Every role is miscast. Whose idea was it to have the boyishly British Bale play an illiterate Greek peasant, or the elegant Hurt a gruff-voiced country doctor? Cruz’s run of bad luck in American movies continues.

The movie feels like a half-hour skit blown up, like its stars, to unwieldy proportions. [02 Jul 1984, p.45]

Labour teeters on the edge of the amateur. Yet it's hard not to root for its moonstruck spirit, or to succumb to the panache of the pastiche.

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]

There are some very funny moments, and Coughlan is a delight as Leigh Anne's best friend.

Like many movies with wimpy intellectual infrastructures, St. Elmo's Fire is not without a certain trumpery charm. [1 June 1995, p.55]

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]

Provides some great laughs, but founders when it tries to tackle more serious issues. Entitled "10 Dates," it might have been a much better film.

A disappointingly slack, hackneyed comedy.

With the talent involved in Sphere -- director Barry Levinson, novelist Michael Crichton and actors Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Sharon Stone--how could it fail? Somehow, it does.

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

As long as it stays focused on showbiz, Bewitched is light, frothy fun. But Ephron insists on turning Bewitched into a love story, and that's when the fun starts to seep out of the movie.

Despite its bizarre intellectual project, Le Pecheur's film is seductive and shockingly sexy.

It's not as cool as it sounds.

A "croc" of nonsense.

Midler's performance does not stand out. She remains very much Bette Midler.

The Clan of the Cave Bear is dog. [27 Jan 1986, p.69]

Think Batman on crystal meth.

Not only the silliest chapter in the Omen trilogy, it's the dullest and most inept. [30 Mar 1981, p.83]

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

Couldn’t have arrived at a better time: movies have been so bad lately that audiences are positively starving for something mediocre.

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]

A vile concoction. [25 July 1983, p.75]

About as bad as it gets?a thrill-less "Speed" wannabe.

Like people who compulsively giggle whenever they tell you bad news, the movie runs for cover in lame, comic shtick.

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.

Writer John Patrick Shanley, whose mix of comedy and romantic whimsy produced intoxicating results in Moonstruck, mixes thrills, social satire and romantic whimsy in The January Man and gets mush. The whodunit is spectacularly implausible, the comedy misjudged, the romance forced. [30 Jan 1989, p.70]

Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair are asked to humiliate themselves many times over in The Sweetest Thing, and they do it with such game good spirits that they ought to get the actor’s equivalent of a Purple Heart.