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]

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

BASEketball feels stale and inert. Still, Parker and Stone have a nice, giddy rapport, and it's a kick to hear traces of Cartman and Kenny in their dude-speak.

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

Wilder is best at outrageous moments, teaching an impromptu hora to the Indians or babbling Yiddish to some Amish farmers he mistakes for rabbis. He is, in fact, an actor of moments, less likely to wear him when surrounded by the funny ensembles Brooks used to give him. Aldrich is not Brooks, but he has, in the past, made fine action films in which the male camaraderie was eloquently implicit. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a sledgehammer. [16 July 1979, p.93]

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]

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

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

Unfortunately, no one seems to have clued Demi in on the joke. Never known for her light touch, she appears to be act-ing (earnestly, humorlessly) in some other movie altogether, a dreary melodrama about a noble mom fighting for her child.

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]

If only the laughs were bigger, smarter and more frequent than they are.

This stiff-in-the-joints movie has little feel for its setting or period, and crucial chunks seem to have been left on the cutting-room floor. Robert Rossen's Oscar-winning 1949 version has nothing to fear.

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.

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]

Brando's performance is enormous fun, but it's not just a joke. He's hilarious and gently mesmerizing at once, and director John Frankenheimer savvily adjusts the tone of his movie to fit Brando's daft brilliance...Let's face it -- this is one nutty movie. It's not exactly "good," but I sure had a good time.

Writer David Rayfiel and director Lamount Johnson are making murky connections between sex, religion, repression and the emotional sterility of avant-garde art. The result is both specious and seductive, a kitschy ode to the pervasive eroticism of contemporary culture. [12 Apr 1976, p.94]

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

Speed Racer creates a timeless, visually seductive world suspended somewhere between the pop '60s and the sci-fi future.

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]

Relax and enjoy the brain candy.

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]

There's something for everyone in this 70-minute special effects frolic, and lovers of the cartoon will find the movie relatively faithful to its animated predecessor.

Under the Cherry Moon is not recommended for seekers of good taste, but if you're looking for a giddy, outre night at the movies, Prince is your man. [21 Jul 1986, p.65]

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.

Rollover wants to be a thriller, love story and economics lesson rolled into one, but in trying to do so much, it shortchanges each element. The screenplay (by David Shaber from a story by Shaber, Howard Kohn and David Weir) doesn't hang together. [14 Dec 1981, p.125]

Unfortunately, this narf's a drag: she talks like a fortune cookie and doesn't really do anything. Still, the multicultural cast is fun, the images have a painterly beauty and there are some beguiling comic touches before the story sinks into a swamp of solemn metaphysical glop.

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.

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.

The movie feels like a half-hour skit blown up, like its stars, to unwieldy proportions. [02 Jul 1984, p.45]

Labour teeters on the edge of the amateur. Yet it's hard not to root for its moonstruck spirit, or to succumb to the panache of the pastiche.

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]

There are some very funny moments, and Coughlan is a delight as Leigh Anne's best friend.

Like many movies with wimpy intellectual infrastructures, St. Elmo's Fire is not without a certain trumpery charm. [1 June 1995, p.55]

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]

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.

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.

It's a gorgeous bad movie, the folly of a great visual stylist.

As long as it stays focused on showbiz, Bewitched is light, frothy fun. But Ephron insists on turning Bewitched into a love story, and that's when the fun starts to seep out of the movie.

Despite its bizarre intellectual project, Le Pecheur's film is seductive and shockingly sexy.

It's not as cool as it sounds.

A "croc" of nonsense.

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

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

Think Batman on crystal meth.

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

Spielberg has brought forth a farce that is both relentlessly spectacular and spectacularly unfunny. [17 Dec 1979, p.111]

Couldn’t have arrived at a better time: movies have been so bad lately that audiences are positively starving for something mediocre.

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]

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.

An odyssey of horror and suspense that's as tightly wound as a garrote and as beautifully designed as a guillotine. [24 Feb 1986, p.81]

Nutty paranoid thriller.

