This time, it seems as if there’s a little less magic in the woods.

The real issue is that everything about Adam’s journey feels half digested and tossed back up. We’ve seen it before. It was better the first time.

Between the off-center comic riffs of Tom Arnold and the wildly improbable hair's-breadth escapes, the whole business dissolves into amiable action farce.

Colorful and at times quite lively, but I wish it were funnier and its satirical edge a bit sharper.

The movie's flaw is impossible to ignore, turning on the most tired of romantic comedy conventions: Someone knows something, and all that person has to do is say it, and the movie is over and everything's great.

Toy Soldiers is to terrorism what just say no is to the temptation of drugs: a will-o'-the-wisp notion that is either laughable or sad, depending upon how seriously one takes either solution to those problems. [26 Apr 1991, p.E7]

Has all the elements of a satisfying movie except knowing when to stop.

A respectable and fairly decent movie.

Emily Blunt is so emotionally present that she almost redeems the movie. She doesn’t, but she at least makes the first half of Pain Hustlers watchable.

Purists should have a field day enumerating the differences between the original "Astro Boy" and this high-gloss reimagining. Someone has to.

An unabashed wallow in the moronic humor of Adam Sandler.

This movie reverie has an almost laughable '80s tone - a yuppified style and even language - that practically buries Costner. [21 Apr 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Something From Tiffany’s rides the line between Hallmark cheese and the Hollywood gloss of big-screen rom-coms once headlined by its producer, Reese Witherspoon. It emerges as a top entry in the former category and a middling example of the latter, with lots of nice moments along the way.

Lacks compelling narrative.

Even now, I can’t decide if it was horrible or if I liked it and must conclude that both things must be true. It really was horrible, and I liked it, anyway.

A sweet, innocuous romantic comedy.

Fortunately, the movie gets a huge lift from Johnson, who reappears in the second half of the film and rescues it from nonstop boys’ hijinks. It’s not enough to say the camera loves her. Put Johnson in a close-up and the rest of the movie disappears.

The core fan base of this English sword battle drama will pay for the boundary-pushing blood and gore. Why bore them with things like plot and context and production values?

Less like watching a movie than it is like being accosted by one.

Once you're done trying to conjugate the smurfs, there's a better movie than anyone could have possibly expected, thanks in large part to an honest effort by Harris in a thankless role.

The strained romantic plot is a slow fizzle.

The movie is an enjoyable but flawed attempt at an epic story, with too much of the best action concentrated in the beginning.

When Costner is good, as he is here, his acting has a purity to it, an unspoken moral dimension. Underneath the sensitive, stoic facade is a loquacious, intellectually alert actor with an encyclopedic understanding of the film tradition he occupies: the rugged, humble movie hero, embodied by the likes of Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda.

The attempt is to create a reality wide enough to accommodate the extremes of absurdity and hard political truth, but the pieces never cohere, and so we end up with a rattling bag of disparate elements.

As for the movie’s ultimate resolution, nothing specific can be said here, except that it borders on inexcusable.

Lottery Ticket is likable, and that goes a long way.

Even as a showcase for the actors, Bird on a Wire is disappointing. More than anything else it's an action movie, and not a very good one, with wall-to-wall chase scenes from start to finish. [18 May 1990, p.E1]

If the movie has a weakness, it’s that Zohar gets the most screen time, though she’s the least engaging character.