Director Caton-Jones has given the film a few moments of charm and gentleness, though the movie would be a lot more beguiling if it weren't so sure of itself. Its charm has the practiced, impersonal touch of the professional salesman.

Like its title heroine, it's sparkly, pretty and flirty--but often all wet.

Some comedies have the knack for affrontery and shock value; The Change-Up, written by the "Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, merely has the will to offend.

A large amount of dope is smoked in The Pick of Destiny, perhaps the most since the salad days of Cheech & Chong. This may be the problem. Pot rarely helped anybody's comic timing.

Strikes me as a pure, unadulterated crock. [12 February 1999, Friday, p.A]

Schumacher's work in The Lost Boys consists of turning undertones into overtones--of taking the latent, the implied and the mysterious, and turning them into the loud and the obvious. He takes a story and turns it into a bunch of scenes, each of which contains its own payoff and none of which seems to draw on what has come before. And in these days of concept films, a story is a terrible thing to waste. [31 Jul 1987, p.D]

Coscarelli, the man behind the long-running "Phantasm" splatter series, can't quite conjure a complete movie out the concept and stretches the material until its humorous conceits repeat ad nauseum.

Rio 2 offers roughly the same approach to story and to story clutter as did the first movie.

The naval equivalent of "Top Gun," focusing on the elite corps of warriors who in this tale must destroy American missiles that have fallen into the hands of Arab terrorists. The boys play together and then fight together. It's all a party. Some of the sequences play like music videos.

Director Ridley Scott's Black Rain belongs to the blunt instrument school of filmmaking. This cop thriller, set largely in Osaka, Japan, is so full of screeching tires, flashing neon and extravagant violence that it's almost physically painful to watch, yet that seems to be the effect the director had in mind. If you smack the audience around enough, you'll be respected for your power.

The biggest problem with Why Him? though, isn't him, it's her. Stephanie is so underwritten, that though these men are competing ruthlessly over her, she drops out of the story completely. She's the center of attention, but she's a void.

There are a couple of potentially interesting movies lurking inside Heaven Help Us, a film that, sadly, doesn`t have the guts to push any one of its elements to the hilt. The result is a picture that is sort of a comedy, sort of a romance and sort of a condemnation of parochial schools, all wrapped up in a nostalgia piece about the mid-`60s.

The film flies away in 50 directions, leaving only a vague, unctuous impression behind. [22 Jun 1990, p.C]

Brightly colored, spiffily designed and easy to sit through in a harmless Disney sort of way, but the comedy never accumulates any momentum.

Adapted from the Goodrich-Hackett play, it just misses the spiritual and emotional majesty it reaches for.

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but in “Cholera” he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

A movie whose satire proves as lame as its clunky title.

Beeman and Tolkin drain every trace of real life friction from the story line, pumping it up instead with the standard Hughes synthetics: kids who are preternaturally smart, sophisticated and poised (Haim's best friend, played by Corey Feldman, has a swagger that suggests Robert Mitchum at his cockiest); adults who are monstrous, cretinous and ultimately pathetic. [07 July 1988, p.3C]

Tucker has done a bang-up job, distancing and hypnotizing us with his frenzied, fragmented, sexy images. But war isn't a video game.

It's worth seeing, on balance, simply for what Mark Ruffalo does in a hundred different, discrete, telling ways as he creates a character who was a capital-A Character, outlandish one minute, scarily unpredictable the next.

Wacky and heartless, bloody and silly -- and it ends in a flourish of grotesque sentimentality.

Here Seidelman's more interested in warm and fuzzy than in carbonation. That's fine, as far as this modest picture goes. But the actors deserve more, and better.

An idealized, dreamy fantasy of life in the business world-harmless as airplane reading, a bit dull on the big screen. [2 Mar 1990, Friday, p.C]

This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.

Cars 3, a reasonably diverting account of middle-aged pity, humiliation and suffering as experienced by Rust-eze-sponsored race car Lightning McQueen, is not the weakest of the Disney/Pixar sequels (I’d vote “Cars 2” or “Monsters University,” those sour, desperate things). But it’s by far the most guilt-ridden.

A neo-noir movie nightmare gone sadly wrong.

Only Viswanathan, wonderful in “Hala” and others, comes close to locating a tone that makes some human sense inside this wildly uneven material, careening all across the character-to-caricature spectrum.

This movie has more parable than paranoia, more metaphor than roar and gore. [16 Sep 1992, p.3C]