Michael Wilmington

The Little Rascals is a nice-looking movie-shot in a nostalgic childhood haze by Richard Bowen-but watching it is almost numbing. It's the kind of empty gaudy show the misfit characters in Spheeris' good comedies might waste their time with.

Despite intelligent, sympathetic direction by Gordon, a brilliant lead performance by Robert Downey Jr. and an adapted script written by Potter himself before his 1991 death, this "Detective" pales next to its predecessor.

Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."

Two gifted co-stars, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and the highly imaginative thriller specialist Phillip Noyce lend some luster and credibility to another borderline-absurd scenario.

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.

If you're looking for purple romance with a social conscience, it doesn't get much more purple than God's Sandbox.

It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.

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.

The sum of all snores until the moviemakers start blowing up Baltimore halfway through. Then the special-effects people take over for about 20 breathless minutes.

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]

Should have worked on our emotions like a scalpel, made us cry and bleed. But, though it's an affecting, polished film, it's not satisfying. [12 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

An odd little ghoul too cleaned up to survive, a bloodless vampire movie that's mostly lifeless as well.

This movie lets you feel something. Like George's house, if not his life, it's built well and full of heart.

An odd mix itself, of contemporary sexual realism and unabashed romantic fantasy. If "Days" works, it's mostly on a sheer fantasy level.

A movie for people with time to waste, Sniper is about as compelling as a Soldier of Fortune magazine cover set to music.

For all its crashes and flash, this is a movie that drifts away as we watch it. Muscle cars and all, it's often a waste of gas.

The Russian film The Return is a stunning contemporary fable about a divided family in the wilderness - a simple, riveting film that almost achieves greatness.

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.

A shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto "Bride's" characters, they run away. [30 July 1999]

In most ways, a sequel-as-usual: a little warmer, with slightly less zip and flurry.

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.

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.

It's a weird little movie that's amusing enough while you watch it, offering fine acting moments and pungent insights into modern L.A.'s show-biz and media subcultures. But it doesn't leave you with much.

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.

Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.

I can't think of much that might happen on a date evening that could be more annoying than this movie.

Falls flat on its face.

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]

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]

Written with such murderous gravity, certainty and gloomy solemnity - such an absence of real life or feeling - that it tends to kill our interest.

A dumb movie, but it's also a knowing one: a cheap castle of lewd trivia and corny excitement built on The Rock.

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.

A film of almost paralyzing gravity and large ambitions that, almost inevitably, it can't quite meet.

There's a lot of beauty and excitement in Legends of the Fall - not least from the actors. [13 Jan 1995]

An oppressively cute Manhattan time-travel romantic comedy that’s lost in time, space and cliches.

Warlock is supposedly about the battle between Good and Evil, but movies about the battle between Heckle and Jeckle have more terror or profundity. [17 Jan 1991, p.F12]

Violent and cynical on the surface, impassioned and celebratory below, Last Man Standing is such a carefully stylized film that sometimes it's hard to respond to it. [20 Sep 1996, p.C]

One more movie comedy about how love can turn you into an idiot. And its major flaw, among many others, is that the idiocy takes over the movie.

Elegant, scary fun.

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

A stirring, large-souled movie.

It's hard to remember when actors have stepped into such a no-win situation and mustered up such panache: Turturro may be on a sinking ship, but he manages to drown brilliantly.

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.

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.

All Center of the World has is the double entendre of its title, some unremarkable dramatic and sex scenes, and some embarrassing moments for its very game co-stars.

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.

Double Team is loony but likable, a would-be triple double that ends up eking out a victory over its own script. And while Tsui is the man who makes it work, Rodman, on his best bad behavior, does his bit, defers to his teammates. At the end, Rourke and Van Damme pull off their shirts, while Rodman keeps his on. And, wisely, The Worm leaves most of the kicking to his co-star.

Girl 6 is a snappy, contemporary comedy about an aspiring New York actress who drifts into and out of the world of phone sex. It's an often sexy, funny show with interesting slants on modern New York culture and mores. [22 Mar 1996, p.F]

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]

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

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

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

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.

