It's so affected and arch it flops into self parody.

It's a movie brimming with good intentions, solid production values and searing performances. However, it never quite clicks into place with any real satisfaction.

I can't imagine how Smith can capture a big enough audience to pay off this private joke, but the inner geek in me had too much fun to care.

A modest but amiable comedy.

At times it gets lost in the backwaters, but the eccentric characters and offbeat humor make it an entertaining detour.

Captures the overwhelming and uncontrollable emotional assault of loving and living through captured moments and sensuous images.

Avoid the hype, just go enjoy the movie

Popcorn is not scary enough to work as horror, not funny enough to work as comedy, not cute enough to work as camp, not skilled enough to work as a tribute to the bad movies of the '50s, and so indifferently acted by the cast (including Tony Roberts, Dee Wallace Stone and Ray Walston) that it just seems a waste of everyone's time. [01 Feb 1991]

The filmmaker's vision is harrowingly ugly and profoundly upsetting every step of the way.

The movie's political and moral points -- and theme about creating family however you can find it -- elevate it above the average kids movie.

Vividly captures the joy of sailing.

The Program has little bite as satire or as muckraking. It doesn't really want to offend anyone very deeply (perhaps because it was filmed with the cooperation of nine separate college athletic departments). If you read the sports pages, you could devise your own script and it would be twice as devastating.

Will Statham make it as an action hero? Hard to say. His personality makes Vin Diesel look positively debonair.

As a thriller it's dull and incomprehensible; as a romance it's empty and emotionally uninvolving; and as a character study it's strangely repulsive.

Plenty of visuals but little of the rhythm, flow or characterizations that made the earlier film an instant children's classic.

Although the film is entertaining, its cleverness is not enough to cover its shortcomings.

Has a delightfully nasty villain and pumped-up action, albeit along familiar lines.

Kidman's performance is the best thing in the movie, but it's not at all appealing.

An honorable and often enticing piece of personal filmmaking.

Watts and Coffey may have vaulted Hollywood's gated enclaves, but this affectionate film shows they haven't forgotten, nor idealized, their days among the ranks of the struggling and ambitious.

There's also a terrific performance from Collette, who, in only a handful of scenes, wonderfully communicates the unusual resourcefulness of a demented woman who has spent her life assuming a succession of physical handicaps as a survival technique.

The numerous plot elements don't come together in the end. Even though we are gradually expected to sympathize with the plight of the murdering vigilante cop, the whole vigilante theme is suddenly dropped midway through the film. It seems to have no real place in the larger story, except as a clumsy and purposeless O.J. Simpson parallel. [26 Apr 1996]

Accomplished if misguided thriller.

The Will Ferrell comedy engine is running on empty in Step Brothers.

But Medak never finds his groove in "Romeo." Every scene smacks of deja vu, the cynicism and irony become smothering, it's never funny or exciting enough to hold our attention, and it finally just collapses into the same pointless violence of "Gunmen" - including a scene in which a character is buried alive. [4 Feb 1994]

Kline saves the movie and makes it something special. He does this not only by mastering the dialect and mannerisms and convincing us he is French, but by skillfully underplaying the character and slowly revealing his humanity. It's a master star turn: He makes a better Gerard Depardieu than Gerard Depardieu. [5 May 1995, p.28]

It's an unenlightening film that proves youthful anarchy is just as dull as a midlife crisis, and sadly, as predictable, too.

Of course, the whole thing would collapse in two seconds without a co-star on the order of newcomer Vidal, whose New York street kid is convincing and appealing without ever seeming forced. Together, she and Fox make you happy to overlook plot holes and enjoy what might otherwise be fairly routine family fare. [4 June 1993]