Penn is a real talent, but it seems downright unfair to cast him in a part designed to compete with the memory of his brother Sean's role in Fast Times. This is one for the kids; had it tried harder, it could have been one for everyone. [08 Oct 1984, p.89]

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]

A dispiriting attempt to wring a last gasp of mirth from an already dangerously overextended series. [22 Aug 1983, p.73]

There is obviously a good deal of built in human interest in this material. But this movie squanders its most important resource - its people - by employing an all-star cast so huge and unwieldy that nobody is on hand long enough to exert much of an emotional tug. [27 Dec 1976, p.57]

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]

Offers easy wisdom and light-hearted fun.

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]

Body of Evidence won't be remembered for classic plotting or brilliant legal gambits. But give it its due: it holds one's attention.

Hilariously incompetent.

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]

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman has written quips, not characters and Joel Schumacher still seems miscast as a Bat-action director: he stages the mayhem confusingly and the comedy too broadly.

The Slugger's Wife isn't remotely provocative -- or even entertaining. It's an example of creative anorexia: the movie is so thin you leave the theater feeling you've watched the outtakes by mistake. [1 Apr 1985, p.87]

Save yourself from this mess.

Second Hand Hearts is a very classy-looking movie. Haskell Wexler is the cinematographer, and he transforms the gauchest milieus into elegant tableaux. But Harris and Blake don't mesh with Ashby's innately cool style. [18 May 1981]

The first half concerns our hero's satirical misadventures on earth, except that director Huyck has the comic finesse of Hulk Hogan. The second half is an overproduced orgy of car crashes and monsters, in which Howard must save the world from the Dark Overlords of the universe. George Lucas was the executive producer. The Force was not with him. [25 Aug 1986, p.63]

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]

Criticizing it is like spitting in the wind, but at the risk of sounding like the spoilsport villain of the piece (a snippety liberal Washington bureaucrat, wouldn't you know), there's a smug, bully-boy spirit underneath this supposedly merry romp. The message is Go for It, and the theme song tells us 'Youv'e gotta have a dream to, make a dream come true," but what have our dreams come to? Breaking the 55-mph speed limit? In this movie, paradise is being able to land a Piper Cubin a busy city street to pick up another six-pack. Unfettered individualism has come to this: drive hard and carry a big Schlitz. [13 July 1981, p.81]

The crude humor in Drop Dead Gorgeous does not have a moral point to it. It's just crude.

Everyone in the film is either annoying or unpleasant.

Like Sherman McCoy, the hero of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Brian De Palma makes one fatal choice that leads to disaster. The disaster is the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities. The choice was De Palma's decision to film it as a cartoon -- a broad, black, wannabe savage comedy. Every unfortunate moment of this screechy, heavy-handed movie is a result of that basic misconception, compounded by the fact that the comedy is staged by a man who seems to have temporarily lost his sense of humor. [24 Dec 1990, p.63A]

One can safely doze through the extremely bland first hour, which feels more like an advertisement for marine theme parks than a suspense movie. [1 Aug 1983, p.47]

I staggered out of this shameless, interminable movie feeling as if I'd been force-fed a ton of mealy, artificially sweetened baby food.

Director Ronald Neame, who once made good movies, has instructed his actors to shout as much as possible. The rest is special effects -- and not very special ones at that. [05 Nov 1979, p.101]

Shorn of its inside references, it's a very mixed bag - pleasant but overlong, funny when Steve Martin is on hand and stultifying when Frankie Howerd goes into his Mean Mr. Mustard routines, full of wonderful music that too rarely reaches the boiling point and pathos that sinks to bathos. [31 Jul 1978, p.42]

Sarah Thorp’s lazy script lurches from the lame to the ludicrous.

As dumb as the film is, the actors escape relatively unscathed.

Screenwriter Ropelewski piles one silly plot contrivance upon another, and the characters start behaving like nitwits.

Director J. Lee Thompson has come a long, depressing way since the days of The Guns of Navarone: his film is sloppily edited, murkily photographed and shot through with a mean streak of sadism unredeemed by its clumsy camp value. [12 Mar 1979, p.89]

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

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]

Spies Like Us does have a few yuks, or at least yukettes, but there's only a semi-smidgeon of inventiveness in this ponderous farce. [16 Dec 1985, p.84]