Pauline Kael

This clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.

Lester's decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don't want joke, joke, joke.

The play was built on topical jokes and a series of vaudeville turns, and in this version the jokes are flat and the turns seemed forced and not very funny.

Foote can't make poetry out of material as laundered and denatured as what he comes up with here. The movie is intended to by a hymn, but all he and Masterson can do is give some of the characters a limp, anesthetized grace.

Billy Wilder's inane yet moderately entertaining version of an Agatha Christie courtroom thriller, with Charles Laughton wiggling his wattles.

It isn't particularly entertaining; it's just busy.

Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.

Mainly it's full of sort-of-funny and trying-to-be-funny ideas. The director Elliot Silverstein's spoofy tone is ineptitude, coyly disguised.

An inflated sci-fi action-horror film...[Cameron] does it in an energetic, systematic, relentless way, with an action dicretor's gusto, and a shortage of imagination. The imagery has a fair amount of graphic power, but there's too much claustrophobic blue-green darkness.

Starts smart and ends dumb. [24 Aug 1987, p.79]

The picture's only claim on one's attention is in the two sequences staged by Busby Berkeley.

It's an ambitious movie made with an inept, sometimes sly, and very often equivocal script...But it's by no means a negligible movie.

The movie is never plain boring, but its comic pathos and Southern-gothic cuteness can grate on you.

A forgettable, generally forgotten Hitchcock gothic, from a Daphne du Maurier novel, full of Cornwall shipwrecks and smuggling and murder in the time of good King George IV.

Nicholson's fatuous leering performance dominates the movie, and because his prankishness also comes out in the casting and directing, the movie hasn't any stabilizing force; there's nothing to balance what he's doing--no one with a strait jacket. An actor-director who prances about the screen manically can easily fool himself into thinking that his film is jumping; Nicholson jumps, all right, but the movie is inert.

Tavernier seems to be enshrining his own idolatry. The music itself has none of the mysterious teeming vitality of great bebop--it's lifeless.

The film's nostalgic fixation on the ambiance of the war years seems to exclude any real interest in the lives of the women workers; this feminist fairy tale sees the characters as precursors of the women's movement of the 60s and 70s rather than as people.

With Arthur hiller in charge, much of the dialogue turns into squawking, and the movie is flattened out and rackety, with Midler doing her damnedest to pump sass and energy into it.

There are funny moments, but they don't add up to enough.

There are startling effects and good revue touches here and there, but the picture goes on and on, as if it were determined to impress us. It goes on so long that it cancels itself out, even out of people's memories; it was long awaited and then forgotten almost instantly.

Cheesy low farce, with Danny DeVito as a thieving millionaire who wants to kill his heiress wife (Bette Miler) and is overjoyed when she's kidnapped.

It's a graceful picture, but it dawdles, and Stephens doesn't seem to have the star presence that Holmes requires.

A huge, mawkish, trite circus movie directed by Cecil B. De Mille in a neo-Biblical style.

Hardly even a shadow; Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Asta go through their paces for the fourth time, but the jauntiness is gone.

Directed by James Fargo, this third in the series doesn't have the savvy to be as sadistic as its predecessors; it's just limp.

The subject - the romantic life of an American Communist - may be daring, but the moviemaking is extremely traditional, with Beatty playing a man who dies for an ideal. It's rather a sad movie, because it isn't really very good.

It's noisy and brutal, with sentimental flourishes.

Herbert Ross directed, unexcitingly; there's no visual sweep, no lift.

The movie is ungainly – you can almost see the chalk marks it's not hitting. But it has a loose, likable shabbiness. [19 Oct 1987, p.110]

The movie doesn’t stick together in one’s head; this thing is like some junky fairground show—a chamber of horrors with skeletons that jump up.

This is a visually claustrophobic, mechanically plotted movie that's meant to be a roguishly charming entertainment, and many people probably consider it just that.

A mixed-up and over-loaded American spy thriller by Alfred Hitchcok, with the unengaging Robert Cummings in the lead and an unappealing cast, featuring Priscilla Lane and Otto Kruger. Nothing holds together, but there are still enough scary sequences to make the picture entertaining.

It sounds promising, but Bogdanovich attempts an exercise in style, and the result is sustained clutter.

Though taken from a pulp best-seller, by Stephen King, the movie isn't the scary fun one might hope for from a virtuoso technician like Kubrick. It has a promising opening sequence, and there is some spectacular use of the Steadicam, but Kubrick isn't interested in the people on the screen as individuals. They are his archetypes, and he's using them to make a metaphysical statement about the timelessness of evil. He's telling us that man is a murderer through eternity. Kubrick's involvement in technology distances us from his meaning, though, and while we're watching the film it just doesn't seem to make sense.

