Richard Schickel

Tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes.

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

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?"

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.

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.

Crude and inept.

Beverly Hills Cop III is just going through the motions, without comic conviction, surprises or suspense. [6 June 1994, p.66]

One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole - faking it -could love.

His is a dispassionate sensibility, and he is not a strong enough actor - nor has he a strong enough intelligence - to fight his way out of the false analogy he has drawn between moviemaking and tragic history in the making.

Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory.

There is none of the affectionate respect for working-class life and values that marked the similar, and far superior, "Norma Rae," nor any of that film's sense of felt reality either.

Braveheart is too much, too late.

Never achieves more than feckless amiability.

The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark.

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.

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.

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.

Our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking.

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.

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.

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

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

In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent.

In the end, everything about this glum and self-important adaptation of Anne Tyler's upper-cute novel is dim. [26 Dec 1988, p.83]

One of the most execrable movies ever made. [6 March 1995, p.100]

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."