If we must have teen movies, let them all be as sweet and seductive as Sollett's smartly observed romance.

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]

Chocolat is a seriocomic plea for tolerance, gift-wrapped in the baby blue colors of a fairy tale and served up with a sybaritic smile.

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]

Its battle scenes have a raw, gritty power that's closer to an actual documentary than any other Vietnam movie (the director, John Irvin, is an Englishman with an extensive background in documentaries, including ones about Vietnam). But its uncompromising indictment of the antiwar movement back home is much too simplistic and undercuts the film's tremendous momentum as a record of the combat soldiers' hellish ordeal. [14 Sept 1987, p.83]

There's no point in overpraising The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. It'd a scary but predictable genre piece that telegraphs its every move.

Robbins eschews leftist diatribes for a bold cartoon version of history. It's as crowded and energetic as a big parade...and just about as subtle.

For diehard fans, X-Men is full of in jokes and sly references -- For everybody else, there's the thrill of the unknown.

It's a marvelous premise, and Crudup's serpentine performance has a venomous grace. But Jeffrey Hatcher's screenplay too often sacrifices psychological insight for bogus theatricality.

Blood Diamond only skims the surface of many important subjects--the script doesn't begin to explain what the civil war was about. But if it opens a few eyes, it will have done its job.

A rousingly funny slapstick comedy about the day John, Paul, George and Ringo set off a tidal wave of adolescent hysteria in New York City. Surprisingly, nostalgia accounts for very little of the movie's charm. [01 May 1978, p.91]

Much of Patriot Games is routine: good guys and bad guys running around with heavy artillery. But at its best moments, Noyce and Ford snap the genre back to life. [8 June 1992, p.59]

Perez, with a whine like a high-speed drill, quickly wears out her welcome, but Fonda and Cage exhibit an endearing lightness. This is a perfect summer souffle. [1 Aug 1994, p.56]

Rosen's film has none of Baskshi's visual razzle-dazzle, but it is loaded with character, and it has the relentless momentum of a good war movie. [20 Nov 1978, p.79]

Marathon Man is an intelligent and largely satisfying thriller, written by William Goldman from his own novel, directed by John Schlesigner and photographed by Conrad Hall. But the most satisfying element is the work of Olivier, one of the few who turn acting into one of the great humane progressions of Western civilization. [11 Oct 1976]

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]

Directed by Tom Shadyac ("Ace Ventura"), it's nearly sociopathic in its quest for laughs, and busts a very big gut.

Shortbus tends to work better in its first, comic half, than in its second, more serious stretch, where the characters' trials and tribulations flirt with soap opera. The actors, formidable with their clothes off, aren't always as expressive fully dressed.

The film is laudable, but Grass's book was lacerating. [21 Apr 1980, p.90]

Bjork gives what may be the most wrenching performance ever given by someone who has no interest in being an actor.

Unfaithful shows what a powerful, sexy, smart filmmaker Lyne can be. It’s a shame he substitutes the mechanics of suspense for the real suspense of what goes on between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.

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.

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

At times Southern Comfort seems like a kind of war game itself--an academic exercise, perfectly executed but a little cut and dried. Still, it's an exercise passed with flying colors. The objective is sighted, the mission accomplished, the audience properly pummeled. [05 Oct 1981, p.78]

This film has everything for the all-important female audience: feisty heroines, lots of slapstick, great clothes.

The Omen is a dumb and largely dull movie. No true connoisseur of kitsch will confuse the work of writer David Seltzer and director Richard Donner with the masterpiece of psychic manipulation contrived by William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin in The Exorcist, not to mention what the diabolical Roman Polanski made out of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby. [12 July 1976, p.69]

Working from an intermittently clever script by Diane Thomas, director Robert Zemeckis, a talented Spielberg protege (Used Cars), sets his sights on fun and proceeds to blast away at our defenses. Some of the fun is real, but much of it seems grimly willed, which tends to be more exhausting than entertaining. Douglas himself is a less than ideal choice as a hip Indy Jones adventurer -- there's no sense of self-enjoyment in his swagger. But Turner more than compensates. [16 Apr 1984, p.93]

The fun of They All Laughed is that it's both blithe and knowing, a work carefree in its spirit and careful in its art, somehow French in the way of (so help me!) Rene Clair. [30 Nov 1981, p.105]

Manages to be simultaneously subversive and sweet.

There's no denying that Emmerich's film, though a good half hour too long, keeps us watching.

An absorbing, well-crafted, honorable movie that seems almost as ambitious as the original operation itself. [20 Jun 1977, p.65]

Depp attacks his role with relish, stamping his boot heels and recounting improbable erotic adventures in a wonderful Castilian lisp. Unfortunately, Depp's the only one flying over this cuckoo's nest. [24 Apr 1995, p.64]

Star 80 is very strong stuff. Fosse is one of our best moviemakers; he shows us better than anyone the perverse beauty in decadence and the decadence that we can't seem to burn out of our dreams of beauty. [14 Nov 1983, p.98]

Fails to rouse any passion. A potentially great subject is frittered away, though this being a Scott movie, there's style to spare.

