Midway never quite decides whether war is hell, good clean fun, or merely another existential dilemma. This drab extravaganza toys with so many conflicting attitudes that it winds up reducing the pivotal World War II battle in the Pacific to utter nonsense. [28 June 1976, p.78]

In this tetralogical effort, writer-director-star Stallone has succumbed to the old one-two of silliness and cynicism. [9 Dec 1985, p.92]

Corny and sweet, Doc Hollywood has its genuine charms, but they'd be a lot more charming if Caton-Jones and the screen-writers allowed them to sneak up on us. Instead, the movie oversells its whimsy and fits its quirkiness into a sitcom formula that's as preordained as the hero's moral rejuvenation.

First-time director Graeme Clifford, a former editor, hasn't set out merely to exploit this lurid legend, and he tries to suggest the multiple layers of the story, but he simply doesn't do his job well. The film has no rhythm, it's stagy and inauthentic-looking, and the patchwork script has that tinny ring that so often infects movies about real people. [06 Dec 1982, p.152]

This is an elaborate production, but all the jazzy sets and explosions in the world can't disguise the story's complete lack of urgency.

A tired piece of hackwork rescued only by the presence of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The whole enterprise moves in slow motion, with its programed music predicting each routine step. [07 July 1975, p.57]

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]

With characteristic Hollywood hypocrisy, the movie sells male chauvinism as it knocks it and ridicules winning while it uses who's-gonna-win as its central energy. [14 Jul 1975, p.77]

Though Penn and a heavily mugging De Niro earn their share of chuckles, you leave this comedy scratching your head at the nutty incongruity of the endeavor. What were these talented people thinking? [25 Dec 1989, p.74B]

Visually, the Bluth effort is disappointingly drab and murky, and the story line may prove too thin to keep the little natives from restlessness. [28 Nov 1988, p.87]

Car-crazy John Stockwell stumbles upon a time-warp machine that unleashes forms from the past and future (dinosaurs, Nazis and mutants) upon his local high school. The principal pleasure in this last comic adventure is Dennis Hopper's science teacher, a tie-dyed-in-the-wool '60s activist who can't forget Woodstock. Forget the rest. [26 Aug 1985, p.62]

There's an inspirational, hang-on-to-your-dreams message, but it comes only at the very end of a long, grim, painful journey. Holiday cheer is not what this movie is offering.

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.

Though some viewers are sure to take offense, between the scattered laughs the movie's most remarkable achievement is its run-of-the mill dullness. [10 Nov 1986, p.86]

In the end, the film lacks the skill of its actors and ends up feeling disjointed and confused about its own message.

Von Trier, however, undercuts the universality of his own message with his meretricious closing credits, set to David Bowie's "Young Americans," which explicitly turns Dogville into an anti-American screed.

The movie plays like a clumsy assault on post-9/11 paranoia. It references "America's war," uses imagery direct from Abu Ghraib and contains dialogue likely to offend anyone who's not, say, a suicide bomber.

Both Henry Winkler and Sally Field have talent to spare, but there's just so far you can go with roles like these, and director Jeremy Paul Kagan, unable to settle on a tone, isn't any help. Winkler is too fresh and appealing by half - he acts like a man who's seen combat only on TV; he can't take us inside his pain. Field has to push her gamin charm to make up for the holes in her character, and she comes off actressy. When Ford is onscreen, the tinny echoes of old movies die away and Heroes takes on - briefly - the resonance of real life. [14 Nov 1977, p.78]

In his seventh movie as James Bond, Rog is looking less like a chap with a license to kill than a gent with an application to retire. [27 May 1985, p.74]

Richard Attenborough's glumly misconceived Chaplin trudges its way through the great comic's long, brilliant, scandal-ridden career without ever catching fire. [28 Dec 1992, p.56]

Newell, no hack, tries not to milk the cliches shamelessly, and that may be the movie's final undoing. Lacking the courage of its own vulgarity, Mona Lisa Smile is as tepid as old bathwater.

This is a movie afraid of its own shadows.

Taps aspires to be both a movie for the conservative '80s and a youth-in-revolt, anti-military movie of the '60s. The contradictions break the dramatic spine of director Harold Becker's film, which grinds to a predictably violent climax without ever having made its basic premise believable. How many teen-agers do you know who would sacrifice their lives for a military school? [28 Dec 1981, p.65]

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

First-time director James Signorelli and his four screen-writers fall right into the trap of imitative fallacy -- they want to show us a vulgar, tacky character and do it by producing a vulgar, tacky movie. [22 Aug 1983, p.73]

There have been and will be worse sequels than City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold, but there are few that seem so unnecessary. Slickers II, directed by Paul Weiland, is so harmless it's numbing: a little male bonding, some sagebrush slapstick, a couple of decent quips and a gift-wrapped moral. I kept wondering how the filmmakers mustered up the energy to go to work every morning. [27 June 1994, p.54]

A mish-mash of special effects, tasteless comedy and pointless action.

