Although the film is full of the sensory jolts common to this genre, it also has more humor than most, thanks to Richard Rice's tough, witty script. [15 Sep 1989, p.37]

Every frame in this comic horror story of two unstable sisters tingles with an arresting mix of deadpan humor and yawning dread. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]

Shirley Valentine only intermittently captures the wistfulness and tough-minded humor Collins is so good at dispensing. The rest of the time, it's far from bracing. [22 Sept 1989, p.31]

Staggeringly preposterous, yet not without a certain entertainment value. Except for the glasnost angle, there's nothing original about The Package, yet there's something amusing in its reminder of how the political assassination genre has come full circle since "The Manchurian Candidate."

Casualties of War is just as successful as "Platoon" was in making us feel Vietnam's moment-by-moment tension, but its central event gives it more resonance. [18 Aug 1989, p.43]

Hughes succeeds more than he has any right to in Uncle Buck because he's able to override sitcom cliche with generosity. It's a smart idea to let Candy play feelings instead of just fatness and bluster. For a movie that isn't really that good, Uncle Buck is surprisingly likable. [16 Aug 1989, p.77]

Funny, gritty, filled with surprising stabs of feeling, Parenthood is a stretch for Ron Howard, its director. This new adult comedy has the generosity of "Cocoon" and "Splash," but it takes Howard into deeper, darker, messier territory. [2 Aug 1989, p.57]

Even the valiant mastiff, with his soulful eyes, splayed crocodile teeth and industrial-strength jaws, can't keep "Turner and Hooch" from going to the dogs. Unfortunately, it's the kind of picture any self-respecting dog would toss back. [28 July 1989, p.29]

A sweet, gentle film with a personality problem. The problem is that it hasn't got enough personality to keep from being overwhelmed by the echoes of other films it evokes. [21 July 1989, p.21]

Despite the revival of narrative vigor accompanying Licence to Kill, you will perhaps sense that I find it too sane, too engineered. Preposterousness seems an integral part of the James Bond universe, which I'd hate to think was turning rational, falling into step with the '80s by abandoning fancifulness. Mercifully, Licence to Kill isn't altogether stripped of excess. [14 July 1989, p.65]

Sitting through Lethal Weapon 2 is like dating a jackhammer. It's a slick, cynical, high-speed assembly line of car chases, jokes, sex, explosions and blood. [41 Jul 1989, p.41]

Great Balls of Fire is little more than just a whole lotta fakin' goin on. [30 June 1989, p.41]

There are times when "Star Trek V" seems padded and low-impact, but there are things to like, too. [9 June 1989, p.81]

There's talent on view in Renegades, even if it's mostly subordinated to formula and marketing imperatives. [02 Jun 1989, p.33]

Pink Cadillac, you might say, is low on gas. [26 May 1989, p.43]

Road House is the kind of action movie whose rigging is so blatant that there can be no air of heroism about it. Although Swayze and Sam Elliott, in the role of his mentor, have the decency to look sheepish most of the time, there's no end to the cynicism and merchandising on screen, especially in the sex scenes. [19 May 1989, p.45]

A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]

Earth Girls Are Easy is 90 minutes of bubble and squeak that doesn't shrink from sharing its subject's vacuousness. But it works often enough. And when it does, it plays like a collision between Zippy and Hairspray. [12 May 1989, p.45]

Robinson's impassioned decency and coruscating invective make "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" a high-minded, invigorating mess. [19 May 1989, p.47]

In the crowded landscape of anti-imperial and anti-colonial film, Claire Denis' Chocolat is a standout. Never raising its voice, avoiding the usual didacticism, Denis brings subtlety, sensitivity and an uncommonly clear personal vision to her memories of colonialism in Africa, where she spent her youth. [31 Mar 1989, p.34]

The miraculous thing about Let's Get Lost is that Weber has managed to create something that's both impossibly stylized and unmistakably moral (not judgmental, moral).

