The sentiments expressed are really no more noble or refined than those of a Chuck Norris picture, though Joano's style tries to stamp art all over the sequence. It sure isn't that, but it isn't good action either. [14 Sep 1990, p.B]

Yet the movie's no stinker. Like their video-game counterparts, co-stars Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo somehow manage to weave their way past threatening obstacles and escape with their dignity.

It took J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter-adjacent franchise exactly one film for the shrugs to set in, even with all those fine actors up there amid expensive digital blue flames.

Like Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island," Stonehearst Asylum starts with the hysteria knob set at 11 and goes up from there.

So what’s missing? The usual scarcities in modern screen comedy: visual finesse and some wit to go with the gross-out stuff. Little things start adding up against Strays.

The script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi gives you next to nothing for narrative complication and surprise, and a meager amount of verbal jokes.

The Keanes' story is one of eventual triumph over adversity for Margaret, but Big Eyes struggles on the page to make much of her as a character. Adams struggles as well; she's acting in one movie, a sincere, often anguished one, while Waltz (mugging up a storm) works in an entirely different key.

Lacks both mystery and urgency.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

While the sentiments feel authentic, the ludicrous plot, filled with holes, doesn’t do the emotional aspects of the story any service.

The film is not badly made. It is, however, weirdly flat, given the stakes and the wild screaming matches.

I enjoyed parts of Street Kings but I didn’t believe one thing about it, and I couldn’t get past Reeves’ unsuitability to his role. He may someday play a cop on the edge convincingly, but the edge needs to be sharper than this.

John Carter isn't much - or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations - but it is a curious sort of blur.

There might have been something in this stew if the screenwriter and directors had stayed in the moment, but to actually explore the tough stuff they bring up might have made this movie less cool and breezy.

I'll describe the central characters in Disney's new ice-skating flick, Ice Princess, and you guess the plot.

A feast of bad taste, a demonic hog-wallow.

A business-as-usual blockbuster blueprint that rarely surprises you.

Drawing purely on his technical skills, Reynolds is finally able to get some momentum going in the picture's final half-hour, when a defeated Robin musters the remains of his band and makes a last-ditch attempt on the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle. It seems to be enough to erase memories of the movie's painfully slow start and send the audience out reasonably happy and stimulated. But Robin Hood does not seem to be the defining blockbuster this summer still needs.

It has a few good laughs in it thanks to Murphy, but mainly depends for its appeal on an uncomfortable manipulation of racial stereotypes. [04 Dec 1992]

It's not exactly a good time at the movies, and even as pure education, it's a rather dull film with very little dialogue, but Glawogger does succeed in capturing the images, sounds and even imagined scents (oh, those burning goats) of contemporary hard labor, work that has become nearly invisible to us cubicle jockeys.

In Uptown Girls Murphy is like a puppy in traffic; you're confident she'll reach the curb but only because the cars are swerving, not because her moves are so deft.

I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.

The villainous creatures are less yucky than their counterparts in the original (the meanest dudes look like overfed lobsters with an epidermal problem), the sets are cheesy and the special effects (supervised by Derek Meddings of Batman) are humdrum. [11 Feb 1991, p.7C]

Awakenings is a film that unquestionably succeeds on its own terms, though those terms are deeply suspect. It is a canny piece of false art, one that consistently swaps meaning for superficial effect. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]

Let It Ride looks like it was vastly overshot and overwritten, then whittled down to something which resembles a movie but is really a long commercial for the joys of the racetrack. [22 Aug 1989]

They might make a nice couple in a movie about them. But Quicksilver, a product of the music video influence, has been edited at such a rapid pace that there`s more time given over to bicycle racing and car chases than to love.

The Bedroom Window is not at all an unskillful film, but that, in some ways, is what is most discouraging about it: Hanson is more than good enough to do something of his own. In its drive to imitate the past, Hollywood is leaving itself without a present. [16 Jan 1987, p.L]

A smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast.