In a way it's silly to review a movie like this; it's like reviewing a case of acne. John G. Avildsen, the checkered-career director who made Rocky, has made this one a kind of Pebbly -- a Rocky for teenychoppers, about a semi-wimpy kid named Daniel (Ralph Macchio) who's constantly being clobbered by the creeps in his high school until he's taught karate by his janitor, Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki [Pat] Morita). [25 June 1984, p.69]

It’s not half bad, with cool locations and a great stunt leap from the top of a Hong Kong high-rise.

It's not as cool as it sounds.

But once the couple clinch their bond -- just when the story gets really shameless -- the life drains out of the movie. Love Affair takes such pains to dodge vulgarity it forgets to put anything in its place.

Light of Day has the virtues of sincerity, but that may also be what keeps it so relentlessly mundane. [09 Feb 1987, p.75]

Romero's remake jettisons just those qualities that lent class to the 1968 original. [5 Nov 1990, p.79]

Wanted has one good plot twist in store (though it makes little sense), and its sense of humor about its own silliness keeps the fantasy afloat for a while. But as the body count rises, so does the portentous tone, and the relentlessness of Bekmambetov's overamped style becomes oppressive.

Alternately enrapturing and exhausting, brilliant and glib, this is a "Romeo and Juliet" more for the eyes than the ears. [4 Nov 1996, pg.73]

But Smooth Talk, alas, is two movies, and the parts don't mesh. What begins as subdued, plotless realism -- everything up to Arnold's late entrance -- then lurches into Gothic melodrama. Arnold is a literary conceit, Connie is real: thus their portentous mating ritual seems more contrived than inevitable. Smooth Talk feels like an anecdote that's been stretched out of shape. [24 March 1986, p.77]

While the first half showcases an impressive new directorial talent, the last two quarters fail to score.

The main problem is the script, which has a few scares but little smarts.

Unfortunately, much of this lineup turns out to be a carbon copy of the "Bull Durham" lineup. We have the wild young fireballer (Charlie Sheen); the veteran catcher (Tom Berenger); the veteran catcher's veteran girlfriend who also happens to be a baseball expert ('You ought to open your stance a little - they're pitching you inside"); and, the superstitious Cuban who sacrifices chickens, kisses snakes and lists his religion as "voodoo."

An ambitious, intense, but overdetermined exploration of the varieties of ethnic intolerance.

It succeeds in bringing O'Barr's comic-book vision to life, but there's little else going on behind the graphic razzle-dazzle and the moody, ominous soundtrack.

Hasn't the South as a cornucopia of Lovable Eccentrics worn out its welcome? After Tennessee Williams? After Carson McCullers? After -- what, you say your appetite for L.E.'s is insatiable? Then Miss Firecracker, which Beth Henley has adapted from her 1984 play, is your heaping platter of that delicacy. [01 May 1989, p.75]

It's precisely at the finish line that Simon's calculations misfire and The Goodbye Girl collapses like a house of cards. The movie could have told us something about the wrenching collision of careers and romance, but it plays it safe, and in the end pays for it. [05 Dec 1977, p.109]

Director Walter Hill has only the faintest interest in realism. His New York City is merely the backdrop for a bone-crunching fantasy that has more to do with science fiction and musicals than social commentary. When it's good - which is not often enough - it suggests what The Wiz, under happier circumstances, might have been. [26 Feb 1979, p.81]

Howard redeems this lumpy fantasy. Soft-spoken and mysterious, he presides over the movie with a dangerous, feline grace.

It's gorgeous. It's epic. It's spectacular. But two hours later, it also proves to be emotionally impenetrable.

The film has its dumb points: too many shots of churning surf and lovers nestled in beach blankets, not to mention the premise that women find incommunicative, hulking shells like Blake the height of irresistibility. But it gets you.

This time out, Shyamalan the writer lets Shyamalan the director down badly.

I might buy Babel if it had any real interest in its characters, but it's too busy moving them around its mechanistic chessboard to explore any nuances or depths.

Swing Shift has neither enough laughs nor enough sobs. [23 Apr 1984, p.80]

The loving exhumation of an earlier cinematic style suggests that the director is looking to regain his own moviemaking innocence, to make the kind of picture that moved him as a child. But you can't go home again -- not on secondhand, sentimentalized memories. In transferring Hinton's teens to the screen, Coppola and screenwriter Kathleen Knutsen Rowell have idealized them to the point of cliche. [4 Apr 1983, p.74]

A fine film; as an Ed Norton picture, it's a disappointment.