Martin Ritt's big, noisy production clunks along like a disjointed play; it defeats Jones, and along the way it also inadvertently exposes the clobber-them-with-guilt tactics of the dramatist, Howard Sackler.

[Ridley Scott] draws you into a dull, sensual daydreaminess, but after watching Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers for a while, you look around for the stars. With so much buildup - so much terror-tinged atmosphere - you expect actors with some verve, and you wonder why the script doesn't sneak in a few jokes. (Has a good thriller ever been this solemn? Or this simple?)

Edwards pulls laughs, though. He does it with the crudest setups and the moldiest, most cynical dumb jokes.

Though the film has its bright moments, and some weird ones, too, the first freshness is gone. Even the effects seem repetitive.

The picture is scrappily edited, and the director seems willing to do almost anything for an immediate effect. It's only in the best scenes that satire and sultriness work together.

When the actors begin to talk (which they do incessantly), the flat-footed dialogue and the amateurish acting (especially by the secondary characters) take one back to the low-budget buffoonery of Maria Montez and Turhan Bey.

When the film came out, Michelangelo Antonioni's mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seemed to have a numbing fascination for some people which they associated with art and intellectuality.

Although Shirley MacLaine tries hard, it's obvious that her dancing isn't up to the demands of the role. It's a disaster, but zoom-happy Fosse's choreographic conceptions are intensely dramatic, and the movie has some of the best dancing in American musicals of the period.

The film is trite, and you can see the big pushes for powerful effects, yet it isn't negligible. It wrenches audiences, making them fear that they, too, could become like this man.

When Attenborough starts crosscutting from the escape to Woods' flashback memories (with bursts of choral music), the movie is dumbfounding. It looks as if Attenborough staged scenes and then didn't know what to do with them, so he stuck them in by having the escaping Woods think back. An every time Biko appears in a flashback our interest quickens; this man with fire in his eyes commands the screen -- Denzel Washington is the star by right of talent.

Probably nobody involved was very happy about the results; Dylan doesn't come off at all.

Turgidly predictable.

Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.

Some of the special effects are amusing, and a few are perverse and frightening, but the effects take over in this Hitchcock scare picture, and he fails to make the plot situations convincing. The script is weak, and the acting is so awkward that often one doesn't know how to take the characters.

Whatever oddball charm and silliness the first Rocky had is long gone. Rocky III starts with the hyped climax of II and then just keeps going on that level; it's packaged hysteria. This picture is primitive, but it's also shrewd and empty and inept.

It's reprehensible and enjoyable, the kind of movie that makes you feel brain dead in two minutes--after which point you're ready to laugh at its mixture of trashiness, violence, and startlingly silly crude humor.

Superman doesn’t have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us—but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone.

You have to have considerable tolerance to make it through Chayefsky's repetitive dialogue, his insistence on the humanity of "little" people, and his attempt to create poetry out of humble, drab conversations.

You'd think that if anybody could film Sam Shepard's 1983 play and keep it metaphorical and rowdy and sexually charged it would be the intuitive Robert Altman, but the material seems to congeal on the screen, and congealed rambunctiousness is not a pretty sight.

The director, Michael Curtiz, seems to be totally out of his element in this careful, deadly version of the celebrated, long-running Broadway comedy.

Rob Reiner's film, taken from Stephen King's autobiographical novella "The Body," overdoses on sincerity and nostalgia. Seeing it is like watching an extended Christmas special of "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie" - it makes you feel virtuous. All that stays with you is the tale that Gordie, the central character, tells his friends around the campfire.

A mosaic that never comes together.

Kasdan has eliminated all the conflicting interests and the psychological impediments to a happy marriage, leaving the physical separation as the only obstacle. There's nothing left for the movie to be about except how the hero and the heroine can conquer space. (And at the end, the pictured fudges even this.)

This whole production is a mixture of wizardry and ineptitude; the picture has enjoyable moments but it's as uncertain of itself as the title indicates.

The movie has a deep-toned flossy and "artistic" clarity and a peculiarly literary tone - the dialogue doesn't sound like living people talking.

Jarmusch's passive style has its wit, but the style is deadening here until he brings in Roberto--a character out of folk humor. And without the boredom of the first three-quarters of an hour Roberto wouldn't be so funny.

The hero is so blandly uninteresting that there's nothing to hold the movie together.

Some exciting scenes in the first half, but the later developments are frenetic, and by the end the film is a loud and discordant mess.

This attempt at screwball charm was directed by Susan Seidelman, who wipes out her actors. All their responsiveness is cut off -- there's nothing going on in them. This flatness can make your jaw fall open, but it seems to be accepted by the audience as New Wave postmodernism.