Part of the reason Pet Sematary is so pedestrian is that its leads - Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby - are uncharismatic. And director Mary Lambert, of Siesta and music video fame, doesn't know how to build and pace her material. [21 Apr 1989, p.46]

Unless you're on its let's-laugh-at-the-loonies wavelength, The Dream Team is singularly unfunny. The writing and direction are smugly vacant, behaving as if the basic concept is so innately hilarious that neither need bother fleshing it out with characterization and inventiveness. The only thing prodigious about The Dream Team is its cheap witlessness. It makes Rain Man look like King Lear. [07 Apr 1989, p.35]

Cyborg is cyboring. [07 Apr 1989, p.34]

Fletch Lives isn't a total zero. Three, or maybe four, of Chevy Chase's wisecracks work. But everything else about the film is feeble and poky. Even its tastelessness lacks the coarse energy of vulgarity. It's hard to believe that the world has had to wait five years for this witless, insipid sequel to "Fletch," an original that's easy to top. [17 Mar 1989, p.45]

Leviathan may be mediocre, unoriginal, boring and nauseating, but it probably won't be the worst sci-fi we'll see this year. [17 Mar 1989, p.46]

Gilliam has a vision and a viewpoint, and he puts it on screen with an extravagance, a humanistic generosity and a visual imagination that make it a standout in 1989's virtual cinematic vacuum. [10 Mar 1989, p.32]

"Chances Are is a sweetly likable little romantic comedy that would be even more likable if it didn't require the season's most massive suspension of disbelief. [10 March 1989, p.32]

There are some sweet impulses in first-time director Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream, but it's a mess. [3 March 1989, p.47]

Avildsen's - and the screenplay's - blatant manipulations make Freeman's job harder. To his credit, Freeman not only sustains the level of fever pitch at which Clark operates throughout, but succeeds in making him seem admirable, if not exactly likable. A well-meaning steamroller is still a steamroller. Are people who question Clark necessarily wrong? And why, for instance, do the students have to be presented with an either-or picture of Mozart and gospel music? Why can't they have both? The script to Lean on Me plays like something written by the Reagan administration. It supplies a rationale for white-controlled governments to ignore the educational needs of largely black school districts that need funding most. With Freeman breathing inspirational fire, Lean on Me is never dull. But it sidesteps some troubling questions. [3 March 1989, p.43]

But Skin Deep hasn't the energy level or the inventiveness to sustain the demands of sex farce. There's only one sight gag as funny, involving glow-in-the-dark prophylactics. There's also only one role that's sympathetic. As usual, it's the Julie Andrews role of long-suffering wife, played by Alyson Reed. One last complaint: In the guise of being unflinching about dancing on the edge of outrage, the film reveals a mean streak involving cruel things done to dogs. Skin Deep spends what seems like a lot of time living up to - or is it down to? - its name. [3 March 1989, p.47]

Never settling for mere irony, High Hopes becomes a small banner of sanity and good humor among the social ruins. Leigh never shies away from his unflinching dead-end class view of contemporary London. Nor does he wallow in '60s nostalgia. Which is part of the reason his passionate, life-embracing High Hopes is so exhilarating. [31 Mar. 1989, p.30]

If The Mighty Quinn is slight, it's also very easy to take. And its soundtrack is a treat. [17 Feb 1989, p.90]

Even an experienced director would have his hands full making anything out of this script. Four screenwriters are credited, and as any movie buff knows, the more writers, the worse the movie. Nowhere Faustian, this one aspires to camp classic status, but lurches lamely into vile gross-out territory. [10 Feb 1989, p.48]

There's no excuse for Her Alibi. [3 Feb 1989, p.42]

Who's Harry Crumb? has a beginning bright enough to make you hope that John Candy might at last have his first good movie role since Splash. But no. Who's Harry Crumb? crumbles into yet another slack, witless misreading of what makes Candy an appealing performer. [03 Feb 1989, p.43]

Mississippi Burning plays loose with truth, turning the history of the civil rights movement on its head. The filmmakers shamelessly transform what was ultimately a triumph of due process and nonviolent civil disobedience into an ugly might-makes-right spectacle. It's "Dirty Harry" coming at you from the left. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]

