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.