It's for those of us for whom killing people with high-powered guns in the movies is not only as good as sex but maybe better -- a sacrament for our age... [A] poorly written, badly directed film.

The movie is a corpse. It's a fish that stinks from the head. They ought to bury it in the Jersey Meadowlands. [25 Dec 1992]

It's last in laughs, last in drama but first in Murphy ego, as he gives a performance that everybody has seen before, only louder. [04 Dec 1992]

It's shallow as a puddle, but lots o' fun.

All in all, Jennifer 8 is about four bricks shy a load and two hours too long.

The whole thing is too preciously conceived. [05 Feb 1993]

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

It never seriously establishes the ground rules of the principle of transference or the relationship between the two of them, and so what follows is gibberish. [14 Jul 1992]

The movie then becomes a story of salvation: how Murphy's Marcus, through the love of a better woman (Halle Berry) manages to rediscover both his decency and his humanity. And yet, pretty much, it stays funny. [01 Jul 1992]

This baby takes place in Tim Burton's id. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

A somewhat simple-minded, overwrought mock epic. [22 May 1992]

One False Move doesn't make a single false move its own self: It's as tough and gripping as they come. It's the first movie I've seen in months where, when I was walking out, I thought to myself, "Damn! I wanna see that one again!"

After a fast, smart start, White Sands implodes like a black hole, sucking all goodwill from the atmosphere of the theater, turning those of us who started to love it into embittered cuckolds.

Deep Cover is good fun.

Newsies is a live-action musical, but it's only barely alive. Call it "Snoozies." [10 Apr 1992]

So much of "Thunderheart" is so good and its intentions are so noble that it pains me to reach the ultimate judgment that the movie is a mess.

The basketball sequences are the most magical in the film -- both Harrelson and Snipes can play -- but more to the point, he also has a great gift for evoking the needling hostility of athletes, the way the games aren't just about talent but about ego, will, self-esteem.

Except for the two stars, not much is believable in the movie. The ice skating sequences are clearly hampered by Sweeney's lack of skill, and it's crushingly obvious when a skating double has slipped into the picture. He's the guy who never looks at the camera.

Overpublicized and underbrained,Basic Instinct is a bitter disappointment, worth maybe a 10th of the hype that the media have so obligingly ladled out for its benefit.

It's hardly brilliant. But it's easygoing and occasionally quite funny and ultimately satisfying.

As a visual adventure, "The Lawnmower Man" is great fun.

No American film this year can touch it. [28 Feb 1992, p.10]

The basic trouble with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is that it goes on far longer than it should. A film of this sort should be no longer than 85 or 90 minutes. This one is 110 minutes long, which means we have to wait much longer for the mouse to turn on the cat.

JFK is entertaining, if only because the cast of characters in the New Orleans underground is so bizarre. [20 Dec 1991]

It is the most dynamic animated film ever made, and the prance of its camera, the sense of penetration into its action, the brilliantly paced editing pyrotechnics give it a crackle of life far more abundant than any feature that's come before.

The movie is occasionally cutesy. That's the worst of it. You can't call it gross, but it is cutesy.

It inverts the typical Hollywood boy-meets-girl formula into something somehow menacing and yet ultimately moving. [29 Oct 1991]

Point Break has its areas of excitement, but on too many occasions the movie just lies there -- even when it does, however, the film still manages to look and sound good.

If you change the course of history, the world will experience a different kind of chaos. That's a time-honored movie cliche. Terminator 2: Judgment Day chooses to go against that philosophy, noisily and with some monotony.

Jungle Fever is so many graceful things, so many angry things, so many truly moving things that its occasional faults are the faults of excess passion, not failure of imagination. Most importantly, it seethes with life, unlike nearly every other movie out of Hollywood these days.

The film is in desperate need of flow. It plays like a collection of bits, skits that have been thrown together with little eye to continuity.

Murray is very funny in the early going when his irritation-shtick is allowed full play; when he turns doughily benign in the late going, he's much less interesting. [17 May 1991]

If you're looking for a pleasing, reassuring film, try this one.

This slap-- sequel is primarily for the cognoscenti -- that is, for other teen-age mutant ninja turtles, or very small children. The rest of us it happily ignores.

The political correctness of Class Action verwhelms its sense of life. It turns into just another movie. [15 Mar 1991]

In fact much of Guilty By Suspicion takes place in a trashy roman a clef zone, with bigger-than-life versions of famous moments and people; the trouble is, the bigger they are, the less like life they seem.

A karate movie so devoid of inner substance that it threatens to suck all known life on planet Earth into the void at its center. [20 Mar 1991]

You don't see The Doors, you survive it. [01 Mar 1991]

Cadence is a bare-bones film. It needs more fill-in, but in spite of its gaps is entertaining and even a little provocative. It is a movie that says something positive about humankind, and there aren't that many films that do.