The pictures is an almost total drag, though Agnes Moorehead, as the villainess, has a sensational exit through plate-glass windows.

Sydney Pollack doesn't have a knack for action pulp; he gets some tension going in this expensive spy thriller, but there's no real fun in it.

A romantic adolescent boy’s view of friendship.

It takes place in the TV land of predictability -- that plain of dowdy realism where a boy finds his manhood by developing the courage to stick to his principles and stand up to his father.

This famous film, high on most lists of the greatest films of all time, seems all wrong - phony when it should ring true. Yet, because of the material, it is often moving in spite of the acting, the directing, and the pseudo-Biblical pore-people talk.

Too bad that the director, George Cukor, doesn't have a little more feeling for the loony baroque; the story is treated much too soberly.

It's so tastefully tame that there's no supsense.

Most of the movie lacks zest.

The tragedy of these two peoples, killing each other because each has just claims to the same plot of ground, is presented with efficient, impersonal evenhandedness, so that we care about neither of them.

It's a Velveeta comedy, processed like a Neil Simon picture, with banter and gags and an unctuous score. All its smart talk is low-key and listless. It stays on the surface, yet it's dissatisfied with the surface; it's a deeply indecisive movie.

The script, by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale, is a mechanical demonstration of how greedy and unfeeling the townspeople are, and Don Siegel's directing lacks rhythm--each scene dies a separate death.

The film is rich in fillips--smart little taps and strokes. But after a while you start asking yourself, what is this movie about? (You're still asking when it's over.)

This movie is both a satirical epic and a square celebration, yet the satire backfires.

It's a detached, opaque, affectionless movie; since it doesn't regard the young prostitutes as human, there's no horror in their dehumanization--only frigid sensationalism.

One of Edna Ferber's heartfelt, numbskull treks through the hardships and glories of the American heritage.

It's marred by a holiday family-picture heartiness--the M-G-M back-lot Americana gets rather thick.

The film's chief distinction is Julie Christie; she's extraordinary--petulant, sullen, and very beautiful.

A junk-food mixture of poetry, black anger, bathroom humor, and routines that have come through the sit-com mill.

People hadn't seen anything like it; that doesn't mean they needed to.

You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing.

It's pleasant to see these two in a picture where they're not carrying all the sins of mankind of their shoulders, but they've gone too far in the opposite direction--they're not carrying anything.

Hysterical twaddle.

The one element Zeffirelli removes that the other bowdlerizers also removed is Shakespeare's language. Only about half the play is left, and what's there doesn't build up the rhythm of a poetic drama. Heard in isolated fragments, the lines just seem a funny way of talking that is hard to understand.

The sumptuousness of Schlesinger's style is impressive. There's something lordly (and a little bored) in this director's command of the medium. While he gives you the felling that he knows what he's doing, he has no staying power--he doesn't develop any of the ideas he tosses in.

Gaudy black-exploitation film with explicit racism and some that's implicit. Partly slick, partly amateurish.

Rather shrill and tiresome.

Low-grade horror.

There's a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola's unusual, little-seen film, but it's a ponderously self-conscious effort; the writer-director applies his film craftsmanship with undue solemnity to material that suggests a gifted college student's imitation of early Tennessee Williams. The result is academic, and never believable.

Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes (hectic criminal ventures and blunders toward justice) on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.

When the picture stops being comic it turns into a different kind of kitsch... The material turns into cheesy plot-centered melodrama... Beetlejuice would have spit in this movie's eye. [17 Dec 1990]

Directed by Alan Parker, the movie takes itself inordinately seriously as a moral fable expressing eternal truths. It feels morose and unrelieved, despite the efforts of the two actors.

It wants to be a jaunty heist-caper movie, like Topkapi, of 1964, but it's of quintessential mediocrity: not hip enough to sustain interest, not dreary enough to walk out on.

If you fed the earlier gangster movies into a machine and made a prototype, you'd come up with this picture.

Sinatra sings pleasantly, and Brando and Simmons are ingratiatingly uneasy when they burst into song and dance, but the movie is extended and rather tedious. The Broadway version is legendary; the movie provides no clue as to why.

So self-conscious about its themes that nothing in the storytelling occurs naturally.

A methodical, pointlessly grueling movie.

The director, Blake Edwards, sets up promising slapstick situations, and then the payoffs are out of step (and worse, repeated); after the first half hour or so, the film loses momentum.

Richard Thorpe directed this package, shrewdly designed to give satisfaction to the new raunchy rock generation. The story ends happily, and the movie made millions, though Presley never begins to suggest the vitality that he showed in documentary footage.

Too self-conscious, though; the cinematography, by Franz Planer, may sometimes evoke Balthus, but the atmosphere is heavy and lugubrious.

