Mike Clark

It says something that during a scene in which nude chorines are turned into a fleshy backdrop, you spend as much time looking at your watch as what's on screen.

Accessibly brainy screen charmer.

De Niro's widely praised performance is like the rest of the film: competent, a product of hard work and borderline mechanical. I like much of Awakenings, including several supporting performances - but like Big, it left me just a little cold. [20 Dec 1990, p.5D]

Shepherd and O'Neal have six Peter Bogdanovich films between them- but criss-cross for the first time here under Emile Ardolino's (Dirty Dancing) comatose direction. They're pleasing (as are their co-leads) but don't quite deliver the salvage job a good cast performed on Mystic Pizza. [10 March 1989, p.5D]

Even by King-movie standards (and there are none lower), the misanthropy, grotesque humor, and all-out ugliness is itself in maximum overdrive. [27 Aug 1993, p.3D]

Large budget notwithstanding, the movie is such a blip on the year's radar screen that it's tempting just to go with it for the ride. But this time, the old MIB label stands for Milder Isn't Better.

Sports-satire misfire. [31 July 1998, p. 2E]

Victoria Tennant's iciness has been well-utilized on screen occasionally, but not this time. [8 Feb 1991, p.D4]

Ultimately, the movie doesn't make it, but there's enough going on to make it more arf than barf.

To its credit, the film isn't foolhardy enough to challenge the unbeatable Errol Flynn version on its own star-power turf. Gritty in most ways, broadly comic in some, and with a dose of the morbidly supernatural, this is a knowing variation at odds with quaint vintage-Hollywood reverence. [14 June 1991, p.1D]

This is a building-block movie: Its stand-out excellence becomes apparent only gradually.

Robert De Niro is so good as a politically blacklisted filmmaker in Guilty by Suspicion that even his hair seems right. [15 Mar 1991, p.4D]

If artist R. (Robert) Crumb can dispense immediately with his resume in Terry Zwigoff's superb Crumb, we can, too. [21 Apr 1995]

Enough low-grade laughs to entertain significantly more than some of the more prestigious year-end releases.

No abomination but forgettably mediocre. [19 March 1999, Life, p. 13E]

Greer Garson, in the same year as her Oscar-winning Mrs. Miniver role, shows good gams in a lively Scottish dance-hall number. And Harvest's seven Oscar nominations (including for picture, Colman and director Mervyn LeRoy) reflect the popularity the film has sustained for decades. [21 Jan 2005]

At just 82 minutes, the film's welcome doesn't have time to wear out; especially amusing is the use of '50s pop ballads and some droll elementary-school classroom scenes. Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt are as ''right'' as the indoor production design. [30 June 1989, p.3D]

It's harmless, but bloodless - hardly a movie to get your juices jumping. [28 Aug 1992, p.5D]

A little movie almost perfectly realized.

Nothing in John McNaughton's script and direction is exploitative; there isn't a frame of wasted action in what may well remain the year's most tightly constructed movie. As such, you're with this qualified classic all the way, you believe in it all the way, and you're thus forced to take its sporadic atrocities seriously. How many movies (and how long has it been since we've seen one) have really pulled this off? [20 April 1990, p.4D]

There's evidence of his talent in some lyrical flying scenes, but the movie is so addled you'd think it was conceived by Michael J. Pollard, who shares a one-on-one scene with Lewis here (the mind boggles). [24 March 1995, p.3D]

The big surprise in Polanski's Oliver is the lack of a discernible personal stamp, especially from such a directorial master of the macabre.

Think of a B-grade "Bulworth" with lesser talents than A-listers Warren Beatty and Halle Berry.

Heat is in the cop-movie pantheon with Akira Kurosawa's "High and Low," and that's as "right" as the genre gets.

Even at its best, Adaptation is one of the movie year's most esoteric outings -- more so than even Paul Thomas Anderson's far superior "Punch-drunk Love." Too smart to ignore but a little too smugly superior to like, this could be a movie that ends up slapping its target audience in the face by shooting itself in the foot.

Watching this movie, it seems to be the next level down from great -- maybe too episodic. But it burns in the memory weeks after you see it.

One Fine Day is two formulaic hours, but they do illustrate how two attractive leads and a lickety-split narrative can elevate meager material into something this side of bearability. [20 Dec 1996]

There's more terror than entertainment here, though. I've seen a lot of movies in my life I couldn't wait to see end; this may be the first good one.