At the end, I know, Trevor has come unhinged. I accept that and believe it. But it feels like the movie lost the nerve of its original story impulse and sought safety in elements borrowed from thrillers. Its destination doesn't have much to do with how it got there.

Life with Mikey is a good-hearted retread of many other movies about friendship between a hapless adult and a wise child.

Empty at its core, Raising Cain is a deeply cynical, spiteful effort by a director who seems to be both punishing himself for Bonfiregate and sticking his tongue out at those who turned on him when it threatened to become his last train to Hollywood. [07 Aug 1992, p.33]

As shamelessly as Tombstone rips off pieces of Unforgiven, you can rest assured none of them relate to Eastwood's strong portrayal of women -- or his antipathy toward violence. The latest shootout at the O.K. Corral is only a prelude to your basic bloodletting in the name of mass entertainment. [24 Dec 1993, p.25]

Problem is, there’s no movie inside this movie. It’s a breezy and intermittently entertaining and super slick work, but it’s filled with so many overly familiar notes and well-worn cliches, and there are so many winking nods to the viewer, it feels as if we’re about two rewrites away from this thing being a flat-out spoof on the level of Airplane! or Hot Shots! or Scary Movie.

Little Darlings really wants to be two movies at once: A fairly serious film about teenagers and sex, but also a box-office winner like "National Lampoon's Animal House" or "Meatballs." That's why we get awkwardly forced comedy like the food-fight scene. The movie also suffers from uncertain direction.

There are images of astonishing beauty in Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi, sequences when we marvel at the sights of the Earth, and yet when the film is over there is the feeling that we are still waiting for it to begin.

You have to be very talented to work with Meryl Streep. It also helps to know how to use her. The Iron Lady fails in both of these categories.

About the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required.

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.

The male characters are uniformly weak (Solomon is only the least articulate of the lot) and all the women, ultimately, are strong or aggressive. [10 Jan 1992, p.32]

It's a rambling, unfocused biography of Wyatt Earp, starting when he's a kid and following his development from an awkward would-be lawyer into a slick gunslinger. This is a long journey, in a three-hour film that needs better pacing.

Slides too easily into its sentimentality; the characters should have put up more of a struggle.

Like the original 1963 movie and the TV series, it expects us to be endlessly amused by a dolphin that does things that are endless but not amusing.

The movie doesn't develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film.

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors, and they don't need to act much.

The movie is more concerned with the story line (premiere-fire-threat-rescue) than with painting the time and place.

Careful What You Wish For is aiming for lusty, lurid, B-movie titillation, but it’s not nearly as sexy nor nearly as clever as it would like to be.

Why didn't they make a baseball picture? Why did The Natural have to be turned into idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford? Why did a perfectly good story, filled with interesting people, have to be made into one man's ascension to the godlike, especially when no effort is made to give that ascension meaning?

The problem with G is not merely that the ending doesn't work and feels hopelessly contrived. It's also that the plot adds too many unnecessary characters and subplots, so that the main line gets misplaced.

Possesses the art and craft of a good movie, but not the story.

The film's redeeming feature is that it knows how sad these people are, and finds the correct solution to their problems: They meet in the flesh.

As someone who believes most movies have too much music, I was surprised to find myself noticing how little is in Mr. Destiny. In the quiet, an innocent little fable grows, blossoms and is harvested, to no great moment.

The problem this time around is the plot is particularly idiotic, the supposedly snappy quips are lame and come at some weirdly inappropriate moments — and it’s all delivered in an extremely bloated package.

For Your Eyes Only is a competent James Bond thriller, well-crafted, a respectable product from the 007 production line. But it's no more than that.

There is something intrinsically silly in this story, and unless you can find a way to believe in it at some level (even on the level on which Peter Pan believes in fairies), it's just a lot of feathers. Many of them from horses.

This chance to warm the hearts of put-upon overweight kids ends up saying next to nothing, and that's a big, fat shame.[18 Feb 1995, p.21]

It tries to be the best bad movie that it can be.