Nutty paranoid thriller.

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]

Pirates is pure Polanski, but it's unfortunately not good Polanski. Attempting to revamp the swashbuckler genre the way he parodied Dracula movies in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," he's produced an abstract action comedy so emotionally detached it's impossible to stay involved. [28 July 1986, p.70]

Michael Beck (of "The Warriors") shows no discernible talent for musical romanticism Olivia ("Totally Hot") Newton-John sings prettily but is totally tepid, and the ever graceful Gene Kelly deserves a medal for keeping a straight face. Robert Greenwald, the director, should look into another line of work. Perhaps opening a disco? [18 Aug 1980, p.85]

The Blue Lagoon is really an exploitation film whose core is so soft it's turned to an overripe mango. [23 June 1980, p.75]

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

There is obviously a good deal of built in human interest in this material. But this movie squanders its most important resource - its people - by employing an all-star cast so huge and unwieldy that nobody is on hand long enough to exert much of an emotional tug. [27 Dec 1976, p.57]

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]

Hampered by a silly plot and flat script.

Leonard's tight, vivid brushstrokes have been turned into cinematic graffiti. [6 May 1985, p.73]

Offers easy wisdom and light-hearted fun.

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]

Unfortunately, the strong ensemble cast is not able to hold together this often wayward and meandering story.

With pretty Martin Hewitt as David and pretty Brooke Shields as Jade, what you get is an overwrought teen make-out movie. [27 July 1981, p.74]

Body of Evidence won't be remembered for classic plotting or brilliant legal gambits. But give it its due: it holds one's attention.

Hilariously incompetent.

Best Defense, already split in two by its dual story lines, lurches about desperately in search of a tone and a target. [30 Jul 1984, p.80]

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.

The Slugger's Wife isn't remotely provocative -- or even entertaining. It's an example of creative anorexia: the movie is so thin you leave the theater feeling you've watched the outtakes by mistake. [1 Apr 1985, p.87]

Save yourself from this mess.

Second Hand Hearts is a very classy-looking movie. Haskell Wexler is the cinematographer, and he transforms the gauchest milieus into elegant tableaux. But Harris and Blake don't mesh with Ashby's innately cool style. [18 May 1981]

The first half concerns our hero's satirical misadventures on earth, except that director Huyck has the comic finesse of Hulk Hogan. The second half is an overproduced orgy of car crashes and monsters, in which Howard must save the world from the Dark Overlords of the universe. George Lucas was the executive producer. The Force was not with him. [25 Aug 1986, p.63]

I suspect a lot of people will be scared - and thus satisfied - by The Amityville Horror, a film that stoops to some of the oldest and cheapest tricks of the trade in its dogged pursuit of goose bumps. It's a crude haunted-house movie that depends for much of its tension on the possibility that the events that befell George and Kathleen Lutz might be true (though there is considerable evidence that Jay Anson's best-selling book was more fiction that fact). [13 Aug 1979, p.75]

Criticizing it is like spitting in the wind, but at the risk of sounding like the spoilsport villain of the piece (a snippety liberal Washington bureaucrat, wouldn't you know), there's a smug, bully-boy spirit underneath this supposedly merry romp. The message is Go for It, and the theme song tells us 'Youv'e gotta have a dream to, make a dream come true," but what have our dreams come to? Breaking the 55-mph speed limit? In this movie, paradise is being able to land a Piper Cubin a busy city street to pick up another six-pack. Unfettered individualism has come to this: drive hard and carry a big Schlitz. [13 July 1981, p.81]

The crude humor in Drop Dead Gorgeous does not have a moral point to it. It's just crude.

Everyone in the film is either annoying or unpleasant.

Like Sherman McCoy, the hero of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Brian De Palma makes one fatal choice that leads to disaster. The disaster is the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities. The choice was De Palma's decision to film it as a cartoon -- a broad, black, wannabe savage comedy. Every unfortunate moment of this screechy, heavy-handed movie is a result of that basic misconception, compounded by the fact that the comedy is staged by a man who seems to have temporarily lost his sense of humor. [24 Dec 1990, p.63A]

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]