The actors attack their roles with commitment (Hartnett’s understatement is impressive), but their fervor can’t hide the movie’s implausible, often confusing storytelling.

Sean Penn, Elizabeth McGovern and Nicolas Cage are three attractive, gifted young actors whose combined talent, if properly used, could set a movie ablaze. Nothing of the sort happens in Racing With the Moon, a movie that wants badly to be taken as tender and understated when in fact it's merely dull and trite. [02 Apr 1984, p.85]

The most interesting thing about Beowulf, alas, is its technology. It's the work of a man who has fallen in love with his toys, but I miss the wicked satirist who made "Used Cars." And the truth is the motion capture in Beowulf comes across as an unsatisfying compromise between animation and live action.

Talk Radio feels like a sketch inflated beyond the breaking point. Sure, it's disturbing. So is watching Morton Downey Jr. Stone seems to believe that he's lifting the lid off the creepy-crawly American unconscious. Perhaps. Or maybe Talk Radio is just a movie in love with the hysterical sound of its own voice.[9 Jan 1989, p.54]

Shorn of its medical shock value, Coma is nothing more than Nancy Drew Goes to Surgery, a creaky blend of red herrings, ominous stares, stale cliff-hangers and doom-laden music. [06 Feb 1978, p.86]

Kill is a disappointing movie: slow, overpopulated and muddled in its thinking.

Rollover wants to be a thriller, love story and economics lesson rolled into one, but in trying to do so much, it shortchanges each element. The screenplay (by David Shaber from a story by Shaber, Howard Kohn and David Weir) doesn't hang together. [14 Dec 1981, p.125]

A dispiriting attempt to wring a last gasp of mirth from an already dangerously overextended series. [22 Aug 1983, p.73]

Actually it's relatively clean, downright affirmative (the girls get insurance plans and 90 percent of the take) and resoundingly unfunny. [2 Aug 1982, p.63]

This stiff-in-the-joints movie has little feel for its setting or period, and crucial chunks seem to have been left on the cutting-room floor. Robert Rossen's Oscar-winning 1949 version has nothing to fear.

There are no ideas, just repartee. Snoop Dogg, as a superfly snitch, and Vince Vaughn, as a drug lord, are wasted in obvious supporting roles. It's harmless fun--and too lazy to be more.

By the time this atmospheric but thoroughly muddled story reaches its conclusion, the film has totally self-destructed. [31 Dec 1979, p.49]

Herbert Ross directed this murky-looking film, and Buck Henry wrote it from a story by Charles Shyer, Nancy Meyers and Harvey Miller. They have all had better days. [31 Dec 1984, p.65]

Torn between moody grandiosity and cartoonish mayhem, Daredevil tries to have it both ways, and succeeds at neither.

The Omen is a dumb and largely dull movie. No true connoisseur of kitsch will confuse the work of writer David Seltzer and director Richard Donner with the masterpiece of psychic manipulation contrived by William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin in The Exorcist, not to mention what the diabolical Roman Polanski made out of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby. [12 July 1976, p.69]

Some snazzy expressionist cinematography and an overkill rock score cannot disguise the fact that Reckless is a totally redundant repackaging of every misunderstood-teen-ager cliche from "Rebel Without a Cause" right up to "All the Right Moves," with which it shares a bleak industrial-town setting. [06 Feb 1984, p.81]

An over-the-top thriller, too loosely tethered to reality to be a lesson about anything other than the limits of popcorn consumption.

The movie's only real attempts to drum up excitement involve gratuitous violence. [04 Apr 1977, p.73]

There's no suspense in either Demon Seed or Audrey Rose because their protagonists haven't got the resourcefulness of an acorn squash. [18 Apr 1977, p.64]

Forget "Bonnie and Clyde"; even compared with "Night Moves," which also starred Hackman, Target disappoints. [18 Nov 1985, p.94]

Midway never quite decides whether war is hell, good clean fun, or merely another existential dilemma. This drab extravaganza toys with so many conflicting attitudes that it winds up reducing the pivotal World War II battle in the Pacific to utter nonsense. [28 June 1976, p.78]

In this tetralogical effort, writer-director-star Stallone has succumbed to the old one-two of silliness and cynicism. [9 Dec 1985, p.92]

Corny and sweet, Doc Hollywood has its genuine charms, but they'd be a lot more charming if Caton-Jones and the screen-writers allowed them to sneak up on us. Instead, the movie oversells its whimsy and fits its quirkiness into a sitcom formula that's as preordained as the hero's moral rejuvenation.

First-time director Graeme Clifford, a former editor, hasn't set out merely to exploit this lurid legend, and he tries to suggest the multiple layers of the story, but he simply doesn't do his job well. The film has no rhythm, it's stagy and inauthentic-looking, and the patchwork script has that tinny ring that so often infects movies about real people. [06 Dec 1982, p.152]

This is an elaborate production, but all the jazzy sets and explosions in the world can't disguise the story's complete lack of urgency.

A tired piece of hackwork rescued only by the presence of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The whole enterprise moves in slow motion, with its programed music predicting each routine step. [07 July 1975, p.57]

Spielberg doesn't differentiate between the good ideas in the script and the bad ones: everything is given an emphatic, production-number treatment... His ultraslick, seductive technique can be a pleasure to watch in itself, but it can't disguise the fact that "Always" is a decidedly uneternal fantasy. [1 Jan. 1990, p.60]

With characteristic Hollywood hypocrisy, the movie sells male chauvinism as it knocks it and ridicules winning while it uses who's-gonna-win as its central energy. [14 Jul 1975, p.77]