This is not a movie that can bear much postgame scrutiny. The minute you begin to question one element of the plot, gaping holes of logic appear throughout.

Lowe and Spader are quite good as alter egos of the moral shallows. But the film goes from shallow to callow. Director Curtis Hanson and writer David Koepp have turned out a glossy but hollow film noir that makes virtue and decadence equally vapid. [26 Mar 1990, p.53]

Entertaining but farfetched, Spy Game might have looked less meretricious a few months back. But the real world has sabotaged its pretense of authenticity. Enjoy it for what it is, a fleet, handsome fantasy of globe-hopping blond demigods.

Eastwood tells his haunting, sorrowful saga with such a sure, steady hand, only a very hardened cynic could fail to be moved.

For all its isolated lovely touches--there's a wonderful moment of repose while Garp listens to Nat King Cole on his car radio--the movie leaves a cold, sour aftertaste. Some of this can be attributed to the uncertain tone of Hill's direction--overly broad here, too remote there--but much of it goes back to Irving. [26 July 1982, p.77]

Zoo avoids any taint of exploitation, but it errs on the opposite extreme. I came away from it wanting a little less Art and a lot more simple reportage.

A streak of pitch-black humor, some bawdy detours and a touch of sanguine, sun-baked poetry Sam Peckinpah would have liked.

Fortunately, whenever the movie starts to sag, Depp flies to the rescue. It’s a truly piratical performance: with his flamboyantly fluttering fingers he steals every scene in the movie.

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.

For all its neon-lit expressionism and portentous, dread-inspiring music, Hardcore has almost nothing to say about its subject. Schrader doesn't explore any moral conflict, he just gives off attitudes - and banal, shopworn attitudes at that. [13 Feb 1979, p.57]

Donner has directed with a strong, quiet sense of human nuance that includes enough irony to give the bum's rush to the self pity that keeps trying to sneak into Max's Bar. [05 Jan 1981, p.55]

In spite of the fact that everything turns out exactly as you think it will, director Curtis (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) Hanson's movie, written by Denis O'Neill, is a tense, satisfying entertainment. [30 Sep 1994, p.69]

Octopussy, the 13th of the Bond adventures and the sixth to star Roger Moore, isn't as exhilarating as "The Spy Who Loved Me". But it's the most enjoyable since then, in large part because it's not trying to be the ultimate anything. [13 June 1983, p.77]

An action-packed love story with something for everyone.

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.

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

The tale is a bit too insular and claustrophobic for its own good: in the end these characters lack the depth and complexity to resonate deeply. The pleasures of The Dreamers stay mostly on the surface. But when the surface is as stylish and sexy as this, it's hard to complain.

Onstage, trapped in the mini-wasteland of the parking lot, the creeped-out kids crackled like lightning in a bottle. Linklater's meager attempts to open up the movie drain its energy.

That's the paradox that makes this parade of folly so much fun: it feels as if everyone involved is having a high old time, and their enthusiasm is contagious.

Tries too hard to prove it has a "heart" when the whole point is that its subjects do not.

Actually it's relatively clean, downright affirmative (the girls get insurance plans and 90 percent of the take) and resoundingly unfunny. [2 Aug 1982, p.63]

(There's) a half dozen other deftly sketched show-biz desperadoes who make this slight but tangy sleeper such an unpretentious delight.

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.

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.

This spirited rerun, neatly mixing parody and panache, squeezes a surprising amount of fun out of the old war horse.

Under the reins of Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Delicatessen"), the Alien franchise has lost none of its taste for acid-spewing, flesh-impaling, entrail-dripping gore.

As preposterous as the movie gets, it's clearly reveling in its own hokiness.

Filled with funny, gritty Tarantino lowlife gab and a respectable body count, but what is most striking is the film's gallantry and sweetness. Tarantino hits some new and touching notes with Grier and Forster.

Gets a lot of the details right. Outside Providence is a sweet, funny little movie.

Greystoke is entertaining, intelligent, even touching in its broad-scale treatment of a story that has always provided common ground for children and grown-ups. The main problem with this movie is that it's too short. [26 Mar 1984, p.74]

Prelude to a Kiss has made the voyage from Broadway to Hollywood with its literacy, charm and full heart very much intact.

The mordant, deadpan humor that streaks through Dead Man is echt Jarmusch, but it's in the service of his most mysterious and deeply felt movie, a meditation on death and transfiguration that, by the end, has thrown off the protective veil of irony. [03 Jun 1996, Pg.75]

Recklessly perched on the edge of the ludicrous, this examination of a destructive erotic passion unfolds with an unsettling mixture of steam and mordant iron.

It's a minimalist almost-love story told with epic flourishes.

