Instead of being moved by Christ's suffering, or awed by his sacrifice, I felt abused by a filmmaker intent on punishing an audience, for who knows what sins.

Unfortunately, this narf's a drag: she talks like a fortune cookie and doesn't really do anything. Still, the multicultural cast is fun, the images have a painterly beauty and there are some beguiling comic touches before the story sinks into a swamp of solemn metaphysical glop.

Dead of Winter is played straight and not without style, but the material (by Marc Shmuger and Mark Malone) is such implausible, antique claptrap it's hard not to think of it as camp. [23 Feb 1987, p.79]

The comic setup is smart, and the undertone of seriousness makes the first part of "City Slickers" genuinely amusing. But when the movie decides to get seriously serious it wears out its welcome fast. Did we really pay to see a male-sensitivity-training movie on horseback? [24 June 1991, p.60]

Attempting a frame-by-frame duplication of Warner Bros. '40s filmmaking--even the extroverted acting style apes the period--Soderbergh has produced a movie so self-conscious that it's drained of all life.

The updated King Kong doesn't really believe in itself; it snickers, straightens its face, roars and tramples, snickers again. Behind the bigness lurks a conventionality of spirit.It does have a certain thunderous fun from time to time, but that's not the stuff that dreams are made on. [20 Dec 1976, p.102]

Robbins eschews leftist diatribes for a bold cartoon version of history. It's as crowded and energetic as a big parade...and just about as subtle.

To anyone who has seen half the movies he appropriates, and can therefore guess every twist of the plot miles before it happens, Foul Play's frenetic eagerness to please is about as refreshing as the whiff of an exhaust pipe on a hot city afternoon. [24 July 1978, p.59]

Unfortunately, no one seems to have clued Demi in on the joke. Never known for her light touch, she appears to be act-ing (earnestly, humorlessly) in some other movie altogether, a dreary melodrama about a noble mom fighting for her child.

Maybe you have to be 14 to find all of this terribly clever.

May only be remembered for featuring the first homoerotic nude bathing scene in children's animated movie history.

Though Helen Slater makes a bad first impression, she's not a bad Supergirl by the end, being likably straightforward, guileless and sweet. And unlike Reeve, who looks exactly the same whether he's Clark Kent or Superman, Slater makes you believe that people wouldn't know brunette Linda Lee was actually blond Supergirl. That may not be a major cinematic achievement, but it's about the best that Supergirl has to offer. [26 Nov 1984, p.119]

It's not just that the movie is formulaic; it's disingenuous. It relies on Roberts's smile to erase all misgivings. But all the stardust in the world can't disguise the fact that this is more package than picture.

This is state-of-the-art stuff, and clearly Landis is as proud of it as those kid prodigies who build computers out of Q-Tips. Landis also out-palms Brian De Palma, not only giving you nightmares about massacres but double nightmares that go on to meta-massacres just when you think they're over. But despite all of this super-sophistication the movie is finally just as silly as the old horror pictures it ambiguously kids. There's nothing like a rotting, wisecracking corpse to embody the bubble-gum nihilism of the Wise-Guy Wave. [7 Sept 1981, p.82]

Spielberg has brought forth a farce that is both relentlessly spectacular and spectacularly unfunny. [17 Dec 1979, p.111]

Almost perversely, Laura Mars breaks the easiest of movie promises: here is a movie about the Beautiful People that hasn't bothered to make them beautiful. [14 Aug 1979, p.62]

The film is too dumb to work as patriotic exhortation and too mawkish to work as blood-and-guts exploitation. It's a long commercial in which the Marlboro Man has become the American Guerrilla, with his good buddies, good guns and a bottomless case of Coors. [03 Sep 1984, p.73]

This would be acceptable, even powerful, if it were a genuinely tragic vision. But there's no true tragic sense here, not even the effective blend of entertainment and social perception of cop movies like "Serpico" and "The Onion Field." [16 Feb 1981, p.81]

It's a little late to be spoofing Westerns, and most of the high-noonery in BTTF III falls flat. [4 June 1990, p.82]

Onstage, trapped in the mini-wasteland of the parking lot, the creeped-out kids crackled like lightning in a bottle. Linklater's meager attempts to open up the movie drain its energy.

Romero and King want to be as unsophisticated as possible, while maintaining a sense of humor, and they succeed all too well. The characters, story lines and images are studiously one-dimensional. For anyone over 12 there's not much pleasure to be had watching two masters of horror deliberately working beneath themselves. Creepshow is a faux naif horror film: too arch to be truly scary, too elemental to succeed as satire. [22 Nov 1982, p.118]

Penn is a real talent, but it seems downright unfair to cast him in a part designed to compete with the memory of his brother Sean's role in Fast Times. This is one for the kids; had it tried harder, it could have been one for everyone. [08 Oct 1984, p.89]

It's a gorgeous bad movie, the folly of a great visual stylist.

Too facile to resonate deeply. Shouldn't a movie celebrating Nash give you some idea what his mathematical work is about? Fishier still is the suggestion that the cure for paranoid schizophrenia is love.

Dahl himself thought his book would be impossible to translate into film, and for all the ingenuity that's been thrown at the screen, perhaps he was right. This overgrown peach never ripens.

BASEketball feels stale and inert. Still, Parker and Stone have a nice, giddy rapport, and it's a kick to hear traces of Cartman and Kenny in their dude-speak.

The whole movie has the air of a sermon delivered over an empty grave. In surfers' terms, Big Wednesday is a wipe-out. [14 Aug 1978, p.62]

Director Amy Heckerling cripples half her jokes by telegraphing the punch lines: a sight gag at the top of the Eiffel Tower involving a tossed hat and a little dog would be a lot funnier if we hadn't seen it coming. Some of the jokes seem 25 years out of date: one hardly has to go all the way to France these days, much less cross a state line, to encounter a racy topless bar. [12 Aug 1985, p.71]