While Harrison Ford brings all you could hope for to the role of Clancy's hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, Patriot Games is a pretty routine, generic and on the whole pedestrian film. Considering the talent and obvious care taken, it's surprisingly flavorless. [5 June 1992, p.25]

Richard Attenborough's Chaplin is little more than an illustrated crash course on Charlie Chaplin. But, while superficial, it at least avoids disgrace. [08 Jan 1993, p.25]

It’s a not-unwatchable retread that has been tricked up to pass as a whole new thing. The problem with high-frame-rate productions is that they don’t look like what we’re used to calling “movies.” The problem with this one is that there wasn’t much movie there to begin with.

The movie’s a mixture of good intentions, a wobbly tone, and a plastic script, and it debuts a somewhat kinder, softer Schumer than the in-your-face comic trainwreck of “Trainwreck” (2015). I’m not sure that’s an improvement.

Mishandles Maria Semple’s best-selling comic novel into a clattery mess. There are deftly human moments to be found, but you have to dig for them like potatoes.

Every now and then, Benny & Joon makes you think it's going to finally take off, but it never does. It looks good but has credibility problems even on the level of whimsical fairy tale. [16 Apr 1993, p.86]

What starts as a modest, agreeable riff on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original tale — and, more relevantly, Tchaikovsky’s ballet — eventually veers into stultifying action, rote twists, and other badly forced contemporary tweaks.

The sequel isn’t a disaster, but it’s a dud.

For all the energy that Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, and their castmates pour into their gimmicky comedy, there’s too often a feeling that they’re straining to pump up flat material.

The movie tries to tell the whole story instead of just a good one.

After Love is like being stuck at a dinner with an unpleasant couple who won’t stop squabbling.

Object of Beauty is another zap-the-yuppies outing, more elegant than most, and sophisticated, too, but hollow and on the whole charmless as it leaves us uninvolved with the spectacle of cash-strapped John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell holed up in a posh London hotel, living on room service and dodging the manager. [19 Apr 1991, p.42]

Despite the film’s length and aspirations, its anthropological correctness and historically accurate gore, Bale’s transformation from stone killer to empathetic ally is unconvincing.

Mark Felt is a drama about an aggrieved control freak, which would be fine if director Landesman openly acknowledged it. He’s torn, though between offering a heroic celebration of the republic’s underappreciated savior and a more damning character portrait of a man who, for complex reasons, ended up doing the right thing.

Visually, the film is at its most interesting when Scott's camera rises over Osaka and photographs it in ways that make it look like a modular electrified Lego city with neon and plexiglass trim. We get the feeling that in Osaka we're staring the near future in the face. But if Scott has gone to Osaka in search of a new Blade Runner, he comes up with nothing more than an Asian French Connection II. Many exchanges play like truncated pieces of scenes that originally existed more fully. And the film's frequent nocturnal motorcycle revvings don't have the panache of The Warriors, much less The Wild One. [22 Sep 1989, p.31]

The Children Act isn’t all that interesting a movie, despite the many talented people involved and the generally high level of work they do. The most interesting thing about it is how it presents a case study in the very different way style can determine what works on the screen vs. what works on the page.

Ad Astra is moody, meditative, and slow (though not the knife fight or rover demolition derby).

The movie is less a movie than a collection of scenes lined up in a row, and the tone wobbles between pomp and circumstantial melodrama.

Nichols is a director who cleanly sculpts his scenes, leaving no intention or action vague. Maybe he should have allowed for a little more ambiguity. [10 July 1991, p.51]

Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]

Although his (Jarmusch) films have moments of sly obliqueness, they leave us feeling stranded in underdevelopment. This is the case with Night on Earth, which is launched on a promising conceit - nocturnal taxi rides in five cities around the world during the same time slot. By the time the film ends, we can't help wondering just who has been taken for a ride. [15 May 1992, p.85]

Oleanna slips to the level of a crass political cartoon, not an examination of human conduct embracing its problematic complexity. And after the first meeting blows up in his face, you can't believe the prof and the student would meet again alone in his office. There's nothing bringing them and keeping them together except the playwright's need to play out his scenario. [11 Nov 1994, p.47]

Captain Ron is an inconsequential but inoffensive little comedy dedicated to the proposition that inheriting Clark Gable's yacht can be a real problem. A throwback to the plastic Disney family comedies of the late '50s and early '60s, it's at least trim and shipshape, if never inspired or original. [18 Sep 1992, p.56]

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 techno-wizards at Industrial Light & Magic really knock themselves out here, but Casper is more serviceable than magical. [26 May 1995, p.85]

The Goldfinch isn’t great literature but it is a good read. By breaking up the chronology and yanking the audience back and forth between Theo’s fraught youth and crisis-ridden present, though, the film prevents an audience from gaining emotional traction.

For a while, Light Sleeper hangs together promisingly. But when Dafoe's character meets old flame Dana Delaney, the plot spirals into preposterousness involving a sinister Eurotrash client, and the film also gets away from Schrader, who isn't a deft enough director to conceal or minimize the flaws in his script. [15 Sep 1992, p.71]

A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.