Three Fugitives isn't the total disaster that such remakes as "The Woman in Red" and "The Tall Blond Man with One Red Shoe" have been. It has moments, mostly having to do with physical comedy, of which Veber is a master. Mostly, though, you keep closing your eyes and wishing that when you open them, Nolte and Short will be gone, and Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard will appear in their place, as they deserve to. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]

It's a wickedly inventive blend of revisionist history and childhood dread. [17 March 1989, p.45]

As he proved in his screenplay for Moonstruck, John Patrick Shanley has an ear for New Yorkese and a soft spot for eccentrics. Both are in evidence in The January Man, but what could have been an offbeat, original cop movie fails because Shanley can't meet the more conventional requirements of the genre, such as plotting, characterization and suspense. [13 Jan 1989, p.47]

Neither the film nor the play has figured out where to go with Barry Champlain once it plants him at the center of his can-of-worms microcosm. We're never bored by his whiplash flailings, but on screen, as on stage, we can't help asking ourselves to what end they're being deployed. [13 Jan 1989, p.46]

Although we're only two weeks into 1989, we've already got a movie so resoundingly awful that it's bound to stand the test of time and emerge as one of the year's worst. [13 Jan 1989, p.48]

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels essentially remains a duet of exquisitely turned gestures exchanged by Martin and Caine. It isn't killer comedy. Sometimes its leisurely pace veers dangerously close to slackness. But it's as close as Hollywood comedy comes to chamber music. [14 Dec 1988, p.77]

The attempts to supply heart are never more than synthetic, but Schwarzenegger, as the good guy with the good genes, and his goofy sweetness lift Twins into the win column. [9 Dec 1988, p.33]

It falls far short of the lighthandedness, whimsy and feeling it needs to override its slightness. You keep wanting to like it, to match the good will coming out of the actors, but the writing keeps shoving its fabricated nothingness in your face. [09 Dec 1988, p.36]

What sets Tequila Sunrise apart is its layering, its existential dimension. The characters played by Gibson and Russell have been sanded down by a kind of fatalism we normally associate with characters in French gangster movies. There's more than one facet to them. They're entertaining. And urgent. Even when they're just going through routine genre moves, they put laid-back spin on them. [2 Dec 1988, p.29]

Scrooged is that rarest of contemporary Hollywood phenomena -- a Christmas movie with Christmas spirit. [23 Nov 1988, p.21]

From its opening evolution sequence of squiggly things in the water through its references to the great circle of life, The Land Before Time embraces a larger perspective than merely that of the adventure story. It's an affecting work, and a work of quality. [18 Nov 1988, p.29]

Neil Jordan's High Spirits wants to be a supernatural comedy. But it isn't super, it isn't natural, it isn't high, and it isn't spirited. [18 Nov 1988, p.33]

The women here aren't afraid to get extreme about love, but in the end, you sense that they are too sound to destroy themselves over the worthless man they have allowed to personify it. That's what lifts Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from the amusing to the sublime. [23 Dec 1988, p.23]

Fred Schepisi's "A Cry in the Dark" is a powerful film with a terrific performance by Meryl Streep, her best since "Sophie's Choice." [11 Nov 1988, p.57]

Child's Play is junk fun. [09 Nov 1988, p.95]

once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness. The big alley-fight scene between Piper and David, in which the former tries to punch some awareness into the latter and make him put on the X-ray sunglasses, is as contrived as it is brutal. And the ending isn't much. The acting has the good sense not to try to be anything more than two-dimensional, though, which keeps the entertainment value at a lively comic-strip level. As sci-fi horror comedy, "They Live," with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with "Terminator" and "Robocop," even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps. [4 Nov 1988, p.52]

Most of the time Things Change makes you marvel at how fresh a mob comedy can seem in the right hands. [21 Oct 1988, p.49]

The film belongs to Donohue's cool, toothy slinker, who sports instant fangs when she lures a pimply student into her bath and later shimmies deadpan out of an art nouveau urn when the snake-charming record starts its amplified grooving. [11 Nov 1988, p.61]

The Accused is far from a perfect film, but it's got a terrific performance by Foster, a pretty good one by McGillis, and Lansing's knack for casting women's issues in a form that makes people go see them at the movies. [14 Oct 1988, p.49]