The director, Vincente Minnelli, stages an impressive romantic ball, but the whole movie is hopelessly overscaled.

The gags are almost all on this level, and the little sops to sentiment are even worse.

Perhaps the farthest out of the Bob Hope--Bing Crosby road pictures. Some of the patter is pure, relaxed craziness, but the topical jokes and the awful quips keep pulling it down.

The film is too cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (and when it opened, there were accounts of people in theaters who threw things at the screen). But it's winged camp--a horror fairy tale gone wild, another in the long history of moviemakers' king-size follies. There's enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what it lacks is judgement.

Sam Peckinpah directed in imitation of Sam Peckinpah; it's a mechanical job, embellished with a vivacious, erotic subplot involving Al Lettieri and Sally Struthers.

The writer-director Robert Benton is unquestionably intelligent, but he seems to have misplaced his sense of humor, and this murder mystery set in Manhattan shows almost no evidence of the nasty streak that's part of the pleasure of a good thriller, or of the manipulative skills that might give us a few tremors.

Yes, it's a collection of barbs and sick jokes, but it's not fun, and it lacks a punch line...The young, inexperience director, Michael Lehmann, doesn't find the right mood for the gags. [17 Apr 1989]

Probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter; the film needed a writer who would fill in what's missing--Pinter's art is the art of taking away.

The facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his apparent intention -- to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old corn.

A mild farce - benign but not really very funny.

Full of forced, unnaturally fast quips that one might, in a state of extreme exhaustion, find fairly funny.

Kubrick suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable. The film says that people are disgusting but things are lovely. And a narrator (Michael Hordern) tells you what's going to happen before you see it.

In its own sombre, inflated terms, the picture is effective, but it's dragged out so many self-importantly that you have time to recognize what a hopelessly naive, incompetent, and untrustworthy lawyer the hero is.

You look at the screen even though there's nothing to occupy your mind--the way you sometimes sit in front of the TV, numbly, because you can't rouse yourself for the effort it takes to go to bed.

Martin has a few good silly gags, but you may find yourself fighting to stay awake and losing.

Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, starts off on the wrong foot and never gets his balance; the performers yowl their lines, and the burlesque of the Nazis, who cower before their superior officers, is more crudely gleeful than funny.

The director Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich try to make a new, more meaningful version of a 40s melodrama, but their Manhattan-set thriller bogs down in a tangle of plot.

The premise of this Hitchcock thriller is promising, but the movie, set in Quebec and partly shot there, is so reticent it's mostly dull.

Hill attempted to stylize gangster characters and conventions, and although he succeeded in the action sequences, which have a near-abstract visual power, the stylized characters, with their uninflected personalities, flatten the movie out.

An all-star send-up of the Bond films, with multiple Bonds and multiple directors, has some laughs, but it makes one terribly conscious of wastefulness. Jokes and plots and possibilities are thrown away along with huge, extravagant sets, and famous performers go spinning by.

There are some good ideas tucked away inside scrambled unpleasantness.

The script has first-rate, hardheaded, precise, sometimes funny dialogue, but it errs in bringing this girl too much to the center. Dramatically, the film lacks snap; there isn't enough tension in the way Max destroys his freedom, and so the story drags--it seems to have nowhere to go but down.

The picture is stupid and often perfunctory; at the same time it's moderately enjoyable.

The film was lavishly produced, with great care given to the sets and costumes and makeup, but the spirit is missing.

Lumet wrote the script alone, and he's so busy laying on the rancorous, bantering atmosphere that he waits too long to get to the plot; the movie becomes torpid.

Hal Ashby directed this intuitive yet amorphous movie, which falls apart when he resorts to melodramatic crosscutting.

The farce situations are pushed too broadly, and have a sanctimonious patriotic veneer, but this first American film directed by Billy Wilder was a box-office hit.

The movie doesn't suggest that adolescents have a right to sexual experimentation -- it just attacks the corrupted grown-ups for their failure to value love above all else. It's the old corn, fermented in a new way.

For all the nippiness in the dialogue (the script is by Jim Kouf) and the comic interplay of the actors, the picture doesn't leave you with anything.

The script and conception are so maudlin and degrading that Cagney's high dedication becomes somewhat oppressive.

The script, by James Toback, is a grandiloquent, egocentric novel written as a film; it spells everything out, and the director Karel Reisz's literal-minded, proficient style calls attention to how airless and schematic it is.

It's intended to be a thriller, but there's little suspense and almost no fun in this account of a schizophrenic ventriloquist.

An aggressively silly head-horror movie, the result of the misalliance of two wildly different hyperbolic talents-the director Ken Russell and the writer Paddy Chayefsky.

