Australia is a shameless—and shamelessly entertaining--pastiche. It works because Luhrmann, a true believer in movie-movie magic, stamps it all with the force of his own extravagant, generous personality.

The actors attack their roles with commitment (Hartnett’s understatement is impressive), but their fervor can’t hide the movie’s implausible, often confusing storytelling.

Clint's latest doesn't try to do much of anything that hasn't been done before, and better. [15 Dec 1986, p.83]

Too bad the film ultimately fails to explore [provocative questions], falling instead to cliches.

The change of locale to Washington, D.C., Venice, Calif., and New Orleans only re-emphasizes the fact that this sleek comic-strip mix of violence and romance could take place anywhere except in the real world.

Enough already with the faux documentary!

If the truth be told, my eagerness to sit through a sequel to "Romancing the Stone" only slightly surpassed my desire to revisit my periodonist. Surprise: The Jewel of the Nile, the further adventures of romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) and adventurer Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), is a good night at the movies. [16 Dec 1985, p.82]

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]

In the end, artifice overwhelms art. Apt Pupil is too serious to work as a genre movie, and too contrived to be taken seriously. [12 October 1998]

if you're trying to make us believe we're watching "reality" by using a faux documentary style, you need actors who never look like they are acting, and this is where Redacted stumbles.

In Brannigan, John Wayne carries on his new career as an urban cop with all the ease of a corraled mustang. [14 Apr 1975, p.92]

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.

Eastwood is at his effortless, slyboots best and the film is as preposterous as it is delightful.

Zorro, the Gay Blade doesn't have an offensive or pretentious bone in its body; it's one of the few comedies around that can properly be called cute. That's no put down. [3 Aug 1981, p.50]

A topical thriller that manages to be watchable despite director Alan J. Pakula's best efforts to take all the fun out of it.

Some snazzy expressionist cinematography and an overkill rock score cannot disguise the fact that Reckless is a totally redundant repackaging of every misunderstood-teen-ager cliche from "Rebel Without a Cause" right up to "All the Right Moves," with which it shares a bleak industrial-town setting. [06 Feb 1984, p.81]

Clearly nobody will mistake this comedy thriller for a precision-made object -- the scenes seem held together with old shoelaces, and you could land a fleet of 747s through the holes in the plot. But two things are clear: the movie provides a generous helping of laughs, and Whoopi proves herself a screen comedienne with a long and bright future ahead of her. [20 Oct 1986, p.79]

To Norman Jewison's credit, the film of Agnes of God releases some of the hot air and gets right down to melodramatic business. Opened up and streamlined by Pielmeier, reset in wintry Quebec and cleanly shot by Sven Nykvist, the movie is a respectably engrossing detective story in theological garb (and not unlike Jewison's 1984 "A Soldier's Story" in form). [9 Sept 1985, p.89]

Using shadows and strikingly designed sounds, Pellington skillfully creates an atmosphere of otherworldly, invisible menace. Gere and Linney, both solid, dance around the edges of a romance.

In its sweet, witty and modestly sentimental way, it delivers the romantic frissons that many star-studded, would-be blockbusters of the heart lumber in vain to achieve. [30 Apr 1979, p.81]

The saving grace of Con Air is its sense of its own absurdity.

A warm-hearted romp that will leave you smiling -- and strutting.

For all its retro design, Spirit actually represents a delicate marriage of the hand and the computer.

This movie is so angrily honest that it's a bit dotty. But the battles between Turner and Perkins have a real ferocity, and Turner's internal battle between sexual pride and fear is poignant and pertinent. [29 Oct 1984, p.134]

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]

Unlike some other Landis movies, the harmlessly silly Three Amigos never wanders too far afield in pursuit of a laugh. It's a well-wrought giggle machine. [15 Dec 1986, p.83]

The end is predictable after the first five minutes (two, if you're smart), but the film sucks you in all the same.

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

A fanciful, featherweight, mostly charming concoction predicated on the old romantic myth that there is one true soul mate out there for us all.

The plot is predictable, but the frights are real.

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

Droll, sweet-tempered and lackadaisical, it's a shaggy-dog story with Nicholson playing the shaggy dog. It turns Western conventions on their heads not out of satirical anger but simply to charm the pants off the audience. A little less coyness, and a lot more John Belushi (as a Mexican deputy), would have helped. Still, at a time when most comedy comes straight out of the bathroom, the quirky, civilized pleasures of Nicholson's film are not to be sneezed at. [09 Oct 1978, p.94]

Builds dread masterfully, but don't expect solace or "fun." This is not for those who like mysteries neatly resolved.