Even though Alvin Sargent's script lacks both grace and plausibility and director Sydney Pollack has succumbed to pretentions of European artiness, star chemistry might have made this love story catch fire. [03 Oct 1977, p. 71]

Just because Sandler's Sonny makes little sense as an actual human being doesn't mean he won't make you laugh.

Sleeping With the Enemy is a flat tire of a movie. Looks good -- white sidewalls, crome spokes -- but it flaps and clunks and never gets to vroom. [18 Feb 1991, p.64B]

Interiors has the look of a Bergman film, helped by Gordon Willis's Nykvist-like cinematography, but it does not have the creative elation that triggers elation in the audience, no matter how dark the artist's vision. Woody gives us his dread untransfigured and it's hard to swallow. [07 Aug 1978, p.83]

How do you literalize heaven? It's a problem moviemakers have struggled with forever, and Jackson hasn't solved it.

The longest, grimmest and least funny of the trilogy.

Congo is basically the old African ooga-mooga movie brought into the P.C., high-tech age.

Payback may not always be P.C., but it's not interested in making friends, anyway. Just killing enemies.

The plain fact is that Halloween II is quite scary, more than a little silly and immediately forgettable. [16 Nov 1981, p.117]

Hotel New Hampshire wants to be both charming and tough: a fairy tale with wings of steel. Its engines roar, but it doesn't fly. [2 Apr 1984, p.85]

he Dogs of War doesn't begin to deal with the moral complexity it promises: it keeps settling for easy, melodramatic solutions. Irvin is obviously a gifted storyteller, but he's shackled with the wrong story: it's a shame he couldn't have scrapped more of Forsyth's original plot and made a real movie about mercenaries and the Third World. [23 Feb 1981, p.61]

There are inspired moments in this edgy, unstable comedy.

Tthough it is action packed, spectacularly edited and often quite funny, one can't help feeling that Carpenter is squeezing the last drops out of a fatigued genre. Ten years ago this would have been one wild and crazy movie; in this era of ruthlessly efficient entertainments, it's a rather one-note evening. [14 July 1986, p.69]

At least in the new Omen, the filmmakers have the sense to keep evil Damien's dialogue to a minimum. His villainy is all in the dimples. But is it too familiar to be scary anymore?

Baby Mama is rescued by two scene-stealing veterans: Sigourney Weaver as the smug, patrician owner of the surrogate company, and a priceless, ponytailed Steve Martin as the self-infatuated New Age owner of Round Earth. These two aren't onscreen a lot, but the movie seems most fully alive when they are.

After the opening sequence, much of the action in The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth James Bond screen epic and the third starring Roger Moore as Bond, is somewhat downhill. [08 Aug 1977, p.77]

It's filled with Mann's signature macho verisimilitude, but essentially it's the stuff of what, in saner fiscal times, would have been a B movie. Miami Vice delivers the thrills, atmosphere and romance it promises, but it doesn't resonate like major Mann.

Before it degenerates into Indiana Potter and the Chamber of Doom, the movie holds promise -- it hints at why the Harry Potter movies aren’t half as wonderful as they ought to be, why they feel created from the outside in. Magic isn’t made by committee.

Sometimes stunning, ultimately stupefying epic .

Soft to the point of squishiness, Phenomenon is rescued from terminal bathos by Travolta's radiant conviction.

The movie does have somewhat more lilt and levity, much of it due to Jim Carrey as the Riddler. But there's still plenty of murk, physical and metaphysical, and more psychobabble about Bruce Wayne's obsessions and repressions.

Single White Female gives the viewers the adrenaline rush they paid for, but it promised more. The formula betrays the fine work of Leigh and Fonda, whose characters are much too interesting to find themselves stranded in a tony but ultimately tired slasher movie.

Mangold is something of a pseudo-Scorsese, assembling elements of other pictures like "Internal Affairs" and "Bad Lieutenant" into an eclectic mix that lacks its own vital reality.

Complacently conventional...it threatens to turn an interesting actor into a self-parodying commodity.

Away from the television screen, Selleck is as stiff as his bulletproof vest. The only fun performers here are sexy, Kinskilipped Kirstie Alley as a scapegoat and a swarm of robot spiders that clatter-crawl all over their victims. [17 Dec 1984, p.84]

Charming cinematic bauble.

