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.