Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought – it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych.

The characters are hardly original...but Stone puts them into play with his usual fever-pitch gusto, producing what's probably the most heart-pounding gridiron movie ever made.

Directed by Charles Shyer, who brings much imagination to the first half but loses all momentum in the homestretch. [04 Oct 1984, p.27]

Though much blood is shed, the film is bloodless.

A genuine PG, gentle and wholesome almost all the way through. It's not a great movie, but it should attract family audiences.

Distinguished less by its elements of melodrama and psychodrama than by its intense acting and the vivid immediacy of Levring's powerful imagery.

Araki graduates from his usual obsession with teenage angst in this neon-lighted comedy, but fails to hit the visual and verbal high notes he strains so hard to reach.

Imaginatively acted, endlessly atmospheric.

The film has a pleasing retro-ness that often mitigates the dullness.

Some of the franchise stalwarts, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, are given too little to do. Most are given too much.

Ferlinghetti’s home-brewed brand of anarchism is weirdly as American as apple pie.

It’s like an over-the-hill gang variant on “The Dirty Dozen,” except not as much fun as that sounds.

What it's mainly about is movie stars skittering from locale to locale while bullets whiz by and the plot thickens – or, more to the point, curdles.

It's a classic example of how a movie can be great without, strictly speaking, being good. But when something is this funny, who wants to speak strictly?

By making Nacho a do-gooder, Hess defuses Black's subversive energy. You could argue that Black also played a do-gooder in "School of Rock," but the kids in that film were a lot spunkier, and Black wasn't constantly playing for sympathy as he does here.

It boasts appealing performances, and it takes a reasonably tasteful approach to its subject, aside from a string of four-letter words that sound strangely out of place in this romantic comedy.

Director Chris Wedge falls into the common animator’s trap of making the “human” characters a lot duller than the nonhuman creepy-crawlies.

Inherently stale.

Isn't as funny as it wants to be, but it has a sheer pleasantness that stands out in this season of heavy-handed entertainments.

The real heroes are cinematographer Stephen H. Burum and editor Bill Pankow, who help the picture keep popping even when its plot and dialogue go into a slump.

The story's celebration of honesty is commendable, even if the treatment of homophobia is no deeper than the hero's swimming pool.

The slapstick is often clunky, but Robinson has a sweet jester’s disposition that keeps many of the gags from collapsing.

We see him (Brolin) whip up a first-class chili, but his specialty is peach pie, which we watch him prepare so lovingly that I was surprised Reitman didn’t include the recipe in the end credits.

Even if the film were sharper, even if it was made by satirists on the order of Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern in their “Dr. Strangelove” days, I would still argue that greenlighting such a film is a blunder. The exercise of free speech does not exempt one from the consequences of stupidity.

It’s an only-in-America success story worth recounting.

A dash – only a dash – of Tim Burton ghoulishness might have helped.

The camera work is pretty, but the drama is flat and lifeless, more concerned with titillating its audience than illuminating its historical background. [20 Feb 1998, p.B2]

The Golden Compass is a blatant attempt to duplicate the success of the "Harry Potter" franchise. The only thing missing is richly imagined characters, a comprehensible story line, good acting, and satisfying special effects.