Ernest Saves Christmas is an improvement on Ernest Goes to Camp, mostly because of Seale. But basically it's another TV ad, a chestnut roasting on an open fire, exploding in your face every so often with another Ya know what I mean? [15 Nov 1988, p.7]

Movies made from serious novels are often ridiculed as unworthy of their sources, but this one may be too worthy -- too reverent, too showy, too earnest.

All these good actors and all Crystal's sass and witty candor can't bring back the heyday of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. Or even, most of the time, their off-days.

City Slickers II, perhaps, isn't really special. But it's the kind of movie Hollywood should churn out more often: a professional, ebullient, formula entertainment that doesn't insult your intelligence and hits its marks with ease, wit and good humor. Unlike most current mega-movies, it's classy, smart, sometimes gaudily tasteless fun-done with such zest and skill that it often makes you smile. And laugh. And maybe even smirk.

Larger Than Life is far closer to Murray's worst than his best. It's a truly senseless, erratic, if occasionally charming comedy that manages to waste Murray, a fine cast, good location photography and a terrific actor: Tai, the 8,000-pound trained pachyderm whose considerable stuff was strutted in 1995's Operation Dumbo Drop. [03 Nov 1996, p.11C]

Director H.S. Miller thinks he's made something broodingly visionary when you're more likely to be aesthetically shaken up by one of Mad magazine's Fold-Ins.

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

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.

It's just another Williams and Crystal movie. But let's see a few more.

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

American Pie 2, which brings back the same cast for more of the same, is just another by-the-numbers, money-hungry sequel with a lot of recycled shaggy-sex jokes and gross-out gags.

Has some of the wit, sass and sexual candor of an "Annie Hall." But it covers the same kind of territory with more bite and bile.

Tries to take us from heaven to hell but winds up leaving us in limbo: exasperated and dumfounded.

There are nice things in Medicine Man but it only works perfectly when it leaves its characters up a tree. [07 Feb 1992, p.F10]

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

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

Unfortunately, after watching Paycheck, you may wish you had the picture's gimmickry at your disposal, so you could erase your own memory of it.

Fast and frenetic and so unvarnished that it can make you feel unclean watching it. The film rubs your face in glamour and filth. But in the midst of the blood and hysteria, Kilmer plays Holmes with the dirty-angelic looks and wheedling charm of a seedy golden boy on the brink of doom.

The new Walt Disney version of "The Three Musketeers"-plushly mounted, but ineptly written and cast-gallops along like a gargantuan tutti-frutti wagon running amok. [12 Nov 1993, p.C]

Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.

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.

Much of this movie seems a crock.

The crass sentimentality of American Wedding increasingly fits Norman Mailer's definition: "the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional." The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny.

There isn't a single performance in Midnight Run that doesn't have a pulse, that doesn't show the actors at their best or near-best, especially De Niro. [20 July 1988]

In this bizarre tale of man among the apes and a psychiatrist among madmen -- an over-emotional hybrid of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- style buries substance.

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

Fairly well done but deadly dull futuristic thriller.

Writer L. M. Kit Carson and director Hooper have made Chainsaw 2 a grisly hoot: a wild satire on modern Texas and horror movies themselves. [31 Aug 1986, p.15]

Like the frosty tropical drinks the people keep sipping here, it's refreshing and icy-cool, a sinful pleasure mixed by experts.

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

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.

An empty-headed movie: one more gargantuan, excessive, over-the-top action thriller with one more superhero -- this time ex-linebacker Brian "The Boz" Bosworth -- battling dozens of deranged villains single-handedly while trucks, motorcycles and cars crash all around him. [20 May 1991, p.F6]

Total Eclipse is a biographical film steeped in ecstasy and despair, seething with madness and torment.

Every scene in this cautionary tale about science running amok has spectacular views, unusual camera angles and moves, or dazzlingly outre computer effects. And every scene, story-wise, gets mushier and more outlandish or perfunctory--until the movie seems disengaged from itself.

Another of many recent Hollywood plotless wonders.

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

Taking Care of Business is a curious achievement: a laughless comedy starring Belushi and Grodin, two actors who are almost always funny.

Has heart, but lacks bite.

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.

