It's a picturesque tale that, hobbled by its episodic structure, never achieves full steam.

Still, even if the movie's vast reach exceeds its grasp, it's a spellbinding history lesson. The Good Shepherd demands you watch it like a spy: alert, paranoid, never knowing whom you can trust, or who will stab you in the back.

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]

Strictly as exploitation, Bad Boys is a pretty slick piece of work. It's overlong and short on characterization. But it's unsentimental about its teen-age hoods and unsparing about the nastiness of juvenile jails. [28 Mar 1983, p.73]

Small in scale, grittily realistic, charged with a fierce intelligence about how people live on the other side of the law, the film makes few concessions to an audience's expectations, but it has an edgy, lingering intensity. [03 Apr 1978, p.91]

Imagine "The War of the Roses" remade as a James Bond fantasy, with appropriately high-tech weaponry, and you have some idea of what Doug Liman's heavily armed comedy has in store.

This lean, hard, ruggedly acted film is hardly ingratiating, but its clenched power has a cruel and compelling beauty. [04 July 1977, p.77]

An engaging and touching flight of fancy. [17 July 1995, p.60]

A mix-and-match crowd-pleaser that shouldn't add up, but delightfully does.

Gillespie’s movie walks a delicate line through a minefield of potential bad taste. Directed with patient, low-key sensitivity, it never goes for a cheap laugh at its protagonist’s expense.

All the ingredients for a classic doomed-by-overnight-success movie can be found in the trajectory of Jean Michel Basquiat's short, sad life.

In the hard-driven, sitcomish Broadway production, these colorful disasters too often seemed willed and self-conscious. The difference here, under Bruce Beresford's direction, is the unalloyed pleasure of watching Spacek, Lange and Keaton devour these juicy parts with lip-smacking relish. [22 Dec 1986, p.75]

Using the distinctive cinematographer Barry Sonnefeld, who shot "Raising Arizona," DeVito gives his comedy a crisp, colorful pop look: you can almost see the broad cartoon outlines drawn around the figures. [14 Dec 1987, p.69]

What Eastwood and Streep have done is to bring a semblance of emotional reality to the story.

A thick stew of sex, violence and suspicion, Lee's movie -- spiked up with a virtually nonstop soundtrack -- definitely has the power to jangle your nerves.

Q & A is an uncommonly ambitious thriller, but it rarely goes solemn -- it's a raw, rude Cook's tour of the New York underworld, from transvestite bars to precinct offices to Mafia mansions -- with a violent side trip to San Juan thrown in. [07 May 1990, p.65]

If the movie is a mess, it's a vital, entertaining mess -- the most interesting film Jewison (F.I.S.T., In the Heat of the Night) has made in years. [22 Oct 1979, p.102]

Just about everything in this lavish, animated feature is for the pigtail set, especially a big romance between Pocahontas (Irene Bedard) and the strapping John Smith (Mel Gibson).

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

Scene by well-crafted scene. Mamet holds you in a tight grip. But this movie is troubling. His intricate murder mystery plot may be overdetermined -- it doesn't leave enough room to satisfactorily explore the richly suggestive themes of identity, loyalty and betrayal. Gold's transformation seems willed by artistic fiat. The bleakness of his ending is a kind of intellectual cop-out: it reduces all that we've seen to hollow ironies. Homicide plays like a house afire: what it adds up to may be less than it seems. [14 Oct 1991, p.70]

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

Full of invention, but under the colorful icing is a slightly stale cake.

It’s sad to see such stunning work self-destruct. You walk out haunted by the movie that might have been.

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]

A film of ideas; meaty ideas about Catholicism, faith, and the true nature of jealousy, love and hate, that are rarely contemplated in today's cinema.

Scott's finesse can't entirely disguise the mechanical nature of Nicholas and Ted Griffin's script, which has one too many twists for its own good. Fun while it lasts, but it's a bit of a con job itself.

"The Final Frontier" is not as witty as the last installment, nor as well made as "The Search for Spock." But it has the Trek essence in spades. [19 June 1989, p.63]

For the most part, however, Beaches is lean cuisine. It's not quite good enough to ring with any authenticity and not quite tasteless enough to be a glitzy, trashy wallow. But it has one enormous, undeniable asset: Bette Midler. [26 Dec 1988, p.66]