Like the object of its lampooning -- television -- "Amazon" is lightweight and often predictable. Anyone who's left grade school by the time "Leave It to Beaver" came on the air might want to sit this one out. [5 Oct 1987, p.86]

Heartburn deflates before your eyes: it's less a slice of life than a slice of lifestyle. [28 July 1986, p.70]

By this time your face is twisted out of shape from reacting to Brooks's nonstop gags with either a yock or a wince. The trouble is that Brooks (who wrote, produced and directed the movie) doesn't develop anything: just like King Louis, he skeet-shoots the audience with his gags. He needs the creative help he had on his biggest hits, "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein." Good bad taste is too precious to be bollixed up. [22 June 1981, p.87]

The heavy-handed direction by Volker Schlondorff doesn't help to make the movie convincing or dramatically effective. [16 Mar 1990, p.54]

It's like nothing you've seen before. Yet, over all, the story it tells seems predictable, secondhand, and its "profound" revelations hackneyed. [12 Sep 1983, p.88]

If you can lose like a winner, can you win like a loser? And if it doesn't matter if you win or lose, how come Sly always wins? Maybe these ambiguities will be resolved in his next opus, when Sly, playing Oldsmobile Cutlass, enters the high-stakes arena of championship horseshoe pitching. [23 Feb 1987, p.79]

Gator is sloppily directed by Reynolds himself and filled with anti-ethnic humor that Reynolds has picked up from all those guest shots on the talk shows with Don Rickles et al. [13 Sep 1976, p.89]

Unlike Clark's extraordinary books of black-and-white photography, Kids is stunningly anti-erotic, though not untainted by sensationalism. By condensing all this inflammatory material into a 24-hour time frame, Clark and 19-year-old screen-writer Harmony Korine create an overwrought narrative that's sometimes tedious in its relentlesshess.

The movie wants to make a serious point that old folks shouldn't be treated as children; the message would be easier to swallow if the moviemakers didn't treat the audience the same way. [20 Oct 1986, p.78b]

Once the shock value rubs off, this hyped-up movie reveals itself to be as empty as the desperate boys it pretends to explore. [05 July 1993, p.57]

The entire solemn, portentous edifice that is The Village collapses of its own fake weight. Just about everything that makes Shyamalan special misfires here.

Speaking as an admirer, but not an apostle, of the graphic novel, I thought the Watchmen movie was confusing, maddeningly inconsistent and fighting a long, losing battle to establish an identity of its own.

A shallowly satiric suburban joke that says some ugly and unsupported things about what kind of women men really want. [03 Mar 1975, p.70]

The more the computer-generated images take over, the sillier The Haunting gets. By the end, the computers have chased all the scares away.

In this distressingly generic spy spoof, it's not Maxwell who's clueless, but the filmmakers.

Though sprinkled with comic gems, Big Top Pee-wee runs out of gas in the home stretch. Kleiser, of Blue Lagoon fame, is too bland for the job -- the tame Big Top finale makes you yearn for the cartoonish pizzazz of Big Adventure director Tim Burton. [01 Aug 1988, p.54]

A paint-by-numbers old-fashioned romantic epic, Head in the Clouds is neither romantic nor epic, but it does succeed at old-fashioned.

Ultimately, this is a war of boorishness vs. sensitivity, and the filmmakers waffle.

An adult love story that's trying for stiff-upper-lip poignancy.

It calls attention not to the fate of the earth, but to the numbing effect of bad, manipulative art. [14 Nov 1983, p.98]

If they merely wanted to retell a good tale, they've failed. The first half of "Postman" succeeds in building up an atmosphere of dread and throttled desire as Nicholson and Lange circle their prey (John Colicos). But after the dramatic turnarounds of the trial, the film goes slack. Just when Mamet's script should be tightening the screws, it grows diffuse, introducing unnecessary characters while unaccountably lopping off Cain's original ending, without which the title is inexplicable. Rafelson's increasingly plodding, stagy direction doesn't help: he emphasizes the mechanics of Cain's plot when it needs to be disguised. [23 March 1981, p.81]

Relax and enjoy the brain candy.

But Die Hard WAV lacks the freshness of its two predecessors: we've had it with gassy police psychiatrists and supersmart terrorists.

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.

Midler's performance does not stand out. She remains very much Bette Midler.

Get back, get back to where you once belonged, you want to shout. But the movie is stuck in the wrong groove.

Gorgeous but curiously weightless.

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 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]

Unfortunately, none of this is very much fun. The cinematography is dark and depressing. The dialogue is stilted. And for some reason, director Antoine Fuqua has even ditched the Arthur/Guinevere/ Lancelot love triangle.

The wrong people made this movie, and its failure rankles. It's a handsomely designed, beautifully photographed production full of good actors who have been asked to play their roles in unfailingly hackneyed fashion. [01 May 1978, p.89]

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]

We've seen it all before and such familiarity kills impact.