It's overwhelming and, in a curious way, it's charming, but at the center, even though you see it in the right place, you detect not a heart, or a mind, but something like a hot, roasted marshmallow beating and burbling within a thickened, ursine breast.

It looks like a TV ad, or 200 of them strung together, with the same kind of gaudy virtuosity, lavish technique and expensive self-mockery tinging every shot.

Compared to many movies of this kind, this Beaver is an enjoyable but mixed bag. [22 Aug 1997, p.C]

Jungle 2 Jungle, is a shallow, joyless show, whose family bonding comedy is as touching as its dead-bird jokes, as witty as a bowl of cat urine and as penetrating as its analysis of the Russian Mafia. [07 Mar 1997, p.F]

In The Haunting, the moviemakers succeed in something very difficult: creating a haunted house with real personality and terror. [23 July 1999, p.A]

Freeman gives his overwrought, over-familiar scenes an unlikely shot of intelligence and dignity that cuts through the formulas and almost makes them work.

What charmed me most about the movie was the interaction of the dogs themselves. [02 Jun 1995, p.J]

Being able to kick people in the head, at least while they’re standing up, is no negligible talent--though Lionheart is a pretty negligible movie. It has that grotesquely off-scale exaggeration of many post-'80s action movies.

Barker, who wasn't involved with the earlier Candyman, has never yet matched his stunning 1987 writer-director debut Hellraiser-and he never will if he keeps coming up with projects like this. [17 Mar 1995, p.J]

Trumbo's aim was a kind of proletarian poetry, but McKenzie's broad emoting has the deadly earnestness of a school play.

Hickox, the son of Douglas (Theatre of Blood) Hickox, shows a derivative, choppy, jagged style in his feature debut. He makes an uneasy stew of this mix of hip, flip teen-slasher gore and movie-buff aestheticism, of callous black humor and smarmy sentimentality. There’s a big problem here: too much waxy buildup.

Serves up horrendous lead acting, murky cinematography, bland atmosphere, unengaging romance, mug-crazy cameo performances, bash-on-the-head satire and ill-timed slapstick gags that look like outtakes from a Bozo the Clown show gone berserk. [20 Oct 1995]

The movie has an odd, queasy edge to it. It's cute. But, sometimes, it gets cold cute, ghastly cute. The effect is mixed--like a Norman Rockwell cover redrawn in Gahan Wilson's style by a computer.

Hardware isn’t long on ideas, emotions or character; it degenerates into a mindless slaughterhouse crescendo.

It may entertain you if you don't mind senseless stories and screaming soundtracks.

Likable but relentlessly trivial.

It's one of the most ferociously convincing physical re-creations of warfare ever put on screen.

However gaudy its credits, it is one more--and one of the worst written--in an endless line of clenched-up, crashed-out, buddy-buddy L.A. cop star vehicles. A waste of talent and energy on all levels.

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

Despite the actors, the visuals and Forster's directorial swagger, the movie lacks impact.

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

There's nothing dopier than the crooks in one-against-a-hundred action movies -- except maybe the people who cook them up. [12 Feb 1990, p.F8]

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.

Some film premises are so outlandish, so thinly worked out and so deep-down ridiculous that they wind up sinking the show -- and White Chicks collapses under a real doozy.

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.

Engrossing as it is, The Hunted is more a showcase for formidable talent than anything else. It's a brainy, exciting but shallow show -- an expert's action movie that almost runs out of breath.

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.

This genuinely ambitious and accomplished Chicago production does have strong points, not the least of which is Lana herself. When the fiery, emotionally transparent Orlenko lets her talent and presence pour down on Lana's Rain, the movie springs to life.

Thanks to Echer, Nettelbeck and this delicious movie, I was able to hear "Country" and the other Jarrett tunes in scene after scene - heightening moods, lyricizing action and making Hamburg seem like a wintry love song. Predictable or not, that's often as good as it gets.

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

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.

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

To work, it has to make us feel crazy with love, like "Vertigo" did. Instead, it often just makes us feel crazy for believing any of it.

Good as much of John Schlesinger’s The Believers is--and it’s one of the better-produced, more exciting and intelligent thrillers of the year--it’s hard to keep from wondering, as you watch, why he wanted to do it in the first place.

