, it veers off into '80s action movie cloud-cuckoo land: the paranoid one-against-a-hundred cliches of the average Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job. [08 Apr 1988, p.14]

Most of the rest of this Hamlet effective or lovely as parts of it may be, just keeps sawing at the air in a drafty hall and pouring all its light on Mel Gibson and his angelic stubble. [18 Jan 1991]

It never cuts loose. No matter how much come-hither villainy Gere generates, or how much envy and menace Garcia throws back at him, they're still trapped there in that bare, empty story, waiting for the dry ice and the steam to arrive.

Brighton Beach Memoirs may be one of Simon’s best plays, but the film’s heart seems to be beating in a plastic wrapper. There’s a kind of glace over everything, a sugary show-biz coat that dulls your taste buds. Everything is bigger, brighter and broader than it should be--though remnants of that simpler, more honest story often peek through.

It’s not the gem it wants to be, but it’s good in comparison to many of the sensation-hungry pictures around it; it’s not just a movie only a mother could love.

When it's just roaring along through a kaleidoscope of Los Angeles locations, the camera perched behind, above or below the skateboarding heroes and villains, the movie can be fun. It's shot in an extravagant, try-anything, music-video style. It's rattlingly paced, vibrant and splashy. Then we get to the story. Stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. Sound familiar? Try this for extra spice. Two warring teen-age gangs clash--the free-and-breezy Valley Guy "Ramp Locals" and the swaggering, black leather, bone-in-the-nose "Daggers."

You’d have to stretch hard to call this movie--a young-love-on-the-run chase thriller with political undercurrents--a success. The story often lacks credibility or a mainspring; its heart sticks too hard to its sleeve. But there are compensating factors: warmth, guts, ambition.

The second film never has the hardness or urgency of the first. Its best moments, perhaps happily, tend to come from the actors rather than the story or Richard Edlund's effects: especially newcomers Geraldine Fitzgerald and Julian Beck. [23 May 1986]

Kill Me Again doesn't look like the noir classics; instead of black-and-white, it's shot in slightly muddy color with vagrant green tints. But it feels like them. It has that nerve-jangling mix of pungent cynicism and thick gobs of pseudo-Expressionist style. It's not brilliant or original, but it's still a lean, fast, wide-awake sleeper.

It's Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She's a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she'll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit.

To give the movie its due, it's been directed, at least on the visual level, with unusual elegance: filled with graceful, gliding tracking shots, and icily precise Hitchcockian setups of the bleak decor and scary effects.

For the right audience, it'll be fun. It's for action movie fans with a taste for something off the beaten track -- but not too far. And for people who like to rail and spew against the vulgarity and stupidity of TV -- but keep watching it all anyway.

No one who sees the last half-hour of this movie will ever forget it--though quite a few may want to.

It wins a few, loses a few. It makes us laugh, gets mileage out of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man.” In the end, the actors save it, especially two of the actors: star Robert Downey Jr., who may have moved into the Robin Williams-Steve Martin-Whoopi Goldberg category, and supporting actor David Paymer, who never hits a false note.

Poltergeist III is another sequel that seems to exist for no better reason than justifying its title and number.

The phrase "by the numbers" was invented for the way Harper crafts this script. After coming up with a good notion, opening and close, he simply fills up the middle innings with the detritus of several decades of TV sitcoms and high-concept kid movies. [07 Jul 1993, p.F1]

A modernized version of that great sentimental horse movie, 1943's "My Friend Flicka," and it comes with the shiny trappings, high professionalism and glamorous accessories you might expect...Something is missing though.

The two halves of Hiding Out--thriller and teen sex comedy--never meld, working against each other rather than together. Hiding Out never escapes its absurd hook, this mechanical collision of genres. After all, if someone really needs to hide out, isn't the best plan to simply . . . hide out?

A cute, well-acted film that tries to mix tones sharply.

Freaky Friday commits a lot of sins; luckily, it has Curtis and a few others to cover them up.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never rises above its marketing-hook origins. It's a product, a commodity, a toy tie-in, a trailer for the comics, an advertisement for the cereal. It's a naked sell.

An uninspired misfire of a TV-series knockoff that, despite its great cast and smart filmmakers, never manages to scare up much magic.

A pumped-up, flag-waving, outrageously hokey and ridiculous -- but sometimes incredibly exciting -- war movie.

In movies as in life, superior technology doesn't necessarily trump humor, magic or really shaggy dogs.

The sense of the unknown that "Padgett" created are largely absent. And the movie fails to supply us with an antagonist to work up some dramatic conflict. Nor are the toys themselves very interesting and Mimzy is a toy bunny of no distinction.

Less a movie than a loud, heavy, money machine, a think tank where nobody thinks. The movie seems intended to extract maximum profit with minimum artistry -- and if you like having your pockets picked by experts, this is probably the show to see. [15 Mar 1996, p.C]

Has heart, but lacks bite.

The film tries to mix the two 1930s movie comedy strains: screwball romance and populist fable. But there's something nerveless and thin about it. Hawn and Russell are good, but their scenes together have a calculated spontaneity--overcute, obvious. Director Garry Marshall keeps the lines slamming off each other briskly but with a shallow, hectoring energy. And he doesn't have much visual flair.

This film has so many good ideas, it tends to seem better after you've left the theater. But the mock TV stuff is just too faux to be funny.

A big, hearty fantasy-adventure with spectacular fire-breathing effects and a fizzling story. [31 May 1996, p.C]

By creating a kind of politically correct version of Andy Griffith's "Mayberry," director Bezucha has drained the movie not only of bigotry but also of dramatic conflict.

The trajectory of the film -- despite its excellent cast and intelligent mounting -- is too preordained.

