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

Parker is flashy and gory and fun as usual. If only there were more to the thing. Then Angel Heart might not seem so dumb. [06 Mar 1987, p.D1]

Lethal Weapon is neither a good film nor good entertainment, but it will be a big hit. It takes two popular stories, scrambles them together and delivers something truly bizarre. It's The Cosby Show meets Rambo. [06 Mar 1987, p.D5]

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]

Prostitution is hardly a new topic for film, of course, but Working Girls was directed by a woman, working with a largely female crew, and that is unusual. So is Borden's technique, which is almost anti-technique. It's the film's strength, and its weakness. [27 Mar 1987, p.D5]

In the romantic comedy Mannequin, a dummy comes to life. The movie never does. [18 Feb 1987, p.D6]

A combination rock-and-roll tearjerker and domestic drama. It is gloomy, boring and sentimental. [06 Feb 1987, p.C5]

Black Widow lacks the deeply felt uneasiness of Five Easy Pieces or even the on-and- off rough animality of The Postman Always Rings Twice. It is a polished, professional picture, but it could use a little more heart. [6 Feb 1987, p.C5]

Penn makes all this fun. He doesn't camp, though he's not above borrowings and homages, and you can count the Hitchcocks. Penn's approach is almost elegant, even though this is little more than a bauble. We're not supposed actually to believe any of it, but merely to come along for the ride. [11 Feb 1987, p.D7]

So Woody Allen has turned nostalgic for at least a movie. He remembers the old days. He knows it's a cliche to think of those old days, whenever they were, as simpler, sweeter times. But Allen can turn the cliche on its head, and convince us that they were indeed, if not more innocent, more interesting times. And not just for him. [30 Jan 1987, p.D1]

Midler has emerged as the best funny woman on the screen. As Sandy, she makes abrasiveness appealing. But her work here can't compare with what she did in Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People. Neither can Outrageous Fortune. [30 Jan 1987, p.D1]

Worst of all, though, is Huppert. This fine actress, who has been so effective in European films, walks through her part. Her last American film was Heaven's Gate. For her own sake, she should stay away from Hollywood. [16 Jan 1987, p.D5]

Given the rather cramped capacities of his crowd, this makes Estevez a prodigy of sorts: His Wisdom isn't good, but like Estevez' work as a performer, it's never quite bad enough to write off. [5 Jan 1987, p.C1]

The filmmakers obviously had something to say, but Dogs in Space is wretched. The photography is fine, and some of the performers do well, but sitting through this film is headache- inducing. [4 Dec 1987, p.D5]

This version was directed by Gene Saks, who is Simon's stage director, and who presumably knows what he wants. Getting it is another story -- Saks seems to have been so concerned with cooling down the play, taking the "theater" out of it, that he let the warmth go, too. [25 Dec 1986, p.B1]

Platoon lacks the sweep, the heroic (and anti-heroic) vision of Apocalypse Now, and it lacks that film's signal strength, which was its evocation of the visceral appeal, the sheer romance of war, at least to those not fighting it. Some of Coppola's images in Apocalypse Now were among the most beautiful in contemporary film. Platoon is merely terrifying. [16 Jan 1987, p.6]

Much of King Kong Lives in fact seems designed by and for invertebrates. It is well known that if you leave a monkey in a room with a typewriter for long enough, the monkey will write an intelligible story. With screenwriters, on the other hand, there's no guarantee. [22 Dec 1986, p.C5]

Please. Quick. Somebody stop Jim Carabatsos before he writes another movie. Carabatsos, author of the vile new Clint Eastwood movie Heartbreak Ridge, has created another trashy screenplay in No Mercy, thus affording stars Richard Gere and Kim Basinger the chance to sully their careers. [19 Dec 1986, p.7]

It's not awful; it isn't dull. But The Golden Child is a kids' film, and there are times when Murphy himself seems uncomfortable, as if he knows he's making a movie he wouldn't pay to see. [13 Dec 1986, p.B1]

All of this, of course, has been done before and much better. Heartbreak Ridge isn't as interesting a training film as An Officer and a Gentleman nor as exciting as Top Gun. Watching paint dry might be less interesting than sitting through Heartbreak Ridge, but only slightly. [6 Dec 1986, p.D1]

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the dopiest and most congenial in the series, an indication that the producers have at last acknowledged that what they're dealing with is not science fiction or adventure, but a kind of cosmic fluke. [27 Nov. 1986, p.F1]

Richard Jordan, who can be uniquely menacing (see: The Mean Season, Flash of Green) is here reduced to lampooning himself in leatherette storm-trooper garb. Charles Durning, looking wonderfully rumpled as the warden of the orphanage, does as little as possible in the heat. The skating stunts are routine. [2 Dec 1986, p.B4]

Chuck Norris, whose action dramas are often unintentionally funny, edges into spoof territory with Firewalker, and the result is inadvertently dull. It's a curious cycle, a kind of primordial rhythm of bad moviemaking.[2 Dec 1986, p.B4]

Director Moshe Mizrahi, who did the Academy Award-winning Madame Rosa, cannot decide whether he has a light comedy or a heavy drama, and the film wavers between the two. [26 Nov 1986, p.D5]

The bad guys are genuinely creepy, the victims likable enough to engage sympathy, and the conflict among the the crooks a kind of wild-card element. If they still made "film noir," the brooding crime fiction of Hollywood in the '40s and '50s, it would look something like this. You have to feel good for Elmore. [7 Nov 1986, p.D2]

The whole film feels bloated, as Joffee makes his point, makes it again, and then returns to it as if for reassurance. [16 Jan 1987, p.5]

At its heart, however, Soul Man is a one-gag story propelled by sitcom material; there are times you'd swear you were watching Lucy. And because the filmmakers really aren't up to their premise, the movie ends on a note of forced harmony that's enough to make the blood run cold. It's a reminder that even good white liberals still aren't sure how to act around black people. Which, come to think of it, would make a fine, socially "relevant" comedy. Perhaps Hollywood will make it someday. [27 Oct 1986, p.C4]

The premise is marvelous, the music more than adequate (assuming you're a metal fan), the performances appropriately dumb. And it's seasonally funny. [28 Oct 1986, p.D5]