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.

Whatever magic the first two movies may have had -- and it wasn't always that apparent to anyone over the age of 10 -- has long since congealed, like stale pizza. Or mock turtle soup. [22 Mar 1993, p.F9]

Vast, riveting, madly audacious movie biography.

Townsend seemed to me ill-matched as a romantic hero: way too moony-eyed and mushy to cope with the likes of the towering Theron and torchy Cruz.

Whether you're won over depends on your own taste for ineptitude. Like the others in the Worrell saga, Ernest Goes to Jail is a movie with couch-potato stylistics and switching-channel logic. Watching it is like sitting with a lukewarm TV dinner for an hour or so, while somebody tries to pound you into a Smurf. [09 Apr 1990, p.F12]

This is a two-sentence movie. In cases like this, you're lucky to get three sentences' worth of dramatic development. Like here.

The show has its moments-some funny scenes, some wild stop-motion Phil Tippett computer action, some of Torn's scenery-chewing. But they're only moments. RoboCop 3's main problem is that nobody fouled up its program. It's a RoboMovie. [05 Nov 1993, p.C]

Though the film falls short of its aspirations, there's something magical about it. It's a poetic look at transience, betrayal, loss and doom.

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

A wild, wanton and wasteful western farce that's so overblown and underwritten it almost makes you cringe to watch it.

Shot in Chicago, this is a picture that looks better than it sounds and is made much better than it deserves to be.

This cautionary thriller about an unjustly imprisoned airline mechanic has a chance to be a canny blend of gutsy melodrama and J'Accuse against the prison system. But, by the end, it has gone as slick and corrupt as the crafty old con (F. Murray Abraham) who advises Tom Selleck's framed Jimmie Rainwood on jail survival. On a fundamental moral level, An Innocent Man is guilty as hell.

Captain Ron is a movie about trapped suburbanites who break out into romantic seas, but it never really leaves suburbia. Its spiritual home is in the shopping mall. Like the Cap'n himself, this movie guzzles up its dreams and ignores the busted engine.

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.

Sam Firstenberg--a decent enough action director who's shepherded along three previous ninja movies--here has a story so preposterous that nothing short of a mutiny could make the movie work.

The movie has an absurd script, fueled by that current B-movie staple, the idiot plot--a plot that proceeds only because all, or most, of the characters, act like idiots.

The usual bad movie sometimes gives a few chuckles, amuses audiences by making them feel superior. But young director Leonard makes a different kind of bomb. Fascinated with technology, Leonard makes cutting-edge techno-turkeys, with wildly elaborate visuals and ridiculous plots. [4 Aug 1995, pg. I]

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

Campbell and her character are willing to take chances. But Toback's tangled noirish plot, with Vera as a post-feminist femme fatale, isn't particularly clever or original.

From the very first images of Saul Bass' credit sequence, the whorls and patterns revolving in darkness, the huge eye bathed in red, the movie lets us feel the heartbeat and divided soul of its hero. And its creator. It is a movie about desire, darkness and the pull toward destruction. Most of all, it is about impossible love and overwhelming fear--conveyed with consummate control and art. Watching it, we feel the fear, suffer the desire. [Restored version; 18 Oct 1996, p.1]

We're reminded of Police Academy because this is another story about outcasts and rejects banding together to beat the odds in a macho profession. And we're reminded of The Sting because that's how we feel after the movie is over. Stung.

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

The movie--while it doesn't knock you out--doesn't self-destruct either. Besson may never rise to the level of his best American models here, but it's fun watching him try.

A soft-core sex comedy that keeps throwing out comic variations on the idea of the line between gay and straight sexuality.

This is the same dopey save-the-princess-and-kill-everybody revenge plot we always get. The Return of Swamp Thing is enough to drive you back to the comic book stand. Or even the swamp.

There’s a good movie buried in it, but it stays buried--and, by the end, the annoyances outweigh the pleasures.

Pearce and Bonham Carter are remarkably photogenic, but the movie is fitful and mannered to a fault, full of watery allusions and stormy scares.

