What Vice says, and how it says it, will have half its audience nodding in angry, contemptuous agreement, and the other half calling it a liberal smear. In other words it’s like everything else in the culture right now.

At times the film appears on the verge of morphing into a singing-cowboy musical.

It's a harmless enough movie, and quite a good-looking one; Bettany and Dunst are an attractive enough couple, even if Lizzie has been written as a selfish little snip and he as a whining man-child.

With Sean Connery as Agent 007, James Bond was a human-scale figure, an exceedingly cool guy to be sure, but a guy nonetheless. With Roger Moore as Bond, we are simply watching a lightweight actor stroll through a role.

Jones does a very good job as the cynical mercenary; Hackman's role doesn't give him enough real moments to make the story credible. [25 Aug 1989, p.A]

If you have ever been the butt of a practical joke, you have some idea how you will feel during the last few minutes of April Fool's Day. [27 Mar 1986, p.2C]

The Holiday is a 131-minute romantic comedy for those who, if they had their way, would still be watching "Love Actually."

It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.

The book’s melancholy spareness has been replaced by a “Here” existing somewhere in a pristine, remote suburb we’ll call Uncanny Valley Falls, a few miles away from real life.

It’s solid craft, but it’s craft wedded to a style of filmmaking that feels wholly impersonal, even with a top-flight director at the helm.

Jungle Fever may be a failure, but it is the kind of failure that engenders hope: It finds Lee refining the skills he already possesses and striking out in encouraging new directions. The next ''Spike Lee Joint''

American movies about childhood often have a spurious feel. They can be grandiosely phony or sentimental--or both, as in Home Alone. Unfortunately, Now and Then, despite massively good intentions, fits right into the program. [20 Oct 1995, p.J]

Mainly, the movie we have here reminds us that what works on a stage, within the non-realistic world and performance momentum of stage musicals, lessens a lot of story problems that movies tend to heighten.

He's endearing and affable when finding humor and even introspective life lessons after arrests, drug use and a near-death experience.

A funny movie, but like "Josh" himself, it's too self-absorbed, and maybe too nice, for its own good.

Diamond Men's potential as a diamond in the rough turn out to be more "rough" than "diamond."

McTiernan, regrettably, seems more interested in spectacle than suspense, and the attack sequences are filmed for splashy visual impact. And an apocalyptic finale that raises the antiwar message to the nuclear level is more than McTiernan's metaphor can bear. [12 June 1987, Friday, p.J]

It's too smoothly controlled to be funny, which is Big Business's problem as a whole. [10 Jun 1988, p.A]

A more honest script might’ve supported Reda Kateb’s laid-back, medium-effective portrayal of Reinhardt more fully. As is, he’s depicted as an artist man floating through his awful times, living for the music.

Toy Soldiers is a movie that appeals at once to adolescent self-pity and adolescent anger-a film that takes feelings of rejection and inadequacy and transforms them into a violent revenge fantasy, directed against all those distant daddies. It's hardly the first teenpic to do so, but it's certainly one of the most thorough, the most methodical and, not coincidentally, the least fun.

Hunt gives it as all as the tortured Louis, but Patterson is the heart and soul of the film, giving a far more interesting performance as his long-suffering wife.

At least Poseidon takes care to dispatch the Black Eyed Peas' Stacy Ferguson who, as the shipboard entertainer, sings what may be the worst song ever written, reprised over the end credits.

The result is a feeling of standing in an OTB with lots of races from lots of places--too many stories calling for attention--instead of the Kentucky Derby, which for two minutes each year focuses the sports world like a laser.

Too often The Express sidelines its own main character in favor of the lemon-sucking, jaw-jutting glower patented by Quaid.

Jackson has not cast himself well, though. He has slathered the imagery in the wrong kind of wonderment and hyperbole, both on Earth and in heaven.

Spears delivers a performance with the same sincerity she invests into a Pepsi commercial, only this film contains twice the sugary calories.

Made up of stylish pastiche, girl power slogans and one go-for-broke performance, The Bride!, like her Monster, isn’t much more than an assemblage of parts, and the slipperiness of time, place and character leaves the film unmoored and unrooted. Here comes The Bride! — unfortunately, she’s brain dead.

It's a movie that's too naive to be pornography and too callous to be art. [25 May 1990]