WITH the russet beauty of New Mexico as the setting, White Sands sports a nice look. With the angular Willem Dafoe in the lead role, White Sands boasts a solid performance. And with director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out) behind the camera, White Sands maintains a brisk pace. Now if it only had a script that made a lick of sense, White Sands might have been a good movie. It doesn't; it isn't. [24 Apr 1992]

Fails as a comedy-drama because it’s neither funny nor involving. But it fails as a buddy movie because Willis and Morgan make for a dull couple.

A kind of dumbed-down, souped-up action thriller in a quasi-"Lethal Weapon" mode.

Miracles from Heaven is mostly an embarrassment.

Phar Lap is another Australian horsy movie starring an American actor, Ron Leibman (Norma Rae), but this time the American's performance is the only redeeming feature in this otherwise tedious, slow-moving Down-Under tale about a fast-moving horse that should have been named Rocky. [20 Jul 1984]

Think of it as trope grope. Things are so relatively democratic nowadays that filmmakers have to rummage through the past for a truly shmaltzy story. And they don't come any shmaltzier than this.

Patch Adams is a flawed visionary, but surely he deserves better than this crass and manipulative movie.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

As a movie for today's girls, it's more than offensive. It's cheap. [11 May 1985]

Quite an artful dissembler. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this clunker has somehow managed to pose as an actual feature movie, the kind that charges full admission and gets hyped on TV and purports to amuse small children and ostensible adults.

If ever there's been a martial-arts movie that makes you feel as if you've been kicked in the head, surely it's Kung Pow! Enter the Fist.

I do see one bright future for this film: the Deep Water drinking game, where the Bingo squares read “Melinda’s dress falls off,” “Vic clenches his jaw,” and “Naked breast.” Everyone will end up very, very drunk

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Spoof chokes on the impossibility of ridiculing what was already ridiculous. [1 Nov 1993]

Can anyone still be rooting for Rocky or Rambo?

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

As always in Emmerich's rollicking Armageddons, the cannon speaks with an expensive bang, while the fodder gets afforded nary a whimper. Of course, that's just part of disaster's simple recipe: Blow us up, then blow us off.

Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.

Star Trek III or The Search for Schlock: a mission that renders the eyelids heavy. What else can you say about a movie whose mechanically inept, gelatinous monsters out-act everyone on the screen and whose poignant moments are simply guffawful. Not to put too fine a Vulcan point on it, it was ba-a-a-d. [2 June 1984]

The film’s ruse is a snooze. The only thing jacked here is the hour and a half wasted watching this film.

The heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mum) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.

The message the movie preaches? The ills of a consumer society, I guess - all those needful things needlessly bought. And the best way to put that preaching into practice? Shut your wallet and pass on this little treat. [27 Aug 1993]

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

It comes across, however, as a 90-minute flirtation with a quarter of an idea, the gist of which barely impinges on the consciousness. [24 Aug 1987]

The tedious, tortuous storyline and lifeless cast are two larger problems.

HAT in the name of artsy pretension do we have here? That Arizona Dream is a nightmare is beyond dispute - it's the sort of murky, symbol-laden trap that European directors often fall into when they cross the pond to take on the entire social stratum of the United States. The culprit in question is Emir Kusturica - Yugoslavian born, Czech trained, and now American buffaloed. This thing makes The Red Desert look coherent. [19 Nov 1994]

Sappy and predictable.

An awkward, needlessly dark, atrocious mess whose visual tics courtesy of director Tomas Alfredson amount to, basically, snow. So. Much. Snow. Shockingly, a fetish for the white stuff in no way overcomes any clunky narrative obstacles here – and they are legion.