It's like a class reunion in purgatory. All the familiar faces are there, but the air is sulfurous and murky, and hell is just an elevator ride away. [10 Dec 1993, p.A2]

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

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

Despite greater resources and high-tech whiz bang than the first movie, has a lot more turkey than dinner.

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

A dark comedy that blows up like an exploding cigar, leaving nothing much behind but smoke, noise and a bad taste.

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.

This Pink Panther really doesn't have to achieve the heights of the original; it just has to be funny on its own terms. But it pales there too. Kline, a master of comic hypocrisy, deserves more screen time, Emily Mortimer is wasted as Clouseau's adoring assistant Nicole and Knowles is over indulged as Xania.

You know the drill: Seven gates of hell. The walking dead. Blood and spurting eyeballs. Strictly for horror mavens hungry for kitsch. [03 Jul 1998]

But it entertained me more than Seagal's first three movies. There's more verbal energy and atmosphere, more humor: in-your-face, scabrous, wise-guy macho humor.

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

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

May try to revive the eerie spirit of the Gothic novel, but, unless you're suffering from amnesia yourself, it probably won't surprise or thrill you.

This new heist movie by the great thriller director John Frankenheimer flails around like its own dysfunctional gang of casino robbers.

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.

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.

What isn't scary--or exciting, amusing or fun--is XXX: State of the Union, a movie so preposterous, cliché-packed and over the top that it makes the original "XXX" seem as good as the original "State of the Union."

Though they're a good pair (Hopkins and Rock), this isn't a very good movie. It's slick but hollow.

I laughed all the way through it.

Nonstrously over-whimsical. It's a gigantic, fatuous whoopie-cushion of a movie-big, smiley and flabbergastingly dumb. Watching it, you may get an odd, overwhelmed feeling, as if you were being smothered to death by party balloons. [15 Oct 1993, p.N]

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

Eddie Murphy's latest is a flabby disappointment. The jokes die, the action curdles. Much of it falls as flat as smashed tinsel.

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 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.

It degenerates into one more cliche-ridden revenge movie. [19 Sep 1987, p.9]

When Side Out gets to its “meat"--intercutting the beach with the law firm, intercutting frantic lovemaking with a tough volleyball loss, intercutting the beach with life, intercutting bikinis with more bikinis--we know we’re dealing with shameless button-pressers.

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."

Disturbingly lightweight and emotionally risk-free.

Bewilderingly bad.

As a bunch, the film makers have created the sort of mystery story that might well puzzle a 12-year-old who had never read a mystery story before and wasn't paying attention anyway, and the sort of love story that 12-year-olds might throw away to read the mystery story, along with the sort of dog story many dogs would actually enjoy--if the pages were edible...Luckily the team of Hanks and Beasley are around to save the show, tell a few snappy stories, dance a few licks, chase a few crooks, make you laugh, make you cry. Who needs writers?

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.

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests. But in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

The film may be bad-and mad-but it's not predictable.

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]

A splashingly pleasant little surprise.

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

Though it’s basically a kids’ movie with a cartoonish structure, it’s laced with lewd innuendo: jokes that suggest teen-age sex, homosexuality and even pedophilia. The core of the humor is raunchy, but the tone is sunny and even-tempered. It even tries to go for a few inspirational moments: feminist statements or sermonettes about overcoming fear and realizing potential.

A misfiring comic fantasia on business success in the Reagan era. [10 Apr 1987, p.1]

Seethes with cruel lust and brainy fancy.

It's beautifully shot on Cephallonian locations by superb landscape photographer John Toll.

It's a generic action movie with more guns than brains, more car crashes than coherence and more opportunism than originality. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

The best thing about star and co-writer David Spade's Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star is the end-title sequence, a big, sassy sing-along in which dozens of old TV child stars spew out defiant jokes about their old careers and fame's fickle fingers.

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.