Mazursky's satiric edge has always been leavened with heart. But now that his edge is gone he's wearing his heart on his sleeve and his dramaturgy has gone flabby. [16 Apr 1984, p.93]

The General's Daughter purports to be a serious examination of the seedy underbelly of military life, but one has the uneasy sensation that it simply wants to show as much of it on screen as possible.

Best Defense, already split in two by its dual story lines, lurches about desperately in search of a tone and a target. [30 Jul 1984, p.80]

One is left longing for Mike Nichols, the brilliant satirist who made us laugh at our foibles, but who seems to have given way to a cynical, grimly grinning moralist. [26 May 1975, p.84]

Trying too hard to grab our attention, he (Marshall) loses it. The art of the geisha prizes subtlety, stillness, grace. Why doesn't this movie?

It's poppycock, but well directed: Ruben delivers two or three guaranteed jolts, which almost make up for the copout of an ending.

The singin' and dancin' ain't much to write home about; you'd reckon that some $30 million would buy you somethin' with more pizzazz than an Amarillo road-show version of Oklahoma. Reckon again. [26 July 1982, p.79]

Howard's fifth movie is a keen disappointment. Clever moments and bittersweet touches aside, it leaves you wishing a modern-day Preston Sturges had written the script. [17 Mar 1986, p.82]

Has its heart in the right place, but its funnybone is out of joint.

When they are all brought together in one of the movie's many badly staged group scenes, King of the Gypsies hilariously resembles nothing so much as a Hollywood costume party. [28 Dec 1978, p.86]

where E.T. celebrated its young hero's imagination, Cloak & Dagger makes the boring mistake of chastening it. This wouldn't be so bad if the kid's prechastening adventures were exciting. [03 Sept 1984, p.73]

This sequel is so laden with dubious, spurious, curious and tedious stuff about theology, parapsychology, entomology and speleology that it forgets to frighten you in its frantic concern with being hip in the fad world of the occult. The Heretic simply drowns in its own malarky. [27 June 1977, p.61]

The Champ is overcalculated to a fault. Like suspense, sentimentality should sneak up on you unexpectedly; when it's poured out like slop in a trough, it kills the appetite. This movie is so busy spilling its own tears that my own seemed quite superfluous. [09 Apr 1979, p.87]

The film's claustrophobic, color-coordinated dourness yields little illumination, and as the surging violins accompany our heroine's un-raveling mind, the movie comes queasily close to romanticizing suicide. I knew I was supposed to feel something, but what?

Seeking the sources of our alienation in the explosively random energies of the eighteenth century, Kubrick has created an epic of esthetic self-indulgence, beautiful but empty. He needs to come back to earth from the outer spaces of past and future. [22 Dec 1975, p.49]

A thriller in which a psychiatrist solves the murder by interpreting a dream? There hasn't been such a dime-store Freudian gimmick since the days when there were dimestores. [22 Nov 1982, p.118]

I suspect a lot of people will be scared - and thus satisfied - by The Amityville Horror, a film that stoops to some of the oldest and cheapest tricks of the trade in its dogged pursuit of goose bumps. It's a crude haunted-house movie that depends for much of its tension on the possibility that the events that befell George and Kathleen Lutz might be true (though there is considerable evidence that Jay Anson's best-selling book was more fiction that fact). [13 Aug 1979, p.75]

Damien is a strikingly handsome film - full of plush offices and country homes reeking of Old Money, all lovingly captured in Bill Butler's burnished-gold cinematography - but it hasn't an ounce of suspense. There's really no story here, just a catalog of increasingly baroque murders. [19 June 1978, p.75]

That American Pop is a work of anti-nostalgia does not make it any less banal than the sunny trip-down-memory-lane formulas it mocks. For all his very real skills as an animator, Bakshi's limitations as an artist are all too clear in American Pop. There's something perversely small-minded about a saga of pop music that resolutely refuses to convey any sense of the joy of making music. Bakshi's ears hear only the downbeats. [16 March 1981, p.94]

As the credits roll by, you may suspect you have wandered into a fund-raiser for the Actors Guild. [13 Aug 1979, p.75]

The Wrath of Khan is a small soap opera about a man coming to terms with age and death and a son he had never acknowledged. It's really On Golden Galaxy, and it would have made a lot more sense as a modestly produced hour of television. [7 June 1982, p.53]

The Fourth Protocol, based on a Frederick Forsyth thriller, ought to be gripping, but it is merely diffuse, mechanical and overlong. So much windup, so little delivery. [14 Sept 1987, p.82]

Rydell and his writers compose a kind of Farmers' Book of Job as they pile one misery after another on the Garveys. But all this suffering does not turn them into real people. They're those old Hollywood standbys, Mr. and Mrs. Indomitable Human Spirit. [31 Dec 1984, p.65]

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]

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]

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

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

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

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]

It is perhaps not presumptuous to take the blind man as the director's image of his ideal viewer, but here, I think, Allen becomes overly cautious. Had the man been blind and deaf, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure would have achieved the stature of a true masterpiece. [11 Jun 1979, p.99]

Pseudo-lush but crummy flick. [15 Mar 1982, p.78]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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