A surprisingly effective film.

Either you stand back and resist it, or you plunge in. There was something about its innocence and spunk that got to me, and I caved in.

Ninjas triumph over anything -- except stupid cliches. [18 Apr 1995, p.24]

One of the dirtiest-minded mainstream releases in history. It has a low opinion of men, a lower opinion of women, and the lowest opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It is obscene, foulmouthed, scatological, creepy and perverted.

The big action set pieces fizzle. And that’s not good for a fantasy adventure movie, especially when the fantasy component is frequently undercut by sub-standard special effects.

The screenplay is so murky, indeed, that I was never sure whether the Kids hated the Hitler Youth lads because they were Nazis, or simply because they didn't swing.

You know there's something wrong with a sex movie when the good parts are the dialogue.

Lethal Weapon 4 has all the technical skill of the first three movies in the series, but lacks the secret weapon, which was conviction.

Dark Places does its best to stir a multitude of emotions within us, but in doing so, the film feels contrived and hurried.

A sad reflection of the new Hollywood, where material is sanitized and dumbed down for a hypothetical teen market that is way too sophisticated for it. It plays like a dinner theater version of the original.

[Garai and Luna] must be given credit for their presence and charisma in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and together with the film's general ambiance, they do a lot to make amends for the lockstep plot.

An Innocent Man has all the elements to put us through an emotional wringer, but the movie never works up any enthusiasm for them. It's the most relaxed crime movie of the year.

This is a nice enough fantasy, but the premise of a dream gone sour is stale. And the Hollywood happy ending seems predictable pretty early in the movie. [22 Sep 1992, p.33]

In the end, though, its own grasp of morality is pretty tenuous. Its survivors learn from the errors of their ways not to make them again. Period. The film probably would have been better off taking the hijinks approach employed by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in "Neighbors." A food fight might have covered up a lot of those holes. [16 Oct 1992, p.41]

For its intended audience, I suspect this will play as a great entertainment. I enjoyed myself, particularly after they released the Kraken.

It offers certain pleasures, but suffers from an inability to structure events or know when to end a shot. And it has an ending that is simply, perhaps ridiculously, incomprehensible.

A cheerfully energetically and very vulgar comedy.

Not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny.

An almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about.

The movie seems to reinvent itself from moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts. There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei,

It's over the top, an exercise in action comedy that cuts loose from logic and enjoys itself.

Here is a movie that ignores the Model Airplane Rule: First, make sure you have taken all of the pieces out of the box, then line them up in the order in which they will be needed. Bringing Down the House is glued together with one of the wings treated like a piece of tail.

Zipper might be entertaining enough in a campy way for you to watch it on demand as long as you’ve got a really big bowl of popcorn and an even bigger glass of wine (or the non-alcoholic elixir of your choice) to get you through. Might. Be.

The blood-soaked potboiler First Kill is Generous Pour through and through, from Bruce Willis playing a cop for the umpteenth time in his career to the old switcheroo we can see coming a mile away to the pounding and overwrought score to some genuinely effective detours and subplots.

Teachers has an interesting central idea, about shell-shocked teachers trying to remember their early idealism, but the movie junks it up with so many sitcom compromises that we can never quite believe the serious scenes.

Intrusion is a derivative, manipulative, convoluted and dopey story that dishes up one scary movie cliché after another before careening out of control with a late plot development so insanely implausible, so far out of left field, it’s as if someone accidentally deleted 20 pages of the script during production and nobody noticed.

The Family Plan exists in a world that defies all logic and reality. Granted, this is an over-the-top comedy, and yes, there are a few dark laughs, but this is basically a live-action cartoon with a deadly premise.

The best parts of Need for Speed are the actual racing and chasing sequences — a true thrill ride for the audience as the story unfolds.