This movie is glum, murky, dour, takes place mostly in the dark, doesn't make much sense and has a surprise climax so ridiculous you may watch it with perverse, astonished respect - the kind you might grant the Joint Chiefs of Staff if they showed up for a press conference wearing lampshades on their heads and yodeling. [17 Sept 1993, p.F]

Admirers of Rambo III will probably point out that it moves fast. But then, so does a gazelle-and a gazelle has better dialogue and more personality. [25 May 1988, p.1]

Stolen Summer is no disaster, though. It's merely one more misfire fortunate enough to attract actors like Bonnie Hunt and Aidan Quinn, who almost make it work.

There's a moral to the new teen movie Can't Buy Me Love: Money can't buy popularity. But it seems to have been lost on the movie makers themselves. What are they doing here but trying to spend their way to audience approval, success and glory? The plot is another one-sentence gimmick, the jokes juvenile, the morality a sham.

The movie is Rambo crossed with Fraternity Vacation and a bad cartoon version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It's an amazingly senseless movie, done with blood-curdling confidence. Each jaw-dropping howler is staged with such rattling intensity and perfect, seamless idiocy that it becomes weirdly amusing.

A misfiring, underdone epic that takes its inspiration not from life or literature, but from a toy line and the cartoon series it inspired.

Though Stealth's strengths are obvious -- high-tech marvels and a good cast -- so are its flaws. At its worst moments, a mad robot seems to have taken over the movie, too.

Surprises with its intensity and grip.

Mrs. Winterbourne doesn't amount to much. But it's such a professional job, done with such glow and verve -- and the people making it seem to be having such an infectiously good time -- that it's hard to resist. Good comedies are easy to love anyway. [19 Apr 1996, p.C]

It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.

One of the best of its streamlined, over-produced, double-clutch kind: a high-speed, slicker-than-slick car-chase movie with unexpected deposits of character and comedy.

A movie that's underwritten, overdirected, overproduced and almost constantly over-the-top. But it's also, at its best, a big tongue-in-cheek extravaganza.

A flashy-looking low-budget indie about drugs, love and crime in small-town Iowa. But, speaking as an ex-small-town Midwesterner, I found it hard to buy.

Fast-moving shocker, but it's a dull shocker, so morally dead that it deadens you to watch it. After a while you couldn't care less if anyone is slaughtered or raped -- including the heroines.

Carpenter writes his own scripts -- here with past collaborator Larry Sulkis -- and their "Ghosts" screenplay lacks the density, character and humor of a Hollywood genre classic.

The movie knocks your eyes out, at the same time it dulls the mind’s eye. Ultimately, it’s one more stop in the arcade, beckoning, waiting to soak up time and money.

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

Most novels can't be encapsulated well enough in a conventional two-hour movie format, and Dreamcatcher may be one of them -- a miniseries gone wrong.

The movie makers try to revive another day’s genre--the early ’70’s “road” pictures--in today’s terms. And it doesn’t work. The looser, more anarchic feelings they’re going after don’t jibe with the modern packaging, and they wind up with something slicked-up, streamlined and hollow--like “Blowing in the Wind” rearranged as elevator music.

Very much a looking-back movie; its most obvious model is "American Graffiti." But if you know that particular slice of early '80s Manhattan, you may be as amused as I was. [26 Feb 1999]

How is it possible that actors as expert as Close and Depardieu can wind up together in a mostly brainless big-budget stinker?

It’s not really a bad movie. In some ways, it’s a better directed farce than the current hits “Back to School” or “Legal Eagles.” But it’s erratic, and often weightless or uncentered; the pieces keep flying apart.

This is a movie whose morality is as banal as its humor--and that's saying something. Basically, it's standard post '80s high-concept drivel, yet another marketing hook in search of comedy, tension, characters, atmosphere, compelling narrative drive--everything we used to see in movies before the hooks and the ad campaigns swallowed them up.

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

One of the most gorgeous science-fiction movies ever - and probably also one of the most realistic in detail and scientific extrapolation

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

The whole grand tradition of the humor of movie stupidity, from Laurel and Hardy and Mortimer Snerd to Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, seems to crash and burn in this movie, which ends with Payne's idiotic laugh wheezing away over the end-titles. It almost sounds like the beginning of a laugh track-which "Major Payne" could certainly use. [24 March 1995, p.H]

It's those scenes-and computer graphics ingeniously engineered by Richard Hollander and VIFX-that give "Ghost" what little kick it generates. Its hero and villain may be hackers, but its heart is hack. [30 Dec 1993, p.20]

Anyone who goes to Halloween 4 deserves what they get: stale, sordid tricks and no treats. [25 Oct 1988, p.C6]

Jingle All the Way has been well shot and imaginatively designed. But somehow that makes it worse. So does the fact that all the actors, Schwarzenegger included, are skilled enough to make you watch them. [22 Nov 1996, p.C]

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

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

A flabbergasting waste of time and talent.

