The film suffers dearly because of the two underwritten, emotionally unavailable characters at the film's center and when all is revealed at an amateur dance contest, the music — and the modicum of tension the movie has created — dies.

It's punishingly dull for fully half of its two hours and 45 minutes.

Field comes off best under the circumstances - she has real spirit - but Leibman, too eager to be liked, hits all the stereotypes on the head and Bridges is saddled with an underwritten, utterly inexplicable character. What Norma Rae really tells us is that Hollywood is still capable of making condescending paeans to the "little people" with all the phoniness of yesteryear. [5 March 1979, p.105]

A lumbering, self-important three-hour melodrama that defies credibility at every turn.

By the time Pale Rider wends its solemn, deliberate way to the final showdown, all of its tantalizing potential has bitten the dust. The woefully inadequate screenplay by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack takes every mundane turn available, reneging on its mythical promises. [1 July 1985, p.55]

Once the film devolves into teary hospital scenes and courtroom shtik, you might pine for Thelma and Louise's daring road to oblivion. [20 Feb 1995, Pg.72]

Downright repetitive! [30 May 1983]

There's a big difference between shock effects and suspense, and in sacrificing everything at the altar of gore, Carpenter sabotages the drama. The Thing is so single-mindedly determined to keep you awake that it almost puts you to sleep. [28 June 1982, p.73B]

An epic vision isn't worth much if you can't tell a story. This, in a nutshell, is the problem at the heart of the three-hour-and-39-minute debacle called Heaven's Gate. In his painstaking quest for period authenticity and his reliance on the operatic set piece, Cimino has lost all sight of day-to-day reality--and all sense of dramatic truth. [01 Dec 1980, p.88]

Though it tells us that it's about a man who gives pleasure for a living but is incapable of accepting pleasure, it is in fact about the guilty obsessions of a filmmaker who seems incapable of giving pleasure to an audience. [11 Feb 1980, p.82]

Flat, distressingly witless -- To put it bluntly -- the thrill is gone. Nobody did it better. But that was then.

This is one of those films that isn't a fllm but some repulsively complicated business deal. Nighthawks purports to be about terrorism, but it should be sued for nonpurport. [20 Apr 1981, p.93]

The densely populated movie, pumped up with unnecessary crowd scenes and a handful of utterly extraneous male characters, is as garish and busy as a TV game show. As directed by Herbert Ross, it is so intent on persuading the audience that it is having a heartwarming emotional experience you almost expect TelePrompTers to flash in the theater, instructing you to laugh and cry. [27 Nov 1989, p.92]

Black Rain is the sort of movie where, if you see a motorcycle race at the start, you know you'll get one in the climax. The script is routine formula swill, at best. [02 Oct 1989, p.70]

You don't have to be a Hitchcock idolater to see that this dumb, dull, plodding, pseudo-camp bore is a callous, commercial parasite. [13 June 1983, p.78]

This echo of the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans is the only new gimmick in Edward Zwick's entry in the cliche- terrorist genre.

Everything in Rounders is right there on the surface. Watching it is about as exciting as playing poker with all the cards face up. [14 Sept 1998]

Neil LaBute’s Possession is bad, but not spectacularly bad, which is disappointing.

An empty videogame of a movie about interplanetary pest control.

Hill is a modern-day Peckinpah. But is there really a need for this pointless, graphic violence in the 1980s? Is this escapism, or is it just a distasteful, needless reflection of what has become horrifyingly common in the real world?... Only small boys will be able to keep a straight face. [4 May 1987, p.77]

Irreversible takes an adolescent pride in its own ugliness. “I Stand Alone" told me something about the world; this one tells me more than I want to know about the calculating mind of its maker.

