In short, My Fellow Americans is too much like the bland, numbing political campaigns of which we're still trying to clear our heads. [20 Dec 1996, p.E6]

The strength of Jacob's Ladder is that we never know what the next scene will be. But that's also its weakness. We don't feel involved with the characters here. We just feel jerked around. Jacob's Ladder, finally, is bummer theater. [2 Nov 1990, p.73]

In the end, it's hard to see a real reason for the movie's existence. We already have Muppets.

It’s fun in stretches, but also busily forced.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

One of those sticky dramas.

A righteous but wrongheaded thriller, chokes on its well-meant outrage and leaves a moth-eaten plot and handful of nonsense characters on its way to a dopey finish.

Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]

Not without its charms. But it never rises to its clever what-if concept.

The Boogeyman becomes an exercise in diminishing returns, though it is not without its pleasures.

Unlike other films that successfully explore abstractions, such as Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” or the memoiristic collages of Terence Davies, it doesn’t seem to have much going on beneath the drab surface.

Achingly slow, at times bleak and, in the end, frustratingly and regrettably, rather pointless.

Belle has the pace and sumptuous cinematography of a Merchant and Ivory production, but none of their memorable characters, subtle performances, or literate dialogue.

A textbook case of filmmakers who can't make up their minds about their characters; it's a failure of nerve disguised as dramatic ambiguity.

In James Marsh's The King, the usually wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal is all wrong for the role of Elvis Valderez.

German director Uli Edel's film of Last Exit to Brooklyn, while honorable, just doesn't roar off the screen the way the novel roared off the page. [11 May 1990, p.33p]

The movie works best when it finds a balance between flatly familiar and over-aggressively unexpected.

After a sensuous introductory act, The Reader descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust - which still pollute postwar Germany.

It’s weird-stupid more than good-stupid.

Ironically, the phoniness that iconic teen romantic Holden Caulfield despised pervades Jim Sadwith’s Coming through the Rye, a semi-autobiographical tale of hero worship and literary integrity.

Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Time is a lovely visit to a Budapest that yields its secrets more willingly than the sad, repressed woman at the story’s center.

Sarah Silverman is far and away the best part of I Smile Back, a strained entry in the Mad Housewife genre.

The new film's not only almost double the length of the original, it's four times as ambitious - a sprawling, surrealist, ultimately disturbing portrait of a society lurching uncertainly toward democracy. What's really on trial in this movie? Just the Russian soul.

The film's meta-fey title alone is an example of why some people adore Anderson and why he drives others absolutely crazy.

Intermittently engaging but inescapably overextended.

Nick Nolte electrifies the football-cum-drugs saga with a remarkable performance as Phil Elliott, a pot smokin', beer swillin', cocaine sniffin' tight end for the North Dallas Bulls. But the erratic direction of Ted Kotcheff and the wayward script are strictly second-string. [10 Jun 2014, p.G15]

Redmon's film is a welcome reminder that everything comes from somewhere and responsible people should at least pause to examine the label. For one thing, that's how bigger and better documentaries get made.