Nair, to her credit, doesn't succumb to any special pleading, which deepens her film's impact. Time and again, you sense that she and her subjects come from a place that believes in film, as "Salaam, Bombay" specifies its world and compels us to inhabit it. [15 Sep 1988, p.68]

Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]

It's got flashes of brilliance from Tom Hanks as an unstable comedian whose desperation gives his routines their edge. It's also got an embarrassing performance by Sally Field as a frazzled New Jersey housewife who, late in the game, confronts her resentful family and says, "I want to be a mom, I want to be a wife, and I want to be a comedienne." On the whole, Punchline does not wear its schizophrenia well. [7 Oct 1988, p.38]

It's more than a labor of love -- it's a powerful summoning of devoted craft, conveying the pain and complexity of a great musical innovator, avoiding almost totally the usual Hollywood cliches. [14 Oct 1988, p. 53]

There's justification for Hearst's bitter reflection that her real crime consisted in surviving. There's also some intelligent work in Patty Hearst. Still, it's more pat and less disturbing than you feel it should be. [23 Sep 1988, p.56]

In short, "Crossing Delancey" is a joy of a romantic comedy. It's got warmth, brains, heart and humor. So what's not to like? [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

It's a stunningly stylized, fiercely emotional one-of-a-kind film that seals in amber the horrors of a life the director couldn't wait to escape. [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

At first glance, Running on Empty seems a humane, if rickety, left-wing tearjerker, with strong acting propping up a weak script. It takes a second glance to get at what's really interesting about the film - its subtext. [30 Sep 1988, p.33]

Married to the Mob is a funny yard sale of a film about regeneration in a junked-up America. [19 Aug 1988]

It's also [Coppola's] most gloriously extravagant film since "One from the Heart." [12 Aug 1988]

It could have been shorter, some of its exchanges misfire, but I respect The Last Temptation of Christ, and I'm much more for it than against it. It's the most spiritual biblical movie of our times. [2 Sep 1988, p.25]

Fusco's script undercuts whatever freshness it may have brought to its view of Billy the Kid with a steady stream of howlers, most of which involve Kiefer Sutherland, as the sensitive member of the gang. [12 Aug 1988, p.24]

There isn't a scene in Cocktail that isn't cheap and dumb, and whether its camp entertainment value compensates for its contempt for women is a question. Cocktail makes beer commercials look deep, makes "Top Gun" look like "Hamlet." [29 Jul 1988, p.21]

The Dead Pool is not a subtle movie or a bloodless one, although it does manage to put its own twist on the usual car chase sequence. [13 Jul 1988, p.59]

The romantic stuff is tepid. Luckily, his onscreen buddy, Hall, never strays far. Coming to America is at its best when they're playing off each other, and not just as the prince and his buddy. [29 Jun 1988, p.69]

There's always something touching about the diligence with which Schwarzenegger soldiers through his assignments. There's a play of intelligence and decency in his eyes that exists quite independently of his bashing. Of the Hollywood tribe of virile fists, he's the one who seems most sensitive. [17 Jun 1988, p.31]

Big is an example of what has become rare in Hollywood -- a self-confident comedy that transforms an old gimmick into a new, vivid experience. It's as funny for the kids as it is for adults and, for that reason alone, can't be recommended too highly. [3 Jun 1988, p.33]

Rambo III is just another of Stallone's exercises in narcissism and jingoism, death and glory wrapped up in one tidy package. [25 May 1988, p.75]

The most startling achievement of The Last Emperor is that it accomplishes what seems to have eluded Bertolucci for some time. He has found the small in the large and, in many ways, he has created what many thought impossible -- an intimate epic. [18 Dec 1987, p.95]

Broadcast News grows in your memory. It recalls an era when movies were made by, for and with three-dimensional characters you cared about. Let's hope it doesn't take James L. Brooks another four years to make another one. We can't wait that long. [25 Dec 1987, p.53]

Oliver Stone's Wall Street plays like "Platoon" in civvies. It's a good bad movie, unable to muster the moral firepower of the earlier film, but entertaining on the level of a big, bold, biff-bam-pow comic strip that likes high-profile high-rolling more than it perhaps realizes. [11 Dec 1987, p.45]