Heavy Metal is the bummer version of "Star Wars," an expression of adolescent revenge against the world. What gives the movie its thoroughly unpleasant integrity is the suspicion it arouses that the guys who dreamed this stuff up mean business. If only they'd saved it for their shrinks. [10 Aug 1981, p.69]

Eastwood has no more singing talent than Citizen Kane's mistress, and this oh-so-well-intentioned movie takes more than two tepid hours to show us the boy becoming a man, the man achieving his dream and somebody singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot over his grave. They'll have to come for to carry you home after this one. [27 Dec 1982, p.62]

All the surprises strenuously cooked up by screenwriter Patrick Smith Kelly and director Andrew ("The Fugitive") Davis can't overcome the movie's inability to make us care about any of its paper-thin characters.

Rent the devastating "The Boys of St. Vincent" to see how slick and hollow Sleepers is, how little it reveals about the real nature and effect of child abuse. [28 October 1996, p. 74]

One of the nastiest movies of our time, it pretends to be horrified by endemic violence in our schools while actually exploiting violence with a coldblooded cynicism that's worse than the violence itself. [30 Aug 1982, p.61]

An amiable comedy without a thought in its point head. [2 Aug 1993, p.55]

The superhero genre screams for a makeover, or at least a smart deconstruction, but Hancock isn't that movie. It just ups the foolishness ante.

This is a farfetched premise, and the movie pays a price for it.

My advice to moviegoers: Just say no. [16 Nov 1987, p.108]

The creepy subtext of his (Sandler's) behavior is something this crude, mirthless comedy tries not to notice.

The movie merely piles on one special effect after another - none of them too special - and stalls for time. Even the title is a sham: nobody ever so much as lights a match. And nobody - not even the most gullible moviegoer - can expect to receive any present. [08 Nov 1976, p.108]

When a director as gifted, personal and eccentric as Peckinpah makes a film as gaseous and ludicrous as this, the temptation is to laugh, but the spectacle of his continuing skid is a sad one. [10 July 1978, p.83]

As adroit and charming as Witherspoon is--and she gives it her all--she cannot rise above the embarrassingly broad, witless material.

The ads for Neighbors call it "a comic nightmare"; it's more like a sour case of creative indigestion. [21 Dec 1981, p.51]

Trying for a tone somewhere between an art film, an absurdist comedy, a horror movie and an old Saturday-matinee serial, he's made a handsome, cripplingly self-conscious thriller that's devoid of any real thrills. [3 Feb. 1992, p.65]

You know a romantic comedy is in trouble when you root for the hero not to get the girl.

Attempting a slapstick satire of suburban paranoia and xenophobia, Dante lavishes his considerable skills on a one-note, repetitive Dana Olsen screenplay which, at best, contains enough invention for a 20-minute skit. [06 Mar 1989, p.58]

Under the tone-deaf direction of Peter Yates, Krull manages to be both lavishly overdone and bizarrely half-baked. [08 Aug 1983, p.55]

3 Men and a Cradle has precious few laughs. Shot in a strangely grave, twilight style ill suited to the sitcom premise, the movie plods dully from one foreseeable irony to the next. [26 May 1986, p.72]

That this relentless barrage of psychological and physical torture is extremely well made and powerfully performed--Watts hurls herself into her physically demanding role with heroic conviction--somehow makes it worse.

This is one of those films where lots of things happen but there's no real excitement. [28 June 1982, p.73B]

All shots and no scenes, which is nice for a picture book but deadly for drama.

Howard Franklin's Larger Than Life is so bad that even the elephant seems embarrassed. [11 Nov 1996, p.78]

A tired, confused romantic comedy/noir thriller with all the suspense of an infomercial. Buy the poster; skip the movie.

A sad spectacle: it feels like an advertisement, but what is left to sell? [27 Dec 1982, p.62]

The special effects are definitely the best thing about this curiously bland disasterthon.

Every once in a while a film comes along that's so inexplicably ghastly that there's just no point in making nice about it.

Despite some funny lines and situations, this comedy falls short.