A wildly expensive movie full of computers, nonsense and violence, a film where wit, romance, elegance -- everything -- is sacrificed on the altar of giganticism, cliche and over-the-top action.

Boyle's new movie is mostly a zombie fiasco, closer to the vacuities of "The Beach" than the scintillating social satire of "Trainspotting."

Keith -- a consistent hit-maker who wrote the controversial 9/11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" -- has a future in movies if he wants it. Hopefully, they'll be better ones than this.

What the movie doesn't have, besides too many laughs, is either the pungent style and sociology of true film noir, or the sheer yuppie desperation of the hard-core erotic thriller. Instead of being hard-boiled, it's over easy.

A breakthrough for karate comedy king Chan, but not necessarily the kind we've all been waiting and hoping for. It's an ultra-digitized DreamWorks show crammed with elaborate special effects, the kind that physical-stunt specialist Chan has always avoided.

A likable little movie without much to offer but cute tots, recycled gags and a talented cast amiably wasting their time and ours.

The movie is like the bikers; it's best and freest when it's just racing ahead. Whenever it stops, you ask too many questions.

A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.

Pink Cadillac has a strong visual design and lots of juicy, self-confident acting. But it doesn’t transcend its star vehicle trappings or chemistry. The construction of the story is so soft, you get the impression that if the driver and navigator were replaced, the movie might turn rattletrap and fall apart.

In Nightbreed neither the coyly horrible killers nor the horribly coy monsters register strongly enough. It's a dark beast with a flabby hide.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

A feast of bad taste, a demonic hog-wallow.

A business-as-usual blockbuster blueprint that rarely surprises you.

This is a picture in which the barf scenes standard in the usual crude youth comedies aren't gratuitous. They're logical climaxes.

Parents is all leftovers, despite the tasty little tidbits that Quaid and Hurt keep sporadically cooking up: Dad's spotless collars and loopy grin, Mom's brittle Cutex-lacquered claws. [27 Jan 1989, p.7]

The movie doesn't deserve any of the talent bestowed on it, from Reiner's amiable direction to the occasional grace notes in the performances of Hudson, Marceau and David Paymer.

It's a movie that robs the story of its politics and point and never really matches the charm of the '60s film.

Hobbled with pedestrian direction, a dull visual style and a last act awash in obvious bang-bang melodrama.

This seems to be a movie made by people who love the old classic movie swashbucklers but don't have a clue how to make or modernize them.

Unfortunately, the humans only have scripts to support them. So for every bear triumph, Country Bears also features cliched jokes, corny sentiment, ludicrous shtick and the most flabbergasting set of star cameos since Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson wandered into "Men in Black II."

Most of the jokes in Eddie Murphy Raw are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.

Slick but forgettable. [01 Oct 1993, p.C]

Like too many movies these days, takes a clever little idea and all but pounds it into the ground.

An overblown, overspectacular, oversold movie without an original idea in its head.

Despite some impressive technical achievements, it too looks like a movie with little reason for being.

It's a bizarre but engaging fling.

It's a comedy about maniacs: a tasteful murder-comedy, which isn't that laudable a goal.

Slick, expensive and filled with good-looking actors flexing muscles, but once it grabs our attention it doesn't really reward it...this movie doesn't have fear -- or sheer wonder and marvel -- enough.

There's barely a scene in this movie that taps his (Murphy) special brilliance.

Overbroad, underdone.

It’s a big, frothy, high-tech, cutesy-poo musical comedy.

One of those movies that promises much but doesn't deliver. Despite a lot of misplaced talent, this movie is as silly and forced as its title.

Maybe Georgia Rule should be required viewing for Paris Hilton during her term in the slammer. But not for us.

This movie can spot the handsome face that lies beneath an ugly exterior, but it seems to get fooled by the rot that sometimes lurks beneath the sweet and the safe, the formula and the sure-fire.

It's really a crock: a coming-of-age boys' prison film that has only a fanciful link with Behan's life. The film is a bastard grandchild of Tony Richardson's 1962 "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."

It's a middling film that wastes a lot of good opportunities, as well as two fine, charming co-stars.

Hitchcock adapts another Daphne Du Maurier novel -- a tale of pirates and distressed damsels on the Cornish coast -- with less memorable results than either "Rebecca" or "The Birds." But Charles Laughton is a nicely nasty two-faced villain and Maureen O'Hara a staunch heroine. [18 Jun 2000, p.22]

It's a shiny, glib, hollowly good-looking movie that always seems to be cooing at us-coldly. [23 Nov 1994, p.9C]

This isn't a particularly good movie, and it's offensive in the way mid-range low-budget slasher shows usually are. But it works better than some, largely because Etheredge-Ouzts has a more original slant and a deeper sense of character than horror movies usually allow.

The flabbergasting scenes here-written by a team of "Tonight Show" and "David Letterman Show" writers and directed by hot, young TV-commercial and music-video director Michael Bay-are slick, fast, loud, mostly derived from other movies and often senseless.

A light, breezy, often charming little film, with a good cast playing mostly shallow characters.

There are some premises that absolutely aren't going to work--no matter how much intelligence, talent or craft the film makers bring to them. And Marshall Brickman may have stumbled onto such a premise in The Manhattan Project.

The filmmakers' instincts may be sound, but Permanent Midnight is no killer. Stahl hated most of what he wrote in his TV heyday. So one really wonders why he, and maybe Stiller, didn't write this script. Surely, it's one script Stahl could have delivered.

A bright and zippy, but alarmingly over-campy and lighter-than-fluff cartoon feature.

Like its title heroine, it's sparkly, pretty and flirty--but often all wet.

Strikes me as a pure, unadulterated crock. [12 February 1999, Friday, p.A]