The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.

Given the decibel level of this movie, it's a miracle that these guys were able to give creditable performances. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the achievement: Imagine delivering a stirring rendition of the Gettysburg Address while standing under Niagara Falls.

His drug-smuggling underworld, specifically the Amsterdam-New York connection, is likewise drably depicted. Is this because director Kevin Asch and screenwriter Antonio Macia deliberately played it down, or are they just incompetent? I’ll be charitable and vote for the former, but sometimes sensationalism is preferable to being altogether unsensational.

Morning Glory isn't targeting the dumbing down of TV news. It's pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.

It's fun to see Val Kilmer assume a sort of Young Republican look after his hippie shenanigans in "The Doors," and the story raises some important issues. But there's little else to praise in this pretentious and overlong drama. It was directed by Michael Apted, who should stick to documentaries like his recent and superb "35 Up." [3 Apr 1992, p.12]

Draggy pastiche of tired gags and half-baked homilies.

There's enough family dysfunction here to fill out a dozen soppy soap operas.

Too many different stories are vying for attention here, and none of them are very good.

Zemeckis tries to juice things up by staging numerous chase scenes up and around London, but do we really need "A Christmas Carol: The Action Picture"?

John Schlesinger has directed Mark Frost's screenplay with great technical skill, constructing highly charged suspense scenes. Robby Muller's cinematography also stands out. The violence is disgusting even by recent standards, though, especially since much of it is aimed at children. And the portrait of a barbarous Afro-Hispanic religion will hardly ease tensions in this time when racism and xenophobia are already rampant. [12 Jun 1987, p.21]

The best thing The Edge of Love could do for you is to send you back to Thomas's poetry. Dash this folderol.

Bond is impersonated by 007 newcomer Timothy Dalton, who does little that's identifiable as acting, although he looks the part. Come back, Sean, all is forgiven!

Harrelson is effective, but the film isn't helped by the inevitable comparisons to the far superior "L.A. Confidential" and "Bad Lieutenant" movies.

A lumbering number that takes its identity as a costume drama quite literally.

The tonal problem of the second installment, which often resembled a drug-infested pulp thriller instead of a comedy, is also problematic here.

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.

The result is this metabiography that says almost nothing about the great photographer's life or art.

Essentially a Harlequin Romance with pulleys, E.L. James’s novel is not exactly “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Kelly Marcel takes itself so seriously that it almost cries out to be lampooned. I’m sure the “Saturday Night Live” crew is already on the case.

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.

Writer-director David Ayer doesn’t have the right graphic technique for a comic-book-style jamboree – he’s strictly a noirish-pulp guy – and the characters, all of whom are promisingly introduced, fizzle fast.

Any movie that opens with the killing of a pet dog is definitely going to capture your attention. But where do you go from there?

The stage is set for a full-scale racial conflict, but neither actor is really up to the task - McDermott seems lost in his voluminous beard and Snoop Dogg spits his lines out.

The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.

Thomas Harris adapted his own bestseller and Peter Webber, who previously directed "Girl with a Pearl Earring," had the unenviable task of trying to give this glop, which is too gruesome to be campy, a high gloss. It should be called Man With a Severed Head.

Judged by the standards of ordinary filmmaking, it's as strange, suggestive, and surreal as other Lynch pictures have been. Judged by the standards of Lynch's own career, however, it's amazingly stale and second-hand… [and] contains not a single moment of genuinely felt emotion. [1 Sept 1992]

Violence in the movies, no matter how many CGI effects are utilized, can't help but be far more luridly realistic. And, in the case of Wanted, to what end?

Amid all the mayhem, there is Paris in all its faded-light glory. Is the movie worth seeing as a travelogue? Only if you are (a) a masochist, (b) a terrorist, or (c) desperate.

The treasure hunt in Fool's Gold is, of course, meant to be about more than money. But the only reason for this movie to exist is to make money.