In the film's second half, Hudson twists the story into knots in order to deliver his "statement" that apes are more civilized than people; the movie simply loses its mind, and dribbles to a pathetically indecisive conclusion.

Probably the material was too precious and fake-lyrical to have worked in natural surroundings, either, but the way it has been done it's hopelessly stagey.

The 12th James Bond film goes through the motions, but not only are we tired of them, the actors are tired of them - even the machines are tired...The producers have made the mistake of deciding on a simpler, more realistic package, without dazzling sets or a big, mad super villain.

The actors have occasional intense and affecting moments, going through emotions that they set off in each other, but Cassavetes is the sort of man who is dedicated to stripping people of their pretenses and laying bare their souls. Inevitably, the results are agonizingly banal.

Talky and stiff, the film never finds the passionate tone that it needs.

It's all meant to be airy and bubbly, but it's obvious, overextended (2 hours plus), and overproduced.

Gangster whimsey--which is to say the very worst kind.

100% pure-plastic adolescent male fantasy.

Frank Tashlin directed this attempt at a stylish comedy-thriller; it goes very wrong--there's no suspense, because we have no idea what's going on, and the spoofy, slapstick embellishments are almost painfully self-conscious.

Hitchcock scraping bottom.

The director, Claude Berri, who did the adaptation with Gerard Brach, aimed for fidelity to the novel; he said it was his task to give the material "a cinematic rhythm," but "there was no need for imagination." That's what he thinks.

The third in the series, and without any new ideas except a bad one: still airily casual, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are now the parents of a baby boy.

Seeing “Raiders” is like being put through a Cuisinart—something has been done to us, but not to our benefit.

Jodorowsky plays with symbols and ideas and enigmas so promiscuously that the confusion may be mistaken for depth.

It's a miserable piece of moviemaking -- poorly paced and tearjerking.

Lightning didn't strike three times; the movie is lumbering... I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation, and it's too amorphous to damage our feelings about the first two. [1 Jan 1991]

This George Stevens film is over-planned and uninspired: Westerns are better when they're not so self-importantly self-conscious.

The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert.

Fanny Brice is herself, though she isn't on screen enough to vitalize this lavish, tedious musical biography; it goes on for a whopping 3 hours.

Innocuous musical version of A Christmas Carol, starring Albert Finney looking glum. The Leslie Bricusse music is so forgettable that your mind flushes it away while you're hearing it.

A combination of raw pulp and gooey kitsch.

A Hitchcock stinker, set in Australia in the early 19th century (though shot in England).

The picture is a piece of technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment; basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races.

A space epic with a horse-and-buggy script. It's dull out there in space, though not as depressing as listening to the astronauts' wives back home. John Sturges directed, in his sleep

This is a film noir without malevolence or mystery. It's a Yuppie thriller: it has no psychological layers.

So klunky and poorly paced, and so loaded with sanctimonious moral lessons, that even the George and Ira Gershwin score doesn't save it.

One of the dreariest films in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy series; it has a metallic flavor.

Standard gory imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt.

But the movie is in a stupor; everything is internalized. Duvall is locked in, and De Niro is in his chameleon trance - he seems flaccid, preoccupied...You have to put up a struggle to get anything out of this picture.

M-G-M's wartime salute to gallant England, engineered to make the audience choke up.

Coppola's efforts to bring depth to this material that has no depth make the picture seem groggy. It's as if he were trying to direct the actors to bring something out of themselves when neither he nor anyone else knows what's wanted.

The film is comatose; you're brought into it only by the camera tricks or the special-effects horrors, or, perhaps, the nude scenes.

A dog of a movie about a horse.

Sloppy, clumsy Hitchcock thriller. Brian Moore is credited with the original screenplay, but probably his friends don't mention it.

Script lacks satiric insolence, and the picture grinds on humorlessly. The villain Christopher Lee's fanged smile is the only attraction.

In movies like this one, Poitier's self-inflicted stereotype of goodness cancels out his acting.

What's strange about the movie is that the best things in it aren't developed, and what Superman and the other characters do doesn't seem to have any weight. [11 July 1983, p.90]

Terrible, but bearable; there's a fascination to its clunkiness.

But all that this encounter-session movie actually does is strip a group of high-school kids down to their most banal longings to be accepted and liked. Its real emblem is that dreary, retro ribbon. [8 Apr 1985, p.123]

It's all plot, and the plot is all holes; it's not just that it doesn't add up right - most of the episodes don't quite make sense. About all that carries the movie along is the functional - and occasionally smooth, bright - dialogue.

Tacky low-budget picture about a scientist whose carelessness gets him into a tragic pickle.