What makes you giggle your way through much of the movie isn't the jokes--Jonathan Gems's script is surprisingly feeble, and Burton's comic timing is often flat-- but the sheer, oddball chutzpah of it all. [23 Dec 1996]

Punchline is never less than compelling, never less than smart. Seltzer and company have made a disturbingly entertaining movie about the manic-depressive world of comedy. [26 Sept 1988, p.58]

Birch's confidence as a director ebbs and flows throughout -it's odd that she can direct the complicated musical numbers so well and bungle the action scenes so badly. Yet in the end it's hard to resist the movie's bubble-gum romanticism. There's even a dream sequence in which the heroine sings to a vision of her fantasy boyfriend, who appears in heaven in a silver-lame biker's outfit. What can-you say in the face of such sublime silliness but hooray for Hollywood? [14 June 1982, p.88]

The trouble with Sudden Impact is that it has the makings of a fascinating, multileveled melodrama, but settles for crude, comic-book detail. Eastwood doesn't want to let down his Dirty Harry fans, but at the same time he wants to take this character into deeper and murkier waters. The result is curious, a disquisition on the justice of revenge written with a spray can. [12 Dec 1983, p.109]

An empty videogame of a movie about interplanetary pest control.

A very stylish and sexy film noir, a tale of obsessive love neatly balanced between exploitation movie and art film. [23 May 1983, p.54]

I'll take the Disney any day, in spite of the fact that the characters are cardboard, that the dialogue belongs in a deflated cartoon balloon, that the ending is hopelessly murky and that the acting -- by Schell, Anthony Perkins, Yvette Mimieux and especially Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster and Joseph Bottoms -- is abysmal. The magic of Peter Ellenshaw's production designs disarms the critical mind: the child in me had a dandy time. [24 Dec 1979, p.79]

A good half hour too long, and badly in need of some scares, Hook is a huge party cake of a movie, with too much frosting. After the first delicious bite, sugar shock sets in.

Stone creates such a sizzling, raunchy, vital world that the cliches almost seem new.

Nickelodeon is Bogdanovich's sweet funny homage to the days before World War I when America played with its new toy, the movies, in those converted storefronts or jerry-built pantheons where for a nickel you could enter the new magic darkness of electric centuryIn that flickering, faintly salacious darkness, a new innocence was born. [27 Dec 1976, p.56]

The theatricality is off the charts. Lane aims for the balconies; Broderick tones it down for the camera a bit.

This swiftly paced comedy is a deliciously impure compound of old-fashioned "women's film" formulas and up-to-the-minute sexual mores. It is, from moment to moment, trashy and touching, literate and ludicrous, bitchily funny and as full of sharp, sophisticated insights as it is of appalling blind spots. Part soap opera, part comedy of manners, it refurbishes shopworn cliches into a gloriously unrespectable entertainment. [12 Oct 1981, p.98]

In trying to appeal to a wide audience, quirky material has been forced to fit a formula that can't really contain it.

Ultimately an easy film to like. As portrayed by Pauline Collins, reprising the role she originated on stage, the title character is imbued with such slyness and spirit that we're able to forgive the idiosyncracies, the glibness and event he staleness of this feminist manifesto. That Collins never strains from the film's weight is one of the acting triumphs of the year. [18 Sept 1989, p.80c]

When George’s fortunes start to go from bad to worse, so does the movie.

There's plenty of bravura camera work and two terrific supporting turns from Carla Gugino, as a terrified key witness, and Stan Shaw, as the soul-searching heavyweight champ. De Palma didn't hit the jackpot here, but he certainly didn't roll snake eyes.

The Hunger is slick, silly and not without thrills. [09 May 1983, p.85]

You cheer the good guys, gasp at the cliffhangers, hiss the villains and leave the theater with an old-fashioned sense of satisfaction. It may not be great filmmaking -- it's certainly not for purists -- but it's definitely good fun. [24 June 1991, p.60]

For all its reliance on old movie cliches, Top Gun is devoid of a strong dramatic line. It's a disjointed movie about flying school bracketed by two arbitrary action sequences... The likable Tom Cruise is simply miscast -- he's not the dangerous guy everyone's talking about, but the boy next door. Nor, for all the erotic posing, is there any real spark between him and the more sophisticated McGillis. Cruise seems to think that if he stares at her hard enough chemistry will result. [19 May 1986, p.72]

It's ersatz classicism, in its inoffensive way as much a dead end as Stardust Memories. Allen seems to be biding his time, waiting for the "real" Woody Allen to figure out what a real Woody Allen movie will be. [19 July 1982, p.70]

Dudley Moore is the comic bubble beneath her solemn sultriness, and Unfaithfully Yours, though a slow starter, eventually works up a full head of comic steam. [05 Mar 1984, p.81]

Barring one dreadfully trumped-up climactic scene, they've managed to avoid the usual asylum-movie cliches.

Mary Rodgers's screenplay, based on her novel, supplies enough faintly Freudian undertones to pique a grownup's interest even further. Try to imagine how Annabel Andrews, a 13-year-old tomboy, must feel when she finds herself with a mature figure and a husband she suddenly starts calling "Daddy," and you begin to get the idea. [28 Feb 1977, p.72]

A romantic comedy for an era of diminished expectations.

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]

The Final Countdown is clunky, square filmmaking, but it's rarely boring, and the screenwriters come up with a final mysterious twist that saves the movie at the last moment from a disastrously anti-climactic turn of events. [18 Aug 1980, p.85]

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.

