Those opening minutes, in which Hawn plays a heavy, are some of her best work. The rest we've seen before, a lot. Overboard is overlong, and stale as can be. [18 Dec 1987, p.D6]

The entire Nightmare on Elm Street oeuvre has been hailed by critics as a fascinating exercise in id projection and Freudian cant, which helps explain why criticism is in low regard. A better reason to see Dream Warriors, if indeed there is one, is that it's really pretty gross and neat. [06 Mar 1987, p.D2]

As a director, Talkington has a good sense of pacing: The movie rarely stands still. But too much of Love and a .45 is simply poorly executed rehash. [18 Nov 1994, p.G19]

John Wick reminds you this actor deserves better. Reeves makes the movie entertaining in a background-noise way, but he can’t give it any gravity, even when the filmmakers pull the cheapest trick in the book to get the audience to root for the hero and hiss at the Eurotrash villains. Someone get this man some good work, quick.

The only thing the movie lacks is a pulse.

To the extent that it has a serious theme, the film is about the tug of mortality and the demands it makes on simple humanity -- courage, selflessness, the sharing of wisdom. There's not enough of this, not by far. But it's something. The rest of Cocoon -- The Return is hash. [23 Nov 1988, p.D1]

Notorious excels at showcasing Wallace's music and his magnetism as a performer: It fares less well at giving that music a proper context.

Basically, it's an inversion of an already proven formula, a kind of Fatal Attraction's Revenge, with every bit of business save the parboiled rabbit, and you can see the ending coming up Main Street. [08 Feb 1991, p.G5]

Nowhere near as insightful as Boyz N the Hood, nor as uncompromisingly truthful as Colors, South Central still has some worthy things to say. But the film continually resorts to stock situations to express them. [22 Oct 1992, p.F8]

Oh, what a hollow experience Dark of the Moon is! Bay is so afraid of boring his audience, he pitches every scene at the same high volume right from the first shot, and the effect is exhausting.

Casanova doesn't seduce so much as lull the audience into a stupor with tedious blather about the battle of the sexes, intermittent but pointless swordplay and clumsy slapstick.

The good news is, The Vow is not excruciating.

With Little Buddha, Bertolucci moves from political themes to religious phenomena. But despite his obvious care and moments of great visceral beauty, Little Buddha never quite captivates your imagination. It's a pretty but hollow bauble. [25 May 1994, p.E2]

Schepisi and his writers don't get what they should have from the business of traumatic culture shock; they spend too much time on twaddle. [13 Apr 1984, p.D1]

The picture is schematic and awkward, made in movie-of-the-week style and laced with implausibilities and ham- handed set pieces. Still, someone deserves a nod for making Gramps the hero of an action potboiler. It's an idea, and in the Hollywood of the '80s ideas are very rare, very special things. [31 Oct 1985, p.6]

A relentless descent into a psychedelic hell, a rambunctious feel-bad epic.

This might have been OK for cable, but as a night out at the movies, it feels like a bit of a cheat.

The film moves jerkily, in fits and starts, squandering its promising setup and bogging down in explanation.

The Runaways ultimately feels too lethargic and conventional for the wild story it tells.

The performances are standard brat-pack; you could rotate the casts of anything from Risky Business to About Last Night . . . into the picture and it would stay exactly the same. [6 Nov 1987, p.D1]

Junk, but amusing junk. [17 Mar 1987, p.B5]

The plot -- Day trying to take over all the clubs -- is meaningless and the ending almost pathetic. But that's not the reason to watch Graffiti Bridge. It's the music, the set, the colors and the musical numbers that make this movie memorable. [07 Nov 1990, p.C5]

The movie operates on the same principle as the first: Show that each of us, however nerdy, has value; demonstrate that an ideal appearance can mask a nasty person; and give heart to nerds of the world by presenting these losers as triumphant. It does all these things, but not nearly as well as the first Nerds. [10 July 1987, p.D5]

Three O'Clock High is one of those ideas that must have sounded wonderful at one point, and to be fair it still sounds better than the pop-out plots of most teen-explo projects. It turns out, however, to have surprisingly little range. Once the story is under way, there's nowhere for it to go but home room, lunch and out the door. [13 Oct 1987, p.C7]

The misery is there, all right, in every woozy, spaced-out shot of Hoffman clutching his gas-soaked rag. But in the end, do we really care?

Better than you might expect despite its awkward, slow beginning, drawing you in gradually and paying off in surprisingly effective and bittersweet ways.

Basically the first movie all over again, with plenty more of the bridge-jumping, rocket-launching action that audiences loved about the original.

Jarmusch has never seemed quite this baffling -- or quite this dull.