Luke has real movie-star power. He's enormously sympathetic, but this moving, well-crafted movie, written by Shawn Slovo, mercifully doesn't turn him into a plaster saint.

This one is all about the boys. But as glad as we are to see them, watching the third installment is like attending a college reunion too soon after the last one: after the initial welcome, there's not all that much to say.

Sometimes flat, The Human Factor is nonetheless a lucidly impressive return to form for the 73-year-old director. It's not really a thriller at all, but an understated, uncompromising dissection of an event: an anatomy of the murder of a soul. [11 Feb 1980, p.82]

For a number of reasons The Duchess isn't all it could have been. It's fun, but falls short of fabulous.

An over-the-top thriller, too loosely tethered to reality to be a lesson about anything other than the limits of popcorn consumption.

Though The Bounty is almost willfully perverse in thwarting audience expectations, and though it ends anticlimactically, you can't dismiss it. You know you've seen something. A spell, however faint, has been cast, like the one the island casts on the Bounty's crew. [14 May 1984, p.81]

Henry & June doesn't finally cohere, but there's something noble in its evocation of the erotic in all its pleasure and pathos. [22 Oct 1990, p.74]

Director Harold Becker ("The Onion Field," "Sea of Love") makes "City Hall" absorbing in its evocation of New York fauna and rhythms. The problem is in the screenplay. [19 Feb 1996, p.68]

This material is charged enough without piling on the melodrama and the lip-smacking violence. The movie too often sacrifices reportage for razzle-dazzle.

Working Girls has its shortcomings (the madam is too caricatured, the script occasionally reads like rehashed research), but the film, a fiction with the conviction of a documentary, fascinates and provokes. [06 Apr 1987, p.64]

What really puts Alligator above all the other Jaws"ripoffs is its snappy sense of humor. [20 Apr 1981, p.93]

Their best work since the fresh and appealing studies in cultural clash they made in India in the '60s, such as "Shakespeare Wallah." Movies are not literature, and Ivory is a dangerously literary director. But in Quartet he has found the images to express Jean Rhys's troubling vision of female fatality. [9 Nov 1981, p.94]

The women in this smart, highly entertaining comedy don't pack guns, but relations between the sexes are such that a well-placed knee in the groin can come in handy.

Pretty charming. Audiences may like it more than critics, but everyone should agree it's one of the most wickedly stylish movies of the year.

The preposterousness of the premise (concocted by writers Perry Howze and Randy Howze) is the appeal of Chances Are. The problem is the execution. Where "Heaven Can Wait" seduced you into belief with its expert comic timing and romantic urgency, director Emile ("Dirty Dancing") Ardolino's fantasy grows increasingly labored as it piles improbability upon psychological impossibility. [20 March 1989, p.83]

De Palma's takeoff on the Godfather genre doesn't have the subversive slyness of Prizzi's Honor. Wise Guys aims lower, but that's an honorable direction in which to aim, and De Palma and writer George Gallo riddle the belly with dumdum laugh bullets. [19 May 1986, p.73]

Woody Allen is back in sharp comic form, though it's likely that his abrasive black comedy Deconstructing Harry will alienate as many people as it tickles.

Gibson is right at home as the wisecracking gambler, and Foster, though slightly squirmy in this burlesque, hints at a free comic side. But it's the veteran's show. Garner wears his you-can't-put-one-over-on-me character like a pair of fine weathered boots. With his breaking half-smile, he's irresistible. [20 May 1994, p.64]

Watching Moore battle the heavy odds may be formulaic fun, but it's genuine fun, and the formula is classic.

The overall effect of Grenaway's film is mixed: disturbing, too schematic to be entirely convincing, unforgettable as few movies are. A key element is the powerful acting of a distinguished cast. [23 Apr 1990, p.73]

A cliffhanger with no real ending. When the lights come up, think of it as the start of a six-month intermission. For better and worse, Reloaded leaves you hungry for more.

The script is lame...but U-571 works, thanks to the jittery handheld-camera work, the great, visceral sound editing and a few sneaky plot twists.

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]

While this accomplished film holds you in its grip, it doesn't convince. The revelatory urgency that made Selby's book a literary scandal is long gone. [14 May 1990, p.75]

What first feels like thin skit material gets funnier and sweeter. Damon and Kinnear make a terrific team.

Tom Hanks displays his usual comic finesse as Friday's rule-bending new sidekick, but it's Aykroyd's movie -- what movie there it. The fact is, ma'am, this Dragnet doesn't add up to much. [13 July 1987, p.60]

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

For all its parodic elements, this clever 'whodunit' leaves us squirming and wincing at each slash of the killer. Prepare for a surprise and beware the person enjoying the film right next to you.

Iceman may boil down to a disappointingly sentimental/mystical concept, but Schepisi is such a fluid, exciting filmmaker that you remain thrilled by his images even if you're dismayed by the direction the plot takes. [16 Apr 1984, p.92]