Faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

The movie is above all entertaining, if you enjoy human grotesquerie and flamboyant acting. Let's face it: Many of us do. There's a reason Hannibal Lecter remains the most popular villain in the movies.

While the performances are solid and we do get a few touching moments, the film sinks under the weight of too many intersecting storylines and too many loud and fiery and surprisingly mediocre action sequences.

I suspect its audience, which takes these films very seriously indeed, will drink deeply of its blood. The sensational closing sequence cannot be accused of leaving a single loophole, not even some those we didn't know were there.

There are a few chuckles sprinkled here and there, but for a movie about football it doesn’t seem to know all that much about football (certain scenes that transpire during the Super Bowl are cartoonishly implausible), and the four primary characters are rather thinly drawn.

Kaprisky, as the young French student, is an unknown in a role too large and complex for her, and there are times when she seems lost in a scene, looking to Gere for guidance. The result is a stylistic exercise without any genuine human concerns we can identify with - and yet, an exercise that does have a command of its style, is good-looking, fun to watch, and develops a certain morbid humor.

The ruling on the field is this is an incomplete pass.

Takes us all the way to the rim of space only to bog us down in a talky melodrama whipped up out of mad scientists and haunted houses.

The overwrought score and the Orwellian themes announce “Barbarians” as a prestige project brimming with Big Ideas, but it’s ultimately stilted and didactic, and more than a bit nasty.

The Last Boy Scout is a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart, utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller. To give it a negative review would be dishonest, because it is such a skillful and well-crafted movie.

McKinnon has so much energy and creativity she nearly jumps out of the frame. It’s an uneven performance with mixed results — but we’re left hoping she’ll be matched up with a better film role sometime soon, one that makes full use of her unique talents.

Overcrowded and overwritten, with too many shrill denunciations and dramatic surprises; we don't like the characters and, worse, they don't interest us.

Rousing in an old pulp science fiction sort of way, but the climactic scene transcends the rest, and stands by itself as one of the great animated action sequences.

A gentle and sweet whimsy, attentive to the love between the two brothers, respectful of the boy's growth and curiosity.

What's alluring is the way the characters played by John Livingston and Sabrina Lloyd savor each other, in between their troubles. Movies are too quick to interrupt romance with sex. Sarah and Rand fascinate us with their dance of dread and desire.

Whimsy with a capital W. No, it's WHIMSY in all caps. Make that all-caps italic boldface. Oh, never mind. I'm getting too whimsical.

Kazan writes plausible, literate dialogue and Hoblit creates a realistic world, so that the horror never seems, as it does in less ambitious thrillers, to feel at home.

There is something repulsive and manipulative about it, and even its best scenes have the flavor of a kid in the school yard, trying to show you pictures you don't feel like looking at.

The movie is only 84 minutes long, including credit cookies, but that is quite long enough. All the same, it's fitfully amusing and I have the sense that Spanish-speaking audiences will like it more than I did, although whether they'll be laughing with it or at it, I cannot say.

Poignancy. Lessons to be learned. Speeches to be made. Lost marbles to be rediscovered. Tears to be shed. The conclusion of Hook would be embarrassingly excessive even for a movie in which something of substance had gone before.

My deepest objection to the movie is that it is so blood-soaked. When dialogue arrives to interrupt the carnage, it's like the seventh-inning stretch.

I think Dwayne Johnson has a likable screen presence and is a good choice for an innocuous family entertainment like this.

It's a close call here. I guess I recommend the movie because the dramatic scenes are worth it. But if some studio executive came along and made Stone cut his movie down to two hours, I have the strangest feeling it wouldn't lose much of substance and might even play better.

Irreconcilable Differences is sometimes cute, and is about mean parents, but it also is one of the funnier and more intelligent movies of 1984, and if viewers can work their way past the ungainly title, they're likely to have a surprisingly good time.

Goya's Ghosts is like the sketchbook Goya might have made with a camera.

It's the ending, really, that spoils The Cowboys. Otherwise, it's a good-to-fine Western, with a nice, sly performance by Roscoe Lee Browne as the trail cook, and the usual solid Wayne performance.

The film is warm and intriguing, and he (Valentin) is the engine that pulls us through it. We care about what happens to him; high praise.

The film is upbeat, wholesome, chirpy, positive, sunny, cheerful, optimistic and squeaky-clean. It bears so little resemblance to the more complicated worlds of many members of its target audience (girls 4 to 11) that it may work as pure escapism.