Jaw 2 is not a shipwreck of a movie; it'll make you jump now and then, like a boring guy tickling your ribs. But it lacks the style and intelligence that director Steven Spielberg brough to the original "Jaws". Jennot Szwarc, a French-born teveision specialist, come nowhere near Spielberg's blend of kinetic drive and comic touch. [19 June 1978, p.74]

May only be remembered for featuring the first homoerotic nude bathing scene in children's animated movie history.

A slick but surprisingly empty genre movie that builds to a not particularly shocking shock.

Thomas is supported in his first directorial endeavor by a truly spectacular cast.

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]

Director Donald Wrye handles this chestnut with restraint, scoring points about media madness and the fear of success without getting messagy. [05 Feb 1979, p.79]

All the state-of-the-art technology in the world is no help to an actor saddled with Lucas's tinny dialogue.

The fact is, you are not the kind of novel who should be turned into a move. Without McInerney's deft, witty prose to divert and amuse us, where's the beef in "Bright Lights"? [4 Apr 1988, p.72]

It may be clumsily made, shamelessly contrived and utterly cynical in its calculated uplift, but there's no getting around it: the damn thing is funny.

Ridiculous, and oddly unforgettable.

I don't want to sound like a party pooper (or deny that there is something wickedly funny about seeing these middle-age adolescents beating the crap out of a playground full of little bullying kids) but there's something depressing about the never-ending celebration of eternal adolescence in recent American comedies.

Spielberg doesn't differentiate between the good ideas in the script and the bad ones: everything is given an emphatic, production-number treatment... His ultraslick, seductive technique can be a pleasure to watch in itself, but it can't disguise the fact that "Always" is a decidedly uneternal fantasy. [1 Jan. 1990, p.60]

We don't really need some young punk to tell us that anarchy is an untenable idea, but watching him live it is an invigorating experience.

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

Watching Robin Williams's new movie, Cadillac Man, spin hopelessly out of control, you know intuitively that there was no single storyteller at the wheel, but a committee of back-seat drivers inflating a small, decent idea into an incoherent, opportunistic concept. Trying desperately to speak to everyone, these star packages have no voice of their own. They're not really movies -- they're product. [28 May 1990, p.72]

The movie, half camp, half straight, has its moments, but Australian director Russell Mulcahy lacks the loopy flair of Batman's Tim Burton. Still, the art deco -- 1930s New York, Miller's silvery dresses -- is gorgeous. [11 Jul 1994, p.50]

Sidney Lumet's new film does have its absorbing aspects, but it doesn't provide any jolting insights into the pervasive process that turns elections into advertising wars in which candidates come fixing at us like Peter Pepsi and Calvin Coke. [10 Feb 1986, p.79]

But the tale has been squeezed to fit the mold of director John Hughes, which for long stretches makes it feel as much like the third "Home Alone" as the second "Dalmations."

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]

Has its flaws, but at its best it’s a fleet, fun action movie -- and certainly one of the cooler blockbusters that Hollywood will cough up this godforsaken summer.

Peaks early, then descends into portentous nonsense.

Badham's not-inconsiderable accomplishment is to have produced a decently entertaining romp composed entirely of borrowed parts. But however much one regrets to admit it, the movie is fun. [02 June 1986, p.75]

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]

American Flyers is too accomplished not to wring tears, but you may want to kick and scream before you succumb. [09 Sep 1985, p.90]

No matter how important teamwork is on a job of industrialized entertainment like these ostensibly visionary films, the vision itself has to come from a single inspired sensibility. Despite some intriguing ideas, episodes and effects, that isn't the case with "Star Trek." [17 Dec. 1979, p.110]

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.

The longest, grimmest and least funny of the trilogy.

Roberts and Gibson form a "pas de deux," two lonely urbanites fighting vague yet common enemies in a plot that never quite comes together.

Spacek is brilliantly funny, slowly transforming Helen from a nervous 60s housewife into a liquored-up one. I could have watched her in the vibrating fat-burner, eyes closed, lazily gripping a martini glass, for hours.

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]

There's a frenzied integrity to this wild and crazy movie that yells at us as a father yells at children who are playing with fire. [26 Apr 1982, p.75]

Though the movie suffers from an underdeveloped plot, it does benefit from solid acting.

Screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue and director Rob Cohen have reasonably literate fun subverting the knight genre. [10 Jun 1996, p.91]

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]

By the time this atmospheric but thoroughly muddled story reaches its conclusion, the film has totally self-destructed. [31 Dec 1979, p.49]

Ron Howard's version is--no surprise--a funny, audience-friendly entertainment that's ultimately less scathing satire than conventional Hollywood romantic comedy outfitted in trendy new clothes.

Attempting a frame-by-frame duplication of Warner Bros. '40s filmmaking--even the extroverted acting style apes the period--Soderbergh has produced a movie so self-conscious that it's drained of all life.

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]