Veteran director Richard Fleischer brings to the Conan sequel some of the endearingly stolid craftsmanship of his old movies, while avoiding the lip-smacking sadism of the original. The movie is consistently dumb, though not hard to watch, but it would be a lot more fun if someone had bothered to give Conan a personality. [02 July 1984, p.45]

This slick, handsomely produced thriller only gets the pulse half racing.

A style so chic, studied and murky it resembles a cross between a Nike commercial and a bad Polish art film.

This is high-risk chemistry, and the results are bizarre. The bulging forearms and corncob pipe are in place, but this Popeye hates spinach. The plot hinges on his Oedipal search for his Pappy (Ray Walston), the songs and minimal dances are designed for singers who can't sing and dancers who can't dance, and this gruff icon of pug nacious, all-American goodness has been set adrift on an abstract isle that can perhaps best be described as backlot Ionesco. Popeye's air of alienated whimsy makes for an odd family movie indeed. [22 Dec 1980, p.72]

Hughes is just treading lukewarm water. Stotz is the blandest of his teen heroes yet. [16 Mar 1987]

A flat, cliched film in a flat, cliched genre.

Along the way, not just the storytelling but the original intention has gotten muddled. You leave The Alamo uncertain of what you're meant to feel: is this a celebration of patriotic sacrifice or an illustration of war's futility?

The viewer is diverted, but not terribly involved. As a romantic partner, hardware has considerably less resonance than Cary Grant. [06 Aug 1984, p.74]

Unless you’re 15 at heart, you may need anger management yourself after sitting through this aggressively crass comedy, which alternates between mean-spirited slapstick and arbitrary uplift.

Fat Man and Little Boy casts a wide net, but it never really traps its subject. The screenplay simply isn't up to the job. Only in the last half hour, as Trinity approaches, does dramatic fission occur. [30 Oct 1989, p.75]

Edwards's sputtering rhythm makes it tough for Moonlighting's Bruce Willis, who nonetheless in his first leading movie role mixes a nice blend of brashness and bewilderment. [13 Apr 1987, p.77]

Lurching uncertainly from slapstick to tears, The Family Stone works hard to warm the cockles of our hearts. The cast is attractive. The sentiments are commendable. But the love Bezucha wants us to feel for the family couldn't possibly compete with the love they already feel for themselves.

The movie begs comparison with the book only because every alteration has made the story so much less interesting and intriguing than its source. Obvious and mushy beneath its dazzling surface, the film fails on its own terms. [12 May 1975, p.104]

It isn't a comedy - it's a sluggish adventure movie about an L.A.-to-Chicago train trip that wastes two considerable talents. [13 Dec 1976, p.106A]

The Escape Artist is chockablock with intriguing ingredients, none of which pays off. It's a true oddball, but as much as one would like to encourage iconoclasm in Hollywood, a movie this incoherent can only induce exasperation. [14 Jun 1982, p.88]

As a straight thriller Condor comes down to thrills that work and thrills that don't. [29 Sep 1975, p.84]

Director Seidelman thrashes about in search of a tone: there's no weight to her images; the plot twists seem arbitrary and contrived. By the end you've lost interest in Ruth's revenge and can't wait until Streep gets back on screen. Watching her prod her face into new shapes in the mirror, contemplating a face-lift, you momentarily forget you're watching a mediocre movie and marvel at real comic witchcraft. [11 Dec 1989, p.88]

Never mean-spirited, A Dirty Shame has some big laughs, but it's a one-joke movie that shows its strain well before the finish line.

Provides some great laughs, but founders when it tries to tackle more serious issues. Entitled "10 Dates," it might have been a much better film.

The film's chief delight is the sharp and funny international cast. But Jarmusch's comic touch keeps curdling into corn. The minimalist is a sentimentalist, which would be ok if he didn't cover it all with an incense of cosmic pretentiousness. [18 May 1992, p.66]

The screenplay, by Rafelson and Charles Gaines from the latter's novel, has all the ingredients of an American Gothic, and that's what you get. But the theme of the young dropout who opposes the system with ironic apathy until something (usually something violent) needles him to action is moldy around the edges, and by now Jeff Bridges seems to be playing that role in his sleep. [17 May 1976, p.111]

As long as Polanski keeps his focus on character and ambiance, the film is an eerie pleasure. But he doesn't, and it degenerates into a second-rate chase movie which takes its supernatural overtones either too seriously or too lightly to be convincing.

The semifunny Semi-Pro is amiable enough, but you never feel there's much at stake.