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

Band of the Hand is a formula 1986 revenge thriller, and, though it hooks you frequently into its thin plot, it never gets far past formula. It’s a bad movie with saving graces-- Dylan’s song among them--which is better than a bad movie that just lies there and rots.

This is one more "yuppie-in-peril" movie, just as slick and empty, manipulative and crude, as most of the rest: all those paranoid pictures bent on scaring us with insane roommates, murderous baby-sitters and killer temps. [5 Apr 1993, p.F3]

Has the air of a film and actor (Beatty)reaching clumsily for a golden past that's gone.

Devotees of awful filmmaking can't go wrong with this one.

Kirk Douglas' performance...is so strong and inspiring it's a shame there isn't a better movie around it.

A staggeringly bad picture: a shallow, cliche-ridden mess that keeps blowing up on screen.

Not a picture that makes you think very much -- except to wonder why the studios keep making movies like this.

A wish fulfillment fantasy of staggering silliness, both smirkingly cutesy and gratingly offensive, this is one for the movie ash heap.

There are good movies, bad movies and confoundingly bad movies. My Favorite Martian belongs to that rare third category. [12 Feb 1999, p.A]

It's one of those movies that are unfortunately so technically well done, it's hard to tune out on the senseless story.

How can Reiner, who has been terrific in the past with both comedy ("This is Spinal Tap," "When Harry Met Sally") and children ("Stand By Me"), come up with something like "North," a movie that may set some kind of record for unfunny humor, forced satire and unappealing kids? [22 Jul 1994, p.C2]

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.

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

It's a Hitchockian "wrong man" story, but there's a twist.

In the end, you can’t have much movie fun with freakiness if you aren’t willing to freak the movie out a little.

(Matthau's) is a truly magical performance: hilarious, unguarded and deeply touching.

A bad, bad movie...It's loud and dumb and it wastes a good cast on a ludicrous script.

Ragged as some of it might have been, that old "Out-of-Towners" had a unified and surprisingly dark comic vision to go with its nifty one-liners. This big, glossy picture is set in movie-movie land, that shiny, peachy place where a celebrity -- like Mayor Rudy -- waits around every corner. [2 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

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]

If you ignore the script--a good strategy for most recent major studio movies--there’s a lot of talent here. But Cimino’s Hours, instead of getting desperate, gets desperately pretty.

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.

Something about baseball seems to bring out the silly side in moviemakers -- even in a movie like The Fan, which starts out well-crafted and deadly serious and seems to have good enough actors and a savvy enough director to stay that way. But halfway through this thriller things go haywire. [16 Aug 1996, p.D]

Wedding Date is neither good art, good entertainment nor even good trash.

The problem with UHF is that everything in it is a parody. The only logic for anything that happens is that there's some new thing to make fun of-mostly inanely. It's not much of a movie. [21 Jul 1989 p.11]

Fghting your heart out at the end of this movie can't win the prize or the crowd.

"Masked" is erratic and volatile, too, from scene to scene, moment to moment. The script is chaotic, but the top-flight actors play their hearts out.

It's a cheap, easy rehash of Spielberg's "Duel" and "The Hitchhiker" (which Red may not have seen)--along with grabs from "Halloween" (the unstoppable fiend), "Jackson County Jail" (the innocent motorist driven outside the law) and "Straw Dogs" (manhood through blood rites). Nothing is original.

So fast, sleek and riveting it almost makes you expect miracles -- which never materialize.

A pretty good film, acted powerfully .

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.

Soft and predictable -- which might be OK if there were more laughs and insight.

It's just another failed movie: a loud, shallow fiasco that leaves you feeling used.

