The strenuously improbable finale in an indoor zoo -- incorporating every available lethal animal Hollywood could rent -- will have you on the edge of your seat . . . straining for the exit. Movies don't get much more impersonal than this. [28 May 1990, p.72]

It's just a standard, mediocre horror flick that wants to be taken seriously. The creators missed the point entirely: even teenagers know that there's no audience for this type of film anymore.

Under the tone-deaf direction of Peter Yates, Krull manages to be both lavishly overdone and bizarrely half-baked. [08 Aug 1983, p.55]

But the script by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod mistakes busyness for funniness. They make Monty Brewster a fading minorleague pitcher. But we want screwballs, not curve balls. Watching the frantic Brewster try to spend 30 million bucks is more tiresome than hilarious. [3 June 1985, p.65]

A lumbering, self-important three-hour melodrama that defies credibility at every turn.

This is one of those films that isn't a fllm but some repulsively complicated business deal. Nighthawks purports to be about terrorism, but it should be sued for nonpurport. [20 Apr 1981, p.93]

One can safely doze through the extremely bland first hour, which feels more like an advertisement for marine theme parks than a suspense movie. [1 Aug 1983, p.47]

Once the film devolves into teary hospital scenes and courtroom shtik, you might pine for Thelma and Louise's daring road to oblivion. [20 Feb 1995, Pg.72]

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman has written quips, not characters and Joel Schumacher still seems miscast as a Bat-action director: he stages the mayhem confusingly and the comedy too broadly.

Howard Franklin's Larger Than Life is so bad that even the elephant seems embarrassed. [11 Nov 1996, p.78]

Bad, but not criminally so.

Trying for a tone somewhere between an art film, an absurdist comedy, a horror movie and an old Saturday-matinee serial, he's made a handsome, cripplingly self-conscious thriller that's devoid of any real thrills. [3 Feb. 1992, p.65]

[Aldrich's] aiming so low in The Choirboys that he's even lost his technical competence; the movie's not just fetid, it's inept. [02 Jan 1978, p.59]

All of this may be based on fact, but as presented in the cutesy script by Ted Leighton and Peter Hyams, it has the hollow ring of counterfeit coin and the formulaic symmetry of a made-for-TV movie. [11 Aug 1980, p.69]

As dumb as Looker is, it's not dull, and Crichton does pull off one very funny sequence--a black comic climax in which corpses and commercials become hilariously intertwined. lt should have been a skit on "Second City Television." [2 Nov 1981, p.108]

Field comes off best under the circumstances - she has real spirit - but Leibman, too eager to be liked, hits all the stereotypes on the head and Bridges is saddled with an underwritten, utterly inexplicable character. What Norma Rae really tells us is that Hollywood is still capable of making condescending paeans to the "little people" with all the phoniness of yesteryear. [5 March 1979, p.105]

Inflated to more than two hours, spiced up with lyrical pseudeo-erotic sex scenes, Scott's Revenge is long on candlelight and billowing white curtains and short on emotional potency. [26 Feb 1990, p.66]

Heavy Metal is the bummer version of "Star Wars," an expression of adolescent revenge against the world. What gives the movie its thoroughly unpleasant integrity is the suspicion it arouses that the guys who dreamed this stuff up mean business. If only they'd saved it for their shrinks. [10 Aug 1981, p.69]

Newman has certainly directed well in the past (Rachel, Rachel), but he flounders helplessly here, unable to find a tone or a shape for his comical-mawkish story. [12 Mar 1984, p.89]

Rapidly veers towards tired 80's territory rather than offering anything new and fresh.

This echo of the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans is the only new gimmick in Edward Zwick's entry in the cliche- terrorist genre.

What we want to know is why we should care about any of these stick figures. Eszterhas seems as bored with them as we are. He's just moving his dopey plot along, leaving Friedkin to fill in the gaps with car chases and irrelevant chinoiserie.

An empty videogame of a movie about interplanetary pest control.

This is a farfetched premise, and the movie pays a price for it.

Director J. Lee Thompson has come a long, depressing way since the days of The Guns of Navarone: his film is sloppily edited, murkily photographed and shot through with a mean streak of sadism unredeemed by its clumsy camp value. [12 Mar 1979, p.89]

Rourke, a good actor, is reduced to doing his whispering-wacko shtik. Supermodel Otis has a marvelous face and can smile and breathe heavily at the same time. Only Jacqueline Bisset gives a real performance, as Claudia, a fiscal whiz who gets her real kicks not form the carnal but the commercial. [7 May 1990]

One look at[Neil Diamond's] conspicuously coiffed hair-do and spotlight-glazed eyes and you know this man has been assimilated years ago, probably at Caesars Palace...Richard Fleischer directed this twaddle, using so many yellow filters it looks as if jaundice had set in. [5 Jan 1981, p.55]

The special effects are definitely the best thing about this curiously bland disasterthon.