For me, there's a problem with The Hulk, always has been, though it hasn't seemed to bother the tale's legions of fans. When the sensitive, physically unprepossessing Banner/Norton turns into the gargantuan, muscle-bound, growling Hulk, there's a total disconnect.

Hugo's themes may be timeless, but in this version the viewer is all too aware of the passing time. [04 May 1998, p.81]

The potential for a funny, touching satire about teen-age sexuality is here, but it emerges only fitfully in director Ronald F. Maxwell's rather patronizing, sitcom approach. One can imagine what a Milos Forman or a Francois Truffaut could have done withthe giddy ambience of sex in tentative first bloom, but texture, verisimilitude and spontaneity are nowhere to be found in Maxwell's clean, postcardlike scenes, which seem strangely underpopulated. [24 March 1980, p.78]

Poor Affleck. He doesn’t just have to singlehandedly save the world from nuclear destruction, he has to erase our memories of Ford and Baldwin. That’s a tall order for any actor, and Affleck, an expert at playing cocky, callow yuppies, just doesn’t have the heft.

With such a broad satirical target, it's a shame that Ritchie's aim goes awry. Because Semi-Tough covers fresh territory, you keep rooting for it to connect. [28 Nov 1977, p.98]

As tempting as it may be to herald Romero as the Swift of schlock, his shopping-mall metaphor is really little more than a clever gag. The director's technique has been refined since his "Living Dead" days, but his grasp of characters is still pretty crude, and he reveals himself to be an all-too-predictable liberal moralists when he singles out the woman and the black as the true heroes. These objections should not-and won't-keep Romero loyalists away. For blood, guts and chuckles, most horror fans will undoubtedly find Dawn of the Dead finger-lickin' good. [7 May 1979, p.90]

There isn't an ounce of genuine affection on display. Fenton and Barbato already made a documentary of the same title about Alig, and their fascination with this vapid, charmless pied piper of decadence remains a mystery.

Manages to take an urgent, important topic and turn it into standard Hollywood melodrama. What a waste.

This is one of the silliest movies ever made--and lots of instantly forgettable fun.

There is too much disconcerting and nasty violence in this light-hearted caper, but when it sticks to its romantic guns, it is often charming.

You're not sure where it's headed, but with an ensemble this good the aimlessness seems invigorating. It's when the plot kicks in that Newell's movie gets less interesting. It's frustrating to see such a promising premise, and such a delightful cast, wasted.

Spielberg has gone to such lengths to avoid boredom that he has leaped squarely into the opposite trap: this movie has such unrelenting action that it jackhammers you into a punch-drunk stupor. This may be the first movie whose audience O.D.'s on action. [4 June 1984, p.78]

Since this isn't one of your deep-think sci-fi movies, you look for the happy hardware to get you kicks. [4 July 1976, p.102]

A decidedly mixed bag.

Eye of the Needle never really catches fire. Marquand and screenwriter Stanley Mann may have overestimated the strength of their story: they serve it up unembellished, with competent but imperhat...Eye of the Needle isn't a bad film, just an unnecessary one: it was a better movie as a book. [3 August 1981, p.50]

The movie becomes a crazy quilt of competing stories, none of them properly developed. You could cut half the major characters out of Mr. Brooks and never miss them.

Marshall is a good technician, but there's no sense of artistic adventure in his sometimes exciting, sometimes draggy movie.

You don't have to have lived through the period to find this wrenching. And you don't have to doubt Estevez's sincerity to find it emotionally opportunistic.

De Palma has brought back Travolta's edge and intelligence. Relieved of having to give a star turn, Travolta seems happy to buckle down and do a straight-ahead, no-frills acting job. [27 July 1981, p.74]

The dialogue is tacky, the characters stock and the special effects no improvement on anything George Lucas did 20 years ago.

Some of this is mildly amusing, but most of it is thumpingly obvious. [01 Oct 1979, p.77]

This film has almost none of the scraggy, raunchy, irreverent anarchy that gave "Animal House" a kind of perverse anti-style. There's nothing at all perverse about Meatballs; in fact, it's so cutesy, squeaky-clean that it becomes Andy Hardy with a few extra belches. [9 July 1979, p.68]

Simon shies away from the more interesting implications of his own growth in favor of ingratiating his audience. This weakens the movie versions even more than the original plays. [04 Apr 1988, p.72A]

The more obvious special effects are downright hokey, such as a weird swirling water creature who looks like something out of a toilet cleaner commercial. As the outcome of all the sword-flinging and catapult-launching is never in question, it's hard to stay engaged with the movie once the fighting begins.