Empire of the Sun is an imperfect film, but at its best it's grand and haunting in ways that only a movie can be. [11 Dec 1987]

The team of producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory has created another classy film of a classic novel with their stunning adaptation of E.M. Forster's Maurice. [24 Sep 1987]

Adrian Lyne pulls out more manipulative nonsense than Machiavelli ever thought of. Lyne stops at nothing to provoke artificial sentimental feelings from the audience. Like the movie itself, the audience's reaction is only skin deep. [18 Sep 1987, p.58]

The Lost Boys is schlock, but it's juicy schlock. [31 Jul 1987, p.34]

[Verhoeven's] cold, slick, funny, high-powered movie is informed by a humanism this genre almost always abandons in its chase after vigilante splat. [17 Jul 1987]

Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do. After a long dry spell, Brooks is back on the money with Spaceballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.33]

Gray's haunted, obsessional riffs are absorbing theater. Because Demme had the good sense to lay back and not beat them over the head with his cameras, they're equally compelling on film. [27 Mar 1987]

The skies are thick with whizzing bullets and strings being pulled by Shane Black's crude script and Richard Donner's cement-mixer direction. Predictably, the chicks-and-ammo stuff is punctuated by TV cop show repartee. [6 Mar 1987, p.36]

Director Bruce Beresford keeps stars Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Diane Keaton firmly rooted in the deep, dark black humor of Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. [01 Jul 2014, p.G15]

Obviously, it wasn't the plot that has given Little Shop such a long life. In the case of this film, it's the music, the sets and the comic sketches that make this remake mostly successful. [19 Dec 1986, p.77]

After an hour of biting charm, Something Wild turns into something else. In a twist that turns the movie into a silly story of violence, Demme surrenders his style to a stupid plot. [7 Nov 1986]

The Fly is that rare species of movie - a remake that far surpasses the original and, quite frankly, all expectations. [15 Aug 1986]

This rather simple story, played with stunning conviction by Rourke and Basinger, achieves its apex through director Adrian Lyne's steamy direction. Yet, it's not nasty enough. [14 Mar 1986, p.11]

In Ran, color plays a role not unlike that of language in "Lear": a kind of ground bass of beauty, a product of pure imagination, that both affirms life and surpasses it. Yet Kurosawa uses that beauty more as negation: a reminder not of what man is capable of but how puny he is in comparison.

Clue the movie, not the board game, isn't so much a drama as it is a marketing gimmick. Presumably, Paramount Pictures believed that an audience was clamoring to see actors play one-dimensional figures from a game. [13 Dec 1985, p.57]

Richard Attenborough's film version of the long-running Broadway musical hit A Chorus Line not only avoids the disaster that many had predicted for it, but is often surprisingly effective and enjoyable, transcending its troubled history. [20 Dec 1985]

Pee- wee's Big Adventure is a shrewdly observed, deftly executed looney tune. [9 Aug 1985, p.42]

Silverado plays like a big-budget regurgitation of old Westerns. Whatkeeps it going is the generosity that flows between Kasdan and his actors. It's got benevolent energies, but not the more primal kind needed to renew the standard Western images and archetypes. [10 Jul 1985, p.26]

The best mainstream film since "E.T.," is an uplifting reminder that Hollywood can still produce truly great entertainment...The plot is so exquisitely developed that divulging anything beyond the basic outline might diminish the joyous surprises that await an audience thirsting for originality in a reactionary medium. [03 July 1985, p.57]

The Disney people have taken such obvious care in making Return to Oz that it's a shame it didn't turn out better. It has its moments - mostly visual - but when it isn't a grim downer, it's largely inert. [21 Jun 1985, p.21]

But, fittingly, it's the kids who carry this outing. They're led by Sean Astin, who's rightly more of a dreamer than the others. Jeff B. Cohen engagingly handles the most cliched role, the fat kid who keeps stuffing his face. And I couldn't help wondering if Ke Huy Quan, who played Indy's sidekick in the Temple of Doom, knows that not all movies are made in caves. In any case, you can relax. The Goonies is entertaining despite its calculated flavor. [7 Jun 1985, p.61]