In a way it's silly to review a movie like this; it's like reviewing a case of acne. John G. Avildsen, the checkered-career director who made Rocky, has made this one a kind of Pebbly -- a Rocky for teenychoppers, about a semi-wimpy kid named Daniel (Ralph Macchio) who's constantly being clobbered by the creeps in his high school until he's taught karate by his janitor, Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki [Pat] Morita). [25 June 1984, p.69]

It’s not half bad, with cool locations and a great stunt leap from the top of a Hong Kong high-rise.

It's not as cool as it sounds.

But once the couple clinch their bond -- just when the story gets really shameless -- the life drains out of the movie. Love Affair takes such pains to dodge vulgarity it forgets to put anything in its place.

Light of Day has the virtues of sincerity, but that may also be what keeps it so relentlessly mundane. [09 Feb 1987, p.75]

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

Wanted has one good plot twist in store (though it makes little sense), and its sense of humor about its own silliness keeps the fantasy afloat for a while. But as the body count rises, so does the portentous tone, and the relentlessness of Bekmambetov's overamped style becomes oppressive.

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]

But Smooth Talk, alas, is two movies, and the parts don't mesh. What begins as subdued, plotless realism -- everything up to Arnold's late entrance -- then lurches into Gothic melodrama. Arnold is a literary conceit, Connie is real: thus their portentous mating ritual seems more contrived than inevitable. Smooth Talk feels like an anecdote that's been stretched out of shape. [24 March 1986, p.77]

While the first half showcases an impressive new directorial talent, the last two quarters fail to score.

The main problem is the script, which has a few scares but little smarts.

Unfortunately, much of this lineup turns out to be a carbon copy of the "Bull Durham" lineup. We have the wild young fireballer (Charlie Sheen); the veteran catcher (Tom Berenger); the veteran catcher's veteran girlfriend who also happens to be a baseball expert ('You ought to open your stance a little - they're pitching you inside"); and, the superstitious Cuban who sacrifices chickens, kisses snakes and lists his religion as "voodoo."

An ambitious, intense, but overdetermined exploration of the varieties of ethnic intolerance.

It succeeds in bringing O'Barr's comic-book vision to life, but there's little else going on behind the graphic razzle-dazzle and the moody, ominous soundtrack.

Hasn't the South as a cornucopia of Lovable Eccentrics worn out its welcome? After Tennessee Williams? After Carson McCullers? After -- what, you say your appetite for L.E.'s is insatiable? Then Miss Firecracker, which Beth Henley has adapted from her 1984 play, is your heaping platter of that delicacy. [01 May 1989, p.75]

It's precisely at the finish line that Simon's calculations misfire and The Goodbye Girl collapses like a house of cards. The movie could have told us something about the wrenching collision of careers and romance, but it plays it safe, and in the end pays for it. [05 Dec 1977, p.109]

Director Walter Hill has only the faintest interest in realism. His New York City is merely the backdrop for a bone-crunching fantasy that has more to do with science fiction and musicals than social commentary. When it's good - which is not often enough - it suggests what The Wiz, under happier circumstances, might have been. [26 Feb 1979, p.81]

Howard redeems this lumpy fantasy. Soft-spoken and mysterious, he presides over the movie with a dangerous, feline grace.

It's gorgeous. It's epic. It's spectacular. But two hours later, it also proves to be emotionally impenetrable.

The film has its dumb points: too many shots of churning surf and lovers nestled in beach blankets, not to mention the premise that women find incommunicative, hulking shells like Blake the height of irresistibility. But it gets you.

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

I might buy Babel if it had any real interest in its characters, but it's too busy moving them around its mechanistic chessboard to explore any nuances or depths.

Swing Shift has neither enough laughs nor enough sobs. [23 Apr 1984, p.80]

The loving exhumation of an earlier cinematic style suggests that the director is looking to regain his own moviemaking innocence, to make the kind of picture that moved him as a child. But you can't go home again -- not on secondhand, sentimentalized memories. In transferring Hinton's teens to the screen, Coppola and screenwriter Kathleen Knutsen Rowell have idealized them to the point of cliche. [4 Apr 1983, p.74]

A fine film; as an Ed Norton picture, it's a disappointment.

Even though Alvin Sargent's script lacks both grace and plausibility and director Sydney Pollack has succumbed to pretentions of European artiness, star chemistry might have made this love story catch fire. [03 Oct 1977, p. 71]

Just because Sandler's Sonny makes little sense as an actual human being doesn't mean he won't make you laugh.

Sleeping With the Enemy is a flat tire of a movie. Looks good -- white sidewalls, crome spokes -- but it flaps and clunks and never gets to vroom. [18 Feb 1991, p.64B]