Long is an actress who can’t throw away a line--though this is one case where she should have thrown away the whole script. But she gets points for sheer, daffy energy and rampaging pulchritude.

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.

Sadly in need of renovation. [28 Aug 1987, p.8]

The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.

A comedy of bad manners with many punchy moments and many irritatingly glib ones.

More an uninspired letdown than a flabbergasting turkey... One reason for this lack of bite lies in the werewolves themselves. They're a bit too teddy-bearish, even oddly cuddly, and the fright scenes work better when you don't see much of them.

Is this a bad movie? Is the sky blue? Short of repeating all 237 or so of its incredibly limp jokes there's no way to convey how completely Repossessed goes awry. On and on they come, endlessly: like a blizzard of stale pork rinds. [17 Sep 1990, p.F2]

A big techno-dud.

It's fairly safe to predict that Silent Night, Deadly Night will start making "Worst Movies of All Time" lists almost immediately. It has all the prerequisites. A roaringly bad idea. Derivative scriptwriting. Tastelessness. Naked opportunism. A cast full of actors who mug, gesticulate and savor every rotten line. A general "we're only in this for the money" attitude, visible in every sloppy frame. And, to top it off, that most crucial quality: enough conscious or unconscious humor to keep you watching, and insulting, it. [11 March 1986, p.C5]

Here is a satire about government and business corruption that's as empty, corrupt and manipulative as everything it attacks: a frantic, jokeless comedy about selling out, that sells out itself constantly. This is another big, dumb, pointless picture, a "high concept" movie that's all concept and no movie.

It's an ultra-slick, ultra-flat movie that cuts like a cellophane knife. No edge, no blood.

It would take the dark wit of a Billy Wilder or a Coen brother--or at least a Neil Simon--to put across this kind of material.

If you take it on its own terms -- as a summer teen exploitation film locked into an adolescent vision of life, with no particular ambitions to step out of its class -- it's a movie that works just fine. [14 Aug 1987, p.26]

A highly entertaining and visually breathtaking movie, capable at times of rocking and delighting you.

It's dispiriting to see Jolie wasting herself (and a good supporting cast) on a story that requires little more than an average pretty actress who can wear clothes well and laugh and cry on cue.

It's a glossy, well-mounted, slickly done but almost stuporously predictable affair, both formula-bound and utterly illogical.

Lean, mean, clean and empty-hearted, Fire Birds is a video-game recruiting poster with a bomb ticking inside--a bomb that never goes off.

Lawrence and Zahn generate enough comic tension and mayhem to jump-start this mass of action-comedy cliches into a fairly amusing show.

No Holds Barred gets no points for originality. It's written with the subtlety of a body-slam and directed with the finesse of a hammerlock. But the movie never takes itself seriously and director Tom Wright has fun with the wrestling montages.

By turns brilliant and simplistic, moving and preposterous, the movie takes one of the ultimate hot-button American issues -- the morality of capital punishment -- and dissolves it into a volatile mix of psychological thriller and socio-political fable.

A fitfully funny retread of "48 Hours," "Fled" and dozens of others.

Somehow The Boy in Blue, amiable enough, always feels like an "afternoon" movie -- a throwaway, not good enough to plan an evening around. [03 May 1986, p.9]

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.

Has the unfortunate effect of overtipping the dramatic scales in favor of the Southern generals and turning almost everybody into waxen idols who spout flowery rhetoric.

Leatherface is as tasteless as its predecessors, but it reduces fear to a business and blood to a drip. It's a slaughterhouse without any real buzz. [15 Jan 1990, p.F2]

In White Noise, Hollywood and Michael Keaton try to make a decent thriller out of ghosts in the machine but come up with lousy reception and static.

The movie goes too far on too little motivation - and the middle section, with its maggoty villains, roiling skies and native revolts, seems almost barmy. Yet Exorcist: Beginning does score a small victory. It's not as bad as you'd think.

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.

The Neverending Story 2 is a story you may want desperately to end. Soon. [11 Feb 1991, p.F10]

A good-natured but trivial Manhattan romantic comedy.

Sad excuse for a movie. [4 Aug 1986, p.C6]