With her arresting, off-kilter look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams ends up being the most interesting aspect of this somber corn.

It's one thing for a script to set the framework for an action film -- it's quite another when the script gets in the way.

ROTLD II may be junk, but at least in the hands of director Ken Wiederhorn it's efficient, well-filmed junk. [18 Jan 1988, p.7C]

With his brazen gifts for mimicry, Eddie Murphy may now be the Peter Sellers of blockbuster toilet comedy movies.

All that — and yet, dull. Why?

The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good

Its gorgeous black-and-white photography, dirty and matte, will almost convince you that anything this slow, small and bereft of dialogue must be important.

Extremely slow--unbearably so at certain points. And even when there's no action, there's very little dialogue, and we're asked to follow the disjointed and dreamlike story line without the help of anything resembling a narrative.

To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.

A dreary, needlessly violent and ugly comic thriller about a psychic hustler (Michael J. Fox) who gets more than he bargained for with his latest scam. Fox seems to be trying to get hip in the movies, and he's lost his way here.

If you can simply get lost in the crushing splendor of the waves themselves, the script might not leave you so seasick.

This premise is not a complete loss, and the movie is not badly written. But all of its various elements (Whaley and Connelly's friendship, their battles with the two criminals who come to rob the store, Whaley's quest to make something of himself, etc.) end up being thrown together like mismatched pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This makes the movie messy and uninteresting. [5 Apr 1991, p.J]

What these men endured is remarkable, and the logistics of the rescue are remarkable as well. The 33 settles for an unremarkable chronicle of that endurance test.

So it’s one of those Hip, Now updates, albeit with jokes riffing on pop-cult artifacts that are already Then. I mean: “Jerry Maguire”? Moratorium!

Clooney's attempt to honor unsung real-life heroes while recapturing the ensemble pleasures of some well-remembered Hollywood war pictures, notably "The Great Escape" and "The Guns of Navarone," comes off as a modestly accomplished forgery at best.

The steady Costner gives a competent enough performance this time out as he dances with foxes, or at least one, while Grammy winner Houston is quite impressive in her feature debut, displaying both hot and cool emotion as well as performing six new songs...Unfortunately, she is assigned to handle lines like, "You're a hard one to figure out, Frank Farmer," and "I've never felt this safe before." Unfortunately, too, the romance gets in the way of the thriller, and when the two principals finally take to their bed, so does the movie. [25 Nov 1992, p.C2]

Good actors and a talented director doing what they can to bring the truth to a script that's mostly bogus.

True Story is a case of a well-crafted film, made by a first-time feature director with an impressive theatrical pedigree, that nonetheless struggles to locate the reasons for telling its story.

The director's lack of restraint and overabundance of ambition makes "Altar Boys" not boring, but troubled.

There's no development of Turner's character. The laughs in the first reel are the same as those in the last. [15 Apr 1994, p.C]

Brewster's Millions is a PG film, and the humor is sanitized. Pryor grins, Candy gurgles and we sit there stone-faced noticing all the holes in the plot. Once Pryor figures out a clever way to spend money by using rare stamps on letters, why doesn't he keep on doing it? Yes, that might make for a short movie, but given the way Brewster's Millions turned out, it would be no great loss. [22 May 1985, p.3]

I’d love to say it isn’t half-bad, but I can’t, because it is. It’s roughly 50 percent bad. The other 50 percent is better than that, even with a running time that threatens to never stop not stopping.

It's perhaps best suited for genre vets who can be satisfied with spot-the-reference games and Chan and Li's chemistry, or for undiscriminating kids who'll enjoy the "Karate Kid" vibe. But it's less a culmination of Li and Chan's careers than a passable footnote to better things.

When classy, pedigreed British actors go hog-wild under the flowering dogwood trees of a Southern Gothic setting, often the results are good. Just as often they're so bad they're good. And sometimes, as is the case with Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson in Beautiful Creatures, they're simply doing the best they can under the circumstances.

This one's worth the ticket price only if you are a showbiz-aholic.

Fortunately, this loud, hectic movie doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it wouldn’t have the material to last a second longer. It’s bright, busy, inoffensive and exactly the opposite of the weird, dark, edgy 1993 movie adaptation. That may be better for the business of Mario, but it’s not exactly terribly interesting either.

Follows a common horror flick recipe (people under siege from hungry monsters--so much for Greenlight's search for originality), adding a dash of humor to keep things from becoming too much of a checklist.

I wish the results were better, and a lot stranger. Cahill’s world-building has its moments, though. And the filmmaker did determine — correctly — that it’d be fun to have Bill Nye, the science guy, in a bow tie, portraying a sniffy scientific researcher.