What Friedkin's film is about is anybody's guess. If he just wanted to make a thriller, he has made a clumsy and unconvincing one. If he wanted to explore the psychology of his characters, he has left out most of the relevant information. If he intended to illuminate the tricky subject of S&M, he hasn't even scratched the surface. "Cruising" is quite effective in working up an atmosphere of dread: the ominous bar scenes are butch grand guignol, full of sweaty flesh, menacing shadows and barely glimpsed acts of degradation performed by glowering, bearded men in black leather and chains. But who are these people and why are they doing all these kinky things? Friedkin isn't interested in explaining his milieu; he merely offers it up as a superficially shocking tableau for the titillation and horror of his audience. [18 Feb 1980, p.92]

Kids will be bored, the rest of us baffled.

It's just a standard, mediocre horror flick that wants to be taken seriously. The creators missed the point entirely: even teenagers know that there's no audience for this type of film anymore.

There's nothing sadder than a movie that tries to be adorable and isn't. Author! Author! tries so hard that the screen seems to sweat. [05 Jul 1982, p.72]

One can forgive the orangutan's participation - he couldn't read the script - but what is Eastwood's excuse? James Fargo directed, every which way but well. [08 Jan 1979, p.60]

Director Joe Johnston ("Honey, I Shrunk the Kids") turns this fantasy into a mean-spirited exercise in terror.

The combination of Shandling's button-down TV sensibility and Nichols's good taste produces a film whose tone is out of sync with the simple, ribald conceit and is only mildly amusing at best.

It's a shaggy-dog road movie, with all the team's usual ingredients but one -- it's not funny. There's no fresh insight in Things Are Tough All Over, little of their surrealist pothead non sequiturs, and to see them through, they've begun to fall back on tired, conventional sight gags -- a car going through a carwash with its top down, Cheech hiding in a spinning laundermat dryer. [6 Sept 1982, p.75]

If this is what Hollywood considers serious, important filmmaking, maybe the movie industry should stick to the low road.

Final destination? Video store bins.

Movies this bad make you wonder if somebody's kidding. [03 Sep 1984, p.73]

The indignities inflicted on the Chester family by writers Jeremy Stevens and Mark Reisman are barely clever enough to sustain a half-hour TV show. Carl Reiner directed this tepid farce, as if half asleep. [26 Aug 1985, p.62]

Since we've lost our innocence, our "fun" movies have to be smarter than they used to be. Now that we're so much better informed and more miserable than we were a generation ago, dumbness is no longer charming for its own sake. But CAPRICORN ONE is just too dumb to be fun. We know too much about space shots, astronauts and moonwalks to swallow the dopey implausibility with which writer-director Peter Hyams tells his story of how sinister forces fake the first manned landing on Mars... But Brolin, Waterston and Simpson are just jump-suited dummies. O.J. displays more style, wit and grace in a one-minute Hertz commercial than he's allowed to show in this entire flick. [19 June 1978, p.75]

What was a ragged but often hilarious charmer has been genetically altered into a deafening and desperate mutant.

If only the movie itself had so much spunk—Flubber bounces but it never flies.

The foreboding, dark camera-work is effective in setting the mood for this sinister, eye- popping, frequently ridiculous thriller.

One look at[Neil Diamond's] conspicuously coiffed hair-do and spotlight-glazed eyes and you know this man has been assimilated years ago, probably at Caesars Palace...Richard Fleischer directed this twaddle, using so many yellow filters it looks as if jaundice had set in. [5 Jan 1981, p.55]

But the script by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod mistakes busyness for funniness. They make Monty Brewster a fading minorleague pitcher. But we want screwballs, not curve balls. Watching the frantic Brewster try to spend 30 million bucks is more tiresome than hilarious. [3 June 1985, p.65]

Though an expensive production, padded out with special effects and side- trips to Nepal, it fails to achieve any grandeur or dash. Murphy seems to be present mainly to mock the film's pretentions and shoddy plotting, as if the producers deliberately had chosen a piece of third-rate pulp, pumped millions of dollars into it, and then brought in Murphy to make them look stupid. [22 Dec 1986, p.75]

So bland and un-lived in you want to pour Tabasco all over the screen.

