Richard Schickel

The problem is that the high-pitched whine of Allie's character finally vitiates not merely the viewer's sympathy for him, but sympathy for the movie he dominates, despite the care and courage that went into its making.

This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either.

Rarely have so many gifted women labored so tastefully to bring forth such a wee, lockjawed mouse.

There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives and much running around without a shirt, punctuated with other familiar gambits: torture scenes; the self-cauterization of, and instant recovery from, a wound large enough to stop an elephant; and a grimly preposterous two-man stand against a tank-led army. What few are likely to find amusing is Rambo III's story line. [30 May 1988, p.64]

What it doesn't have is a central figure you can give a hoot about.

This is soft-gore porn, obvious in its strategies, witless in the play of its ideas, absurdist only in its pretense to seriousness.

Hith her flat little voice and her skinny emotional range, one has to wonder: Is Brooke Shields truly obsession worthy? And can she carry, commercially, another movie about another kind of obsession? The answer is no.

This is moviemaking for people who don't much like movies unless they are -- you know -- "serious." It is visually inert. It appears to be taking up small-scaled, yet emotionally resonant issues, but does not actually define them sharply or bring them to firm conclusions.

Agresti's just out to give us a sentimental good time. Which some people, heaven help us, will have -- while the rest of us choke on the cutesiness.

Tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes.

The Coens have deliberately cut themselves off from their best subject. Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry.

Maybe kids will like the movie; their lust for dinolore appears to be insatiable. But the rest of us will yearn for Robin Williams' giddy goofing in "Aladdin."

As rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house.

Crude and inept.

It's great to have the Moose back, but it would be greater still to see him in a humorous context fully worth of him.

Writer-director Shainberg seems to be aiming for a dark comedy, but mostly his movie is coy without being funny, ugly without being truly transgressive, stupid when it needs to be smart.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it.

The result is a mess. Kym, in Hathaway's unsympathetic performance, is an annoyingly sour observer of the proceedings, a time bomb everyone hopes will not explode before the marriage is completed.

This is, or was, a true story, but invested as it is with relentlessly cliched emotions, it plays like cheap fiction.

A grim and draggy romance in which even the clothes and sets are dismal.

There is nothing in the history of movies to compare with Slap Shot for consistent, low-level obscenity of expression...Its problem is an ending that abruptly transports the audience from heightened realism to broad satire. It is a defect that Slap Shot shares with the current hit Network—a desire to present an editorial so corrosive that aesthetics, questions of form and proportion simply dissolve.

Braveheart is too much, too late.

Jennifer Jason Leigh's draggy performance as Parker is all studied accent (something vaguely mid- Atlantic but never before heard on Earth) and equally studied self-pity and it cannot sustain our sympathy, or our interest in this inept film.

Star Trek is, finally, nothing but a long day's journey into ennui.

The screenwriters, Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson, and the director, Jan de Bont, have no interest in providing their actors with stuff to act.

The film is basically a drag, and not helped by Christopher Cain's stand- around direction. And one's thirst for the clear, cool taste of traditional narrative -- motivated movement, defined antagonists, building suspense -- soon reaches maddening levels. A grownup could die in this wasteland. [5 Sept 1988, p.63]

An uninvolving muddle.

There's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company. Mostly you find yourself thinking, "How long until dinner?"