Car-crazy John Stockwell stumbles upon a time-warp machine that unleashes forms from the past and future (dinosaurs, Nazis and mutants) upon his local high school. The principal pleasure in this last comic adventure is Dennis Hopper's science teacher, a tie-dyed-in-the-wool '60s activist who can't forget Woodstock. Forget the rest. [26 Aug 1985, p.62]

There's an inspirational, hang-on-to-your-dreams message, but it comes only at the very end of a long, grim, painful journey. Holiday cheer is not what this movie is offering.

if you're trying to make us believe we're watching "reality" by using a faux documentary style, you need actors who never look like they are acting, and this is where Redacted stumbles.

Though some viewers are sure to take offense, between the scattered laughs the movie's most remarkable achievement is its run-of-the mill dullness. [10 Nov 1986, p.86]

In the end, the film lacks the skill of its actors and ends up feeling disjointed and confused about its own message.

Von Trier, however, undercuts the universality of his own message with his meretricious closing credits, set to David Bowie's "Young Americans," which explicitly turns Dogville into an anti-American screed.

The movie plays like a clumsy assault on post-9/11 paranoia. It references "America's war," uses imagery direct from Abu Ghraib and contains dialogue likely to offend anyone who's not, say, a suicide bomber.

Both Henry Winkler and Sally Field have talent to spare, but there's just so far you can go with roles like these, and director Jeremy Paul Kagan, unable to settle on a tone, isn't any help. Winkler is too fresh and appealing by half - he acts like a man who's seen combat only on TV; he can't take us inside his pain. Field has to push her gamin charm to make up for the holes in her character, and she comes off actressy. When Ford is onscreen, the tinny echoes of old movies die away and Heroes takes on - briefly - the resonance of real life. [14 Nov 1977, p.78]

In his seventh movie as James Bond, Rog is looking less like a chap with a license to kill than a gent with an application to retire. [27 May 1985, p.74]

Richard Attenborough's glumly misconceived Chaplin trudges its way through the great comic's long, brilliant, scandal-ridden career without ever catching fire. [28 Dec 1992, p.56]

Newell, no hack, tries not to milk the cliches shamelessly, and that may be the movie's final undoing. Lacking the courage of its own vulgarity, Mona Lisa Smile is as tepid as old bathwater.

This is a movie afraid of its own shadows.

Taps aspires to be both a movie for the conservative '80s and a youth-in-revolt, anti-military movie of the '60s. The contradictions break the dramatic spine of director Harold Becker's film, which grinds to a predictably violent climax without ever having made its basic premise believable. How many teen-agers do you know who would sacrifice their lives for a military school? [28 Dec 1981, p.65]

All the state-of-the-art technology in the world is no help to an actor saddled with Lucas's tinny dialogue.

First-time director James Signorelli and his four screen-writers fall right into the trap of imitative fallacy -- they want to show us a vulgar, tacky character and do it by producing a vulgar, tacky movie. [22 Aug 1983, p.73]

There have been and will be worse sequels than City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold, but there are few that seem so unnecessary. Slickers II, directed by Paul Weiland, is so harmless it's numbing: a little male bonding, some sagebrush slapstick, a couple of decent quips and a gift-wrapped moral. I kept wondering how the filmmakers mustered up the energy to go to work every morning. [27 June 1994, p.54]

A mish-mash of special effects, tasteless comedy and pointless action.

Like the object of its lampooning -- television -- "Amazon" is lightweight and often predictable. Anyone who's left grade school by the time "Leave It to Beaver" came on the air might want to sit this one out. [5 Oct 1987, p.86]

Heartburn deflates before your eyes: it's less a slice of life than a slice of lifestyle. [28 July 1986, p.70]

By this time your face is twisted out of shape from reacting to Brooks's nonstop gags with either a yock or a wince. The trouble is that Brooks (who wrote, produced and directed the movie) doesn't develop anything: just like King Louis, he skeet-shoots the audience with his gags. He needs the creative help he had on his biggest hits, "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein." Good bad taste is too precious to be bollixed up. [22 June 1981, p.87]

The heavy-handed direction by Volker Schlondorff doesn't help to make the movie convincing or dramatically effective. [16 Mar 1990, p.54]

It's like nothing you've seen before. Yet, over all, the story it tells seems predictable, secondhand, and its "profound" revelations hackneyed. [12 Sep 1983, p.88]

If you can lose like a winner, can you win like a loser? And if it doesn't matter if you win or lose, how come Sly always wins? Maybe these ambiguities will be resolved in his next opus, when Sly, playing Oldsmobile Cutlass, enters the high-stakes arena of championship horseshoe pitching. [23 Feb 1987, p.79]

Gator is sloppily directed by Reynolds himself and filled with anti-ethnic humor that Reynolds has picked up from all those guest shots on the talk shows with Don Rickles et al. [13 Sep 1976, p.89]

Unlike Clark's extraordinary books of black-and-white photography, Kids is stunningly anti-erotic, though not untainted by sensationalism. By condensing all this inflammatory material into a 24-hour time frame, Clark and 19-year-old screen-writer Harmony Korine create an overwrought narrative that's sometimes tedious in its relentlesshess.

The movie wants to make a serious point that old folks shouldn't be treated as children; the message would be easier to swallow if the moviemakers didn't treat the audience the same way. [20 Oct 1986, p.78b]

Once the shock value rubs off, this hyped-up movie reveals itself to be as empty as the desperate boys it pretends to explore. [05 July 1993, p.57]

The entire solemn, portentous edifice that is The Village collapses of its own fake weight. Just about everything that makes Shyamalan special misfires here.