It's one of those movies in which the hero has to be a man of few words because if he ever explained anything to the other characters they wouldn't get into the trouble they get into that he has to get them out of, and there wouldn't be a movie. There isn't much of one anyway.

A sour, visually ugly comedy from director Billy Wilder and his co-writer, I. A. L. Diamond, which gets worse as it goes along -- more cynical and more sanctimonious.

At almost every point where we might expect a little ping of surprise or mystery, Donner lets us down. It's a limp and dreary movie.

Tracy and Hepburn, but not a comedy, and not good, either.

Val Lewton produced, but except for a few touches, it's a mess.

There's no electricity in it, no smart talk, no flair. Written and directed by George Seaton, it's bland entertainment of the old school: every stereotyped action is followed by a stereotyped reaction -- cliches commenting on cliches.

Yet, with all the obvious ingredients for success, Spellbound is a disaster.

It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects—though straight from the drawing board—are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed. There’s a little more that’s good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn’t take himself too seriously. [Harper's]

The picture hasn’t been thought out in terms of movement or a visual plan. Dylan merely gives his actor friends some clues as to what he’d like them to do and they improvise, without reference to what has gone before or what will follow.

Paul Newman in a bungled attempt to recapture the Bogart private-eye world of The Big Sleep. Shelley Winters gives the picture artificial respiration for a few minutes, but it soon relapses. A private-eye movie without sophistication and style is ignominious.

It's a slovenly piece of moviemaking and it's full of howlers. Charly may represent the unity of schlock form and schlock content -- true schlock art.

This film brings out all the weaknesses of its director, Sidney Lumet, and none of his strengths. The whole production has a stagnant atmosphere, and the big dance numbers are free-form traffic jams.

The director, Hector Babenco, treats William Kennedy's Albany novel, set in 1938, as a joyless classic; the movie has no momentum--the running time (144 minutes) is like a death sentence.

There's no motivating idea visible in this version, produced abroad by Hal B. Wallis, and the leaden script, by John Hale, lacks romantic spirit and dramatic sense.

There's nothing to look at except Gino and Jerry's mummified skits, which are directed at a deliberate and unvarying pace. Mamet piles on improbabilities in a matter-of-fact style; flatness of performance seems to be part of the point. This minimalist approach--it suggests a knowingness--takes the fun out of hokum. The result is like a Frank Capra--Damon Runyon comic fairy tale of the 30s in slow motion.

A larger, slower, duller version of the spy thrillers [Hitchcock] made in the 30s.

This one doesn't look too bad, but it has no snap, no tension. It's an exhausted movie.

Processed schlock. This could only have been designed as a TV movie and then blown up to cheapie-epic proportions.

The kind of uplifting twaddle that traffics heavily in rather basic symbols: the gold light on the pond stands for the sunset of life, and so on and so on...A doddering valentine.

They should never have allowed the audience so much time to think about what's going on: the short play turns into a ludicrous, lumbering horror movie.

Unimaginative Bond picture that is often noisy when it means to be exciting.

Williams acts all over the place, yet the movie - 2 hours and 47 minutes of documentary seriousness - is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what's going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends...Things don't begin to come together until you're heading into the third hour.

You're supposed to need a strong stomach to sit through this one, but it's so stupefyingly obvious and repetitive that you begin to laugh with relief that you're not being emotionally affected; it's just a gross-out.

Tuggle keeps whomping us on the skull with good-evil symbolism, but the movie has no more depth than the usual exploitation film in which pretty girls are knocked off.

The way the story line has been directed it's a clumsier versions of the plots of 50s musicals.

With ideas skimmed off the top of various systems of thought, Zardoz is a glittering cultural trash pile.

The directing, by Brian De palma, is canny and smooth, but this musty genre calls for fresh jokes and sharp, colorful personalities, and that's not what he's working with.

When Beatty and Hoffman doe their (deliberately hopeless) singing numbers, jerking like mechanical men, phrasing unmusically, going off-key, they don't have the slapstick skills for it. That's when you long for Martin and Murray, or some other comics. [1 June 1987, p.102]

The impulsiveness and raw flamboyance that make the book exciting are missing, and the cool, elegant visuals outclass the characters right from the start.

Its emotional climate is too extreme to invite identification, and its characters are too single-minded in their revenge to evoke pity, terror or even much interest.

Ugh. A murder mystery that starts from a Leslie Charteris story but never gets anyplace you'd want to go to.

Screenwriter Oliver Stone and the director, Alan Parker, have subjected their Billy (Brad Davis) to the most photogenic sadomasochistic brutalization that they could dream up. The film is like a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin. It rushes from torment to torment, treating Billy's ordeals hyponotically in soft colors -- muted squalor -- with a disco beat in the background.