Just about everything in Turner & Hooch is predictable, and the one thing that isn't is unforgivable...Turner & Hooch is expertly executed dreck. [14 Aug 1989, p.56]

The strenuously improbable finale in an indoor zoo -- incorporating every available lethal animal Hollywood could rent -- will have you on the edge of your seat . . . straining for the exit. Movies don't get much more impersonal than this. [28 May 1990, p.72]

The usually reliable director Michael Caton-Jones hasn't a clue how to freshen up such stale material.

Rapidly veers towards tired 80's territory rather than offering anything new and fresh.

Every role is miscast. Whose idea was it to have the boyishly British Bale play an illiterate Greek peasant, or the elegant Hurt a gruff-voiced country doctor? Cruz’s run of bad luck in American movies continues.

Inflated to more than two hours, spiced up with lyrical pseudeo-erotic sex scenes, Scott's Revenge is long on candlelight and billowing white curtains and short on emotional potency. [26 Feb 1990, p.66]

A disappointingly slack, hackneyed comedy.

With the talent involved in Sphere -- director Barry Levinson, novelist Michael Crichton and actors Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Sharon Stone--how could it fail? Somehow, it does.

A "croc" of nonsense.

The Clan of the Cave Bear is dog. [27 Jan 1986, p.69]

Not only the silliest chapter in the Omen trilogy, it's the dullest and most inept. [30 Mar 1981, p.83]

A vile concoction. [25 July 1983, p.75]

About as bad as it gets?a thrill-less "Speed" wannabe.

Like people who compulsively giggle whenever they tell you bad news, the movie runs for cover in lame, comic shtick.

What we want to know is why we should care about any of these stick figures. Eszterhas seems as bored with them as we are. He's just moving his dopey plot along, leaving Friedkin to fill in the gaps with car chases and irrelevant chinoiserie.

Writer John Patrick Shanley, whose mix of comedy and romantic whimsy produced intoxicating results in Moonstruck, mixes thrills, social satire and romantic whimsy in The January Man and gets mush. The whodunit is spectacularly implausible, the comedy misjudged, the romance forced. [30 Jan 1989, p.70]

Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair are asked to humiliate themselves many times over in The Sweetest Thing, and they do it with such game good spirits that they ought to get the actor’s equivalent of a Purple Heart.

A half-hearted comedy whose jokes are far from a knockout.

Nutty paranoid thriller.

Pirates is pure Polanski, but it's unfortunately not good Polanski. Attempting to revamp the swashbuckler genre the way he parodied Dracula movies in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," he's produced an abstract action comedy so emotionally detached it's impossible to stay involved. [28 July 1986, p.70]

Michael Beck (of "The Warriors") shows no discernible talent for musical romanticism Olivia ("Totally Hot") Newton-John sings prettily but is totally tepid, and the ever graceful Gene Kelly deserves a medal for keeping a straight face. Robert Greenwald, the director, should look into another line of work. Perhaps opening a disco? [18 Aug 1980, p.85]

The Blue Lagoon is really an exploitation film whose core is so soft it's turned to an overripe mango. [23 June 1980, p.75]

All of this may be based on fact, but as presented in the cutesy script by Ted Leighton and Peter Hyams, it has the hollow ring of counterfeit coin and the formulaic symmetry of a made-for-TV movie. [11 Aug 1980, p.69]

Hampered by a silly plot and flat script.

Leonard's tight, vivid brushstrokes have been turned into cinematic graffiti. [6 May 1985, p.73]

Newman has certainly directed well in the past (Rachel, Rachel), but he flounders helplessly here, unable to find a tone or a shape for his comical-mawkish story. [12 Mar 1984, p.89]

Unfortunately, the strong ensemble cast is not able to hold together this often wayward and meandering story.

With pretty Martin Hewitt as David and pretty Brooke Shields as Jade, what you get is an overwrought teen make-out movie. [27 July 1981, p.74]

Hilariously incompetent.