The longest, grimmest and least funny of the trilogy.

Congo is basically the old African ooga-mooga movie brought into the P.C., high-tech age.

Payback may not always be P.C., but it's not interested in making friends, anyway. Just killing enemies.

The plain fact is that Halloween II is quite scary, more than a little silly and immediately forgettable. [16 Nov 1981, p.117]

Hotel New Hampshire wants to be both charming and tough: a fairy tale with wings of steel. Its engines roar, but it doesn't fly. [2 Apr 1984, p.85]

he Dogs of War doesn't begin to deal with the moral complexity it promises: it keeps settling for easy, melodramatic solutions. Irvin is obviously a gifted storyteller, but he's shackled with the wrong story: it's a shame he couldn't have scrapped more of Forsyth's original plot and made a real movie about mercenaries and the Third World. [23 Feb 1981, p.61]

There are inspired moments in this edgy, unstable comedy.

Tthough it is action packed, spectacularly edited and often quite funny, one can't help feeling that Carpenter is squeezing the last drops out of a fatigued genre. Ten years ago this would have been one wild and crazy movie; in this era of ruthlessly efficient entertainments, it's a rather one-note evening. [14 July 1986, p.69]

At least in the new Omen, the filmmakers have the sense to keep evil Damien's dialogue to a minimum. His villainy is all in the dimples. But is it too familiar to be scary anymore?

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.

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]

It's filled with Mann's signature macho verisimilitude, but essentially it's the stuff of what, in saner fiscal times, would have been a B movie. Miami Vice delivers the thrills, atmosphere and romance it promises, but it doesn't resonate like major Mann.

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.

Sometimes stunning, ultimately stupefying epic .

Soft to the point of squishiness, Phenomenon is rescued from terminal bathos by Travolta's radiant conviction.

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.

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.

Mangold is something of a pseudo-Scorsese, assembling elements of other pictures like "Internal Affairs" and "Bad Lieutenant" into an eclectic mix that lacks its own vital reality.

Complacently conventional...it threatens to turn an interesting actor into a self-parodying commodity.

Away from the television screen, Selleck is as stiff as his bulletproof vest. The only fun performers here are sexy, Kinskilipped Kirstie Alley as a scapegoat and a swarm of robot spiders that clatter-crawl all over their victims. [17 Dec 1984, p.84]

Charming cinematic bauble.

Veteran director Richard Fleischer brings to the Conan sequel some of the endearingly stolid craftsmanship of his old movies, while avoiding the lip-smacking sadism of the original. The movie is consistently dumb, though not hard to watch, but it would be a lot more fun if someone had bothered to give Conan a personality. [02 July 1984, p.45]

This slick, handsomely produced thriller only gets the pulse half racing.

A style so chic, studied and murky it resembles a cross between a Nike commercial and a bad Polish art film.

This is high-risk chemistry, and the results are bizarre. The bulging forearms and corncob pipe are in place, but this Popeye hates spinach. The plot hinges on his Oedipal search for his Pappy (Ray Walston), the songs and minimal dances are designed for singers who can't sing and dancers who can't dance, and this gruff icon of pug nacious, all-American goodness has been set adrift on an abstract isle that can perhaps best be described as backlot Ionesco. Popeye's air of alienated whimsy makes for an odd family movie indeed. [22 Dec 1980, p.72]

Hughes is just treading lukewarm water. Stotz is the blandest of his teen heroes yet. [16 Mar 1987]

A flat, cliched film in a flat, cliched genre.

Along the way, not just the storytelling but the original intention has gotten muddled. You leave The Alamo uncertain of what you're meant to feel: is this a celebration of patriotic sacrifice or an illustration of war's futility?