The story is predictable, the science is dubious, the dialogue leaden and the acting indifferent. No matter. When Frankenheimer brings on his garish monster, it's as if the audience had never seen one before. Fear and tremblings shake the seats. [18 Jun 1979, p.54]

Frothing from two mouths, they parody film noir, megaviolent thrillers, sports allegories, ravaged-war-veteran movies, existentialist Westerns, even Busby Berkeley musicals.

The trouble with Sudden Impact is that it has the makings of a fascinating, multileveled melodrama, but settles for crude, comic-book detail. Eastwood doesn't want to let down his Dirty Harry fans, but at the same time he wants to take this character into deeper and murkier waters. The result is curious, a disquisition on the justice of revenge written with a spray can. [12 Dec 1983, p.109]

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension doesn't play it safe. For that alone you may want to bless its demented little heart. Buckaroo Banzai may not work, but that's the risk of high-wire acts. At least it's up there trying. [20 Aug 1984, p.75]

There is some elegant and clever filmmaking in Rising Sun. But ultimately Kaufman and Crichton are a bad fit: trying to transcend the material, the director loses the novelist's crude but compelling urgency.

There's something decidedly mechanical about this intermittently gripping movie's bleak view of human nature.

Hollywood rarely mounts these lavish period epics anymore. It's nice to see them try, even if the result is somewhat less than heart-stopping.

Director Guy Hamilton's movie is rather more effective as an advertisement for Majorca than as a thriller, and the idea of Ustinov as Poirot remains more enticing than the reality, but you could do a lot worse. Think of it as a languid cocktail party with a terrific guest list. [22 Mar 1982, p.85]

Inside Deep Throat is more scattershot than deep, but it vividly evokes the days when the "sexual revolution" was supposed to liberate the American libido.

You cannot accuse Wolfen of dullness. Though he hasn't the least interest in developing his characters, Wadleigh keeps you on your toes with a steady diet of dismembered bodies, red herrings (make that Red for the terrorists and Indians) and the sheer lunacy of the concept, which must be seen to be disbelieved. [03 Aug 1981, p.51]

Lili Fini Zanuck's directorial debut is impressively gritty and intense, and she avoids finger-wagging, but for all her good efforts, the movie suffers from deja vu: we've been down this road before. [13 Jan 1992, p.67]

The Hand is a moderately frightening, reasonably stylish exercise that ultimately doesn't seem worth the effort. Connoisseurs of schlock shock effects will not be satisfied by its tony illusion/reality games, and those looking for psycho/sexual illuminations will be one step ahead of the Freudian cliches. [27 Apr 1991, p.90]

Spanglish feels hemmed in, visually monotonous. There are signs that a lot has been cut, and in trimming his film Brooks may have squeezed too tight: his movie needs breathing space.

Like all Stone movies, W. has energy and forward momentum--particularly in the pre-presidential sections, when Bush is in his loose-cannon phase. It's not boring, and Brolin is often remarkable.

As a macho fantasy, First Blood is successful. But by the time it comes to its sobering, let's-put-this-all-in-a-sane-perspective conclusion, one has a right to feel powerfully misused. [25 Oct 1982, p.119]

Black Widow is an honorable attempt to rewire a favorite formula, but it doesn't go far enough. If you're going to play "Persona" games with the film noir, you've got to risk a dive off the deep end. [16 Feb 1987, p.72]

Director Neil Jordan includes some graphic and grisly maninto-wolf transformations (done better in An American Werewolf in London), but his ambitious fantasy never really works up a good fright. [06 May 1985, p.73]

With a little more trust in its characters, Innerspace could have been a truly memorable comedy. Short comes into his own as a screen funnyman, and Quaid works salty miracles within his physically confined role. But when it's over it's a relief, like climbing off a roller coaster. The best comedies leave you wanting more; Innerspace leaves you wanting less. [13 July 1987, p.60]

It's no soap opera: it's serious, unsentimental and novelistic in its preference for anecdotal detail over melodramatic plotting and filled with fresh, acute and moving moments. Shoot the Moon can also boast of excellent performances and Parker's most controlled direction to date. Yet these many virtues don't add up to a completely satisfying film. [25 Jan 1982, p.75]

Polanski treats the hotel with the same virtuosity he displayed in filming the apartment in Rosemary's Baby, one of the most deeply satisfying thrillers ever made. Frantic doesn't maintain this level: there are some irritating illogicalities, and Polanski hasn't fully mined the possibilities of all the elements in his screenplay (cowritten with Gerard Brach), such as Arab terrorists in Paris and the tiny nuclear-bomb trigger they are after. [07 Mar 1988, p.68]

The movie's one pleasure is watching Sarandon turn a cliche into a woman crackling with carnality and spirit. [22 Oct 1990, p.74]

The good news about the amiable but only partly satisfying Tin Cup is that it frees Kevin Costner from playing a monument and restores to us the loose, sparkling comic actor he used to be. [19 August 1996, p.66]

As a moral fable Click holds no surprises; as a Sandler comedy, it's unusually dark, occasionally touching and pretty funny.

It powerfully manipulates our emotions of outrage and revenge but tends to sacrifice human subtlety for polemics. It leaves the thin aftertaste of a TV movie. It doesn't help that McGillis give a dull, leaden performance, rendering her side of the story more perfunctory than it needed to be. Foster must carry the show alone; she seems to compact a lifetime of hard knocks into this furious, touching performance. [24 Oct 1988, p.74]

Poised halfway between the action conventions of "New Jack City" and the personal grit of "Straight Out of Brooklyn," Juice doesn't have the pizzaz or the insight, to satisfy as either exploitation or art. Dickerson and his fresh young cast make it move; it just doesn't move very far.

The film seems to want us to pin a medal to its own chest.

Townsend explodes the industry's tunnel vision in a series of skits, the best of which are explosively funny. His vision of the Black Acting School, run by white instructors ("You, too, can learn to walk black"), captures the movie's message in a raucous nutshell. He also gives us a memorable black street version of a Siskel-Ebert-type critic show called "Sneakin' in the Movies." This supercheapo flick ($ 100,000) is a hit-or-miss affair, but it comes as a tonic: no one's made this movie before. [6 Apr 1987, p.64]

It's no shameless Hollywood weepie, mind you, but an overestheticized, coolly abstracted weepie, which is not necessarily better. [19 Nov 1984, p.132]