Slightly soggy.

Those who haven’t seen “Lock, Stock” will probably get a bigger kick out of Snatch than those who have. The second time around, what seemed spontaneous can sometimes feel strained.

Crossroads is an uneasy hybrid. The script, by 26-year-old John Fusco, wants both to offer authentic homage to the great Delta musicians and to appeal to the teen market. [24 March 1986, p.77]

There are pleasures to be had in the handsome, heroic The Last Samurai. But they' all on the surface.

Baby Mama is rescued by two scene-stealing veterans: Sigourney Weaver as the smug, patrician owner of the surrogate company, and a priceless, ponytailed Steve Martin as the self-infatuated New Age owner of Round Earth. These two aren't onscreen a lot, but the movie seems most fully alive when they are.

While there are few huge laughs, the very lack of pushiness in Harold Ramis's direction comes as comic relief. [8 Aug 1983, p.55]

The plot is madcap nonsense, and the comic aim is sometimes very broad and very low, but the belly-laugh quotient in Arthur (The In-Laws) Hiller's movie is the highest since the last Midler movie, Ruthless People. [26 Jan 1987, p.76]

You may not swallow every coincidental encounter and hair's-breadth escape, but this crisp, complex thriller makes you care what happens every moment; Hackman brings such road-worn humanity to his part you may not realize until the end that this Everyman is a Superman in middle-age disguise. [4 Sept 1989, p.68]

After the opening sequence, much of the action in The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth James Bond screen epic and the third starring Roger Moore as Bond, is somewhat downhill. [08 Aug 1977, p.77]

Only near the end does the mix of melodrama, mush and message get out of hand.

Where so many comic-book movies feel as disposable as Kleenex, the passionate, uncynical Hulk stamps itself into your memory. Lee’s movies are built to last.

You don't have to be a Hitchcock idolater to see that this dumb, dull, plodding, pseudo-camp bore is a callous, commercial parasite. [13 June 1983, p.78]

Director Stuart Rosenberg and screenwriter W. D. Richter have a strong, grim, angry story to tell, and the urgency of their convictions overcomes the frequent clumsiness and confusion of the telling. Unsparing in its evocation of brutality, and unswerving in its commitment to Brubaker's radical, uncompromising ideals, the film at its best provokes a powerful sense of tension and outrage. [23 June 1980, p.75]

The secret of Volcano's success as a better-than-average disasterama is its nonstop pace.

Deep Blue Sea gives good rush -- earning its stripes as one terrific junk movie.

Lively, likable and refreshingly unsensationalistic about the drugs and sex that come with the territory, this techno-propelled mash note to the rave spirit sticks to the surface.

As well-crafted and sensitive as it is, the movie remains one step removed from inspiration.

A decidedly mixed bag.

The movie does have somewhat more lilt and levity, much of it due to Jim Carrey as the Riddler. But there's still plenty of murk, physical and metaphysical, and more psychobabble about Bruce Wayne's obsessions and repressions.

Trying too hard to grab our attention, he (Marshall) loses it. The art of the geisha prizes subtlety, stillness, grace. Why doesn't this movie?

The wrong people made this movie, and its failure rankles. It's a handsomely designed, beautifully photographed production full of good actors who have been asked to play their roles in unfailingly hackneyed fashion. [01 May 1978, p.89]

The Name of the Rose spins a whopping good tale, a medieval murder mystery that only those with seriously damaged attention spans will find hard to enjoy. [29 Sept 1986, p.63]

The film has too much class for its own sensibility; it seems often stuck in this class like a fly in molasses. [24 Sep 1979, p.102]

A shallowly satiric suburban joke that says some ugly and unsupported things about what kind of women men really want. [03 Mar 1975, p.70]

In this distressingly generic spy spoof, it's not Maxwell who's clueless, but the filmmakers.

In the second half the film meanders into all the danger areas one might expect: predictable plot twists, tearful separation scenes between the lovers, and even a joyful reunion in Rome.

Only the first half of Johnny Dangerously really works, but then such nonstop silliness is almost impossible to sustain. [14 Jan 1985, p.53]

Romero's remake jettisons just those qualities that lent class to the 1968 original. [5 Nov 1990, p.79]