Zeffirelli has managed to make Shakespeare's greatest and most modern play one-dimensional. [13 Jan 1991]

There is some plot, but it is wispy at best and frequently gets in the way of the music.

Hartley is grasping at, and only fitfully achieving, an overall tone of mordancy - formally called "black humor" - rather than believability. [25 Oct 1990]

The movie rides the very thin line between art and trash, between exploitation and illumination. It's true, certainly, that it takes one into a universe of such moral squalor that one feels tainted afterward.

The film's ardent sentimentality, as magnified by the schlurpy music, is straight Chaplin, but not as good. The Film's subtext of sight-gag and clown-dance is also straight Chaplin, also not as good. [16 Jan 1990, p.3C]

Grisly, stylish and often weirdly funny, Blood Simple is a reminder of how rarely an original artistic sensibility is announced to the world and how much better movies are when that sensibility is allowed to keep going its own way.

Except for the Mozart music and Tharp movements around the edges, Amadeus plays like a monument to mediocrity. The movie belongs to Salieri.

What makes Lynn Littman's film so devastating -- beyond, that is, the power of Jane Alexander's brilliant performance as the surviving mother -- is its icy control and its complete disavowal of sentimentality and sensationalism. It's a small monument to the principle of understatement. [02 Dec 1983, p.B1]

The movie is emotionally tumultuous and evenhanded and serene. It celebrates the odd pockets of imagination and individuality that can be nurtured in middle-class suburbia. [2002 re-release]

It's not another rah-rah football film. Thanks to Nolte, it has its own form of true grit.

Alien, even with some scene tinkering that has left this "director's cut" one minute shorter than its original release, is still one of the creepiest, scariest, most shocking films ever.

Whenever I see this film, Pryor's look of what-am-I-doing-here? panic echoes my feelings exactly.

It's still the Holy Grail of crazy comedy.

Without a note of music or any other extraneous narrative device, Emitai plunges the viewer deep into the lives of the Diola, to the point where the subtitles translating the Diola and French languages are almost superfluous. [02 Feb 1998]

Le Samourai's take on complicity, betrayal and love is thoroughly original and as tough as a film can be. [06 Jun 1997]

[Poitier] is indeed so good that he almost enables one to forget that "Buck and the Preacher" is simply a standard Western with a slightly different twist. [10 May 1972, p.17]

It remains one of the best-written and best-performed American films of all time.

Funny Girl is old-fashioned; it is also exhilarating.

A non-stop cinematic funhouse impossible to resist.

Thanks to Kerr's eloquent tremor of a performance, when the heroine witnesses apparitions, they're immediately credible to the audience. [29 May 2009, p.1C]

It's a tough slog, but worth seeing once. [08 Nov 2008, p.4C]

Largely devoid of the usual Western histrionics, this 1957 film, thanks to the steady hand of veteran director Delmer Daves, represents one of the more sober depictions of the clash between chaos and order that has always been at the center of the movie Western. [26 Aug 2007, p.3E]

Stanley Kubrick was always infatuated with human clockwork, both in terms of what makes each of us tick and how we choreograph our lives, deaths, and sins. The Killing, his big heist movie, suits this obsession perfectly. It is often considered, and rightly, his first masterpiece.

There is not one word, one scene in the whole thing that doesn't ring the bell of truth, and anyone seeing it should emerge from the theater with a sense of satisfation rare in the movie-going experience. To put it simply, Marty is great. [18 Jun 1955, p.4]

Though Them benefits from a well-motivated script, it suffers from the same hackneyed ingredients that characterize most films of the same genre. [22 Jun 1954, p.12]

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

It is a striking, ironical tribute to the vanishing glory of the silent screen, and a lively reflection of present-day conditions in Hollywood. [15 Sep 1950, p.14]

Winchester '73 has a little bit of everything, including a central conflict straight out of the Old Testament, and Mann's highly visual direction -- dialogue is sparse, and the movie looks gorgeous, filmed largely on location in Arizona -- shows that John Ford and Howard Hawks weren't the only directors able to translate their love of the Old West and its mythical figures to film. [05 Jun 2003]

The movie is impressive both as a celebration of the Old West and a tough, ambivalent depiction of a ruthless pioneer. [04 Jun 2004]

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the rare movie classic that grows more relevant and compelling with every passing year. [29 Dec 2006, p.5C]

Inspirational, heart-rending and the movie that made Taylor a star - what more do you want? [19 May 2007, p.9S]

Samson Raphaelson's marvel of a script unfolds in six sequences that rise and fall with the surprising weight of mini-lifetimes; under Lubitsch's tart-tender direction, the emotionally transparent Stewart and the electric, conflicted Sullivan create an immortal comic courtship. [13 Feb 2004]