The message appears to be that the spirit of M-G-M in the 40s still lives in the hearts and jokes of homosexuals.

The movie is heavy on exposition, and the story isn't dramatized - it's merely acted out (and hurried through), in a series of scenes that are like illustrations. And, despite the care that has gone into the sets and costumes and the staging, the editing rhythms are limp and choppy.

There are potentially funny scenes, but Bergman doesn't know how to give timing and polish to his own jokes.

Simon instinctively makes things easy and palatable, and there's a penalty: it's the retrograde, pepless snooziness of the picture. You come out feeling half dead.

The picture starts out in the confident Capra manner, but with a darker tone; by the end, you feel puzzled and cheated.

There isn't a whisper of surprise in Redford's performance, and he's photographed looking like a wary, modest god, with enough backlighting and soft focus to make him incandescent even when he isn't doing a thing.

As a moviemaker, [Pryor's] a novice presenting us with clumps of unformed experience. It isn't even raw; the juice has been drained away.

Pious muck.

How the West Was Lost would be a more appropriate title for this dud epic, since, as conceived by the writer, James R. Webb, the pioneers seem to dimwitted bunglers who can't do anything right.

The screenwriters retain much of Mamet's dialogue, but they piece it out, and the director punches up the breaks between scenes with rock music. It's like being pounded on the back every two minutes when your back is already sore (because the dialogue has been whacking you so hard).

A the start, Lemmon has vanished almost totally into his role, but soon he's so insufferably perky and boyish and obliging that you feel he deserves the puling lines that Goldberg gives him.

Rambo is to the action film what Flashdance was to the musical, with one to-be-cherished difference: audiences are laughing at it.

This baseball weeper was very clumsily directed by John Hancock; everything stops dead for the dialogue scenes.

The tone is too playful, too bright. Is the heiress herself meant to be a treasure? Is she meant to be charmingly klutzy? You can't tell.

A rigid faced Joan Crawford, in a role that would make sense only if played by a ravishing young beauty. She's twice too old for it, and her acting is grim and masklike.

The aviation footage is still something to see, with great shots of zeppelin warfare...But the First World War story, involving two brothers...is plain awful.

The bedgraggled plotting forces Hanks into maudlin situations, but he manages to get under some of his material and darken it.

In a long career of giving pleasure, this is one of the few occasions when (Rogers) failed; it isn't her worst acting but there's nothing in the soggy material to release the distinctive Ginger Rogers sense of fun.

The picture is a pile of poetic mush set in some doom-laden, vaguely universal city of the past and/or the future.

A forgettable Bogart melodrama that was already familiar when it came out; it had been synthesized from several of his hits, with Lizabeth Scott's role processed out of Mary Astor and Lauren Bacall routines.

Cassavetes built this movie on a small conceit--a love affair between two people who are wildly unsuited to each other--and it doesn't work.

As obsequiously respectful as if it had been made about living monarchs who might reward the producer with a command performance. Viewers are put in the position of celebrity-lovers eager to partake of the home life of the dullest of the Czars.

Its exuberant love of New York seems forced, and most of the numbers are hearty and uninspired.

The picture teeters on the edge of parody without giving itself the relief of falling over.

An honest failure. This United Artists big-budget musical film, directed by Martin Scorsese, suffers from too many conflicting intentions.

If you admired Bette Midler in The Rose and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, you may want to bash you head against the wall...The director, Garry Marshall, shows no feeling for the material - not even false feeling.

The script, by Israel Horovitz, has trim, funny lines but also terrible, overingratiating ones, and some of the most doddering, bonehead situations to be soon on the big screen in years. Directed by Arthur Hiller, the film is blotchy in just about every conceivable way.

It's preposterously ill-conceived.

It’s so derivative that it isn’t a thriller—it’s a crude, ghoulish comedy on thriller themes. The director, Joel Coen, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Ethan, who was the producer, is inventive and amusing when it comes to highly composed camera setups or burying someone alive. But he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the actors; they give their words too much deliberation and weight, and they always look primed for the camera. So they come across as amateurs.

The director, Herbert Ross, and the writer, Dean Pitchford, exhaust one bad idea after another, and build up to a letdown: you don't get the climactic dance you expect.

There ins't a gleam of good sense anywhere in this picture.

What happened to the Kubrick who used to slip in sly, subtle jokes and little editing tricks? This may be his worst movie. He probably believes he's numbing us by the power of his vision, but he's actually numbing us by its emptiness. [13 July 1987, p.75]

He hardly bothers with the characters; the movie is a ventriloquial harrangue. He thrashes around in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.

Mel Ferrer smiles his narcissistic, masochistic smiles as the crippled puppeteer who can speak his love to the 16-year-old orphan girl Lili (Leslie Caron) only through his marionettes. Canon is much too good for him, but the movie doesn't know it.

