Movies like this one - with its spoofy jokes, vacant characters and indefensible plotting - do nothing to keep the western form alive. Deal me out of this con game.

Longo and Gibson have so little interest in the personalities of the characters that the actors seem like stand-ins for computer-generated images. [27 May 1995, p.A2]

If I had to guess, I'd say that the big white "snow" thing is a flimsy combination of cheap plaster, recycled Styrofoam and some poor soul's false hopes. Pretty much like the movie itself. [11 Dec 1998, p.22]

If you get stuck at Striptease, my advice is to relax and try to enjoy its occasional pleasures.

Director Andrew Davis (Seagal's Above the Law) and screenwriter J.F. Lawton (Pretty Woman) handle the early scenes fairly well. As the villains are putting their plan into place, the plot is involving and the pacing brisk. It's only after the bad guys take over the ship that the film begins to degenerate. The staging falls apart almost immediately, and, before long, it's not clear exactly what is happening and where. [06 Nov 1992, p.24]

At two hours and 15 minutes, the new Karate Kid takes an absurd amount of time to get to that “big match.”

It's as disquieting as it is unsatisfying, a slog through gender issues, surgery and violence - sexual and otherwise.

Only Hopkins, readily referencing his bag of tricks, seems to get what to make of this "inspired by trues events (and a book by Matt Baglio)" hooey.

A clever and adorable original film remade with most of the charm wrung out of it.

Between dragon scenes, Dragonheart falls apart. [31 May 1996, p.17]

The movie's central gimmick isn't enough, and when more supernatural twists that don't play by the movie's own fantasy rules kick in, it lost me.

Jackman gamely does his best, Levy keeps the kid just shy of insufferable and just this side of kid-appropriate in his behavior and language.

The irony is that this movie - which fails to emulate such storybook-based virtues as coherent plotting and characterization - is pretty darn empty itself.[15 Feb 1991, p.6]

If Winkler's heart is in the right place, his head is often somewhere else. There's a great movie to be made about the blacklist period, but this just isn't it. [15 Mar 1991, p.8]

After "Zombieland," The Crazies struggles to find novelty and laughs, and must battle the overwhelming sense that we’ve been here, seen this too often and too recently to experience any real surprises.

It’s not a great film, with some edge Sparks put in the novel left out of the script. But there’s real chemistry between the young lovers and an old fashioned virtue to the father-daughter, father-daughter’s boyfriend scenes.

The script is a mad, muddled blitz of one-liners and movie references. Some of the animation is a hoot, and a few voice actors stand out.

Betsy needs a couple more pounds of makeup to get this more than two stars. Joe Bob says check it out anyway.

It's so sentimental and sweet that you can almost forgive the kids' comedy Ramona and Beezus for not being nearly funny enough.

A musical vamp on young LA's decade-long Pussycat Dolls fascination with tarting up like strippers and shaking those money makers, it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts. But those parts. Oh my.

It's meant to be faintly Pythonesque with a hint of bowdlerized "The Black Adder"...But it's entirely too slow of foot for that comparison to pay off.

Forever After still goes down like warmed-over porridge. You don’t have to be Goldilocks to think that this time they’ve cooked their Golden Goose.

Repetitious, tedious, and pretty much joyless.

A barely serviceable romantic comedy.

Disney's Prom is to real high school what "High School Musical" was to "West Side Story" – all fluff, no edge.

There's an unexpected wistfulness, a bittersweet undercurrent to Going the Distance that could not have been in the script. This romantic comedy co-starring Drew Barrymore and longtime beau Justin Long was finished just as the real life couple was splitting up. For good, this time.

For an hour or so, Bigelow (Near Dark, Blue Steel) gets by on that great eye of hers. But about halfway, Point Break breaks down. The plot, which has been unimpressive but not irritating, becomes maddeningly implausible. And the performances, which had been generally engaging, lose their edge.

JFK is a limp, semi-coherent, boring movie. [20 Dec 1991, p.21]