Neither the contemplative Zhivago nor the flux of events is intelligible, and what is worse, they seem unrelated to each other...It's stately, respectable, and dead.

The movie is slight and vapid, with the consistency of watery jello...It isn't about teenagers – it's actually closer to being a pre-teen's idea of what it will be like to be a teenager. [7 Apr 1996, p.91]

A rich-meets-rich picture, and worse than one imagines. Al Pacino gives a torpid performance as a spiritually depleted Grand Prix racing-car driver who falls in love with a well-heeled free spirit (Marthe Keller), a metaphysical kook.

The movie is a form of hysterical, rabble-rousing pulp, yet it isn't involving; it doesn't have the propulsion of good pulp storytelling.

Scorsese designs his own form of alienation in this mistimed, empty movie, which seems to teeter between jokiness and hate.

Nothing more than an inept thriller.

Nichols must have a cummerbund around his head: the directing is constricted – there's no visual inventiveness or spontaneity. And in his hands the script has no conviction. [9 Jan 1989]

The movie is childishly naïve... like a New Age social-studies lesson. It isn't really revisionist; it's the old stuff toned down and sensitized. [17 Dec 1990]

Everything in this movie is fudged ever so humanistically, in a perfuctory, low-pressure way. And the picture has its effectiveness: people are crying at it. Of course they're crying at it - it's a piece of wet kitsch. [6 Feb 1989]

The director, Roland Joffe, and his co-screenwriter, Bruce Robinson, took this inherently dramatic subject and got lost in it; the script is a shambles.

The first three-quarters of an hour...is junkily entertaining. but when they're on the road in the South, Willie turns into a curmudgeonly guardian angel, the boy starts learning lessons about life, and the picture is contemptible.

So inept you can't even get angry; it's like the imitations of sophisticated entertainment that high-school kids put on.

After a few minutes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I began to get that depressed feeling, and, after a half hour, felt rather offended...The director, George Roy Hill, doesn't have the style for it. The tone becomes embarrassing...George Roy Hill is a "sincere" director, but Goldman's script is jocose; though it reads as if it might play, it doesn't, and probably this is't just Hill's fault.

There's a basic flaw in Malick's method: he has perceived the movie--he's done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor rising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there's nothing left to respond to. [18 March 1974, p.135]

The movie could be every errant husband's self-justifying fantasy. (And the way Burstyn overacts, a man would have to be a saint to have stayed with her so long.) Directed by Bud Yorkin, from a script by Colin Welland, the picture is like a sermon on the therapeutic value of adultery, divorce, and remarriage, given by a minister who learned all he knows from watching TV.

This is an impersonal and rather junky piece of moviemaking. It's packed with torture scenes, and it bangs away at you. And every time there's a possibility of a dramatic climax - a chance to engage the audience emotionally with something awesome - the director Richard Marquand trashes it.

The James Bond series has had its bummers, but nothing before in the class of this one.

A crumbum farce.

Directed by George Cukor, this movie has an unflagging pace, but it's full of scenes that don't play, and often you can't even tell what tone was hoped for. It's a tawdry self-parody.

Mariel Hemmingway tries hard as Dorothy, but she's all wrong for the part - she's simply not a bunny type. Fosse must believe that he can make art out of anything - that he doesn't need a writer to create characters, that he can just take the idea of a pimp murdering a pinup and give it such razzle-dazzle that it will shake people to the marrow. He uses his whole pack of tricks - flashbacks, interviews, shock cuts, the works - to keep the audience in a state of dread. He piles up such an accumulation of sordid scenes that the movie is nauseated by itself.

The director, John Schlesinger, opts for so much frazzled corss-cutting that there isn't the clarity needed for suspense. The only emotion one is likely to fell is revulsion at the brutality and general unpleasantness.

This picture seems ingenious at the start, but Crichton can't write people, and he directs like a technocrat. This is the emptiest of his pictures to date.

It operates on darlingness and the kitsch of innocence. The almost pornographic dislocation, which is the source of the film's possible appeal as a novelty, is never acknowledged, but the camera lingers on a gangster's pudgy, infantile fingers or a femme fatale's soft little belly pushing out of her tight stain dress, and it roves over the pubescent figures in the chorus line.

Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.

Daniel Mann's direction is maybe even worse that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes script.

The picture isn't terrible, just terribly dull. It feels dated, especially in the scenes that "explain" the hero and show his redemption - the banality comes down on you like drizzle.

The whole thing is so obvious that people in the audience applaud and hoot; it might be mistaken for parody if the sledgehammer-slow pacing didn't tell you that the director (Eastwood) wasn't in on the joke.