To transform a TV series into a film is to surround yourself with pitfalls, and “Absolutely Fabulous,” sad to report, nosedives into every one of them.

The movie is halfhearted, fragmentary, unachieved.

One of the dreariest films in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy series; it has a metallic flavor.

The directors, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, manage to convince us that we have witnessed an action movie, although in fact the quantity of violence is so minimal that, under Hong Kong law, Infernal Affairs barely qualifies as a motion picture.

Standard gory imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt.

But the movie is in a stupor; everything is internalized. Duvall is locked in, and De Niro is in his chameleon trance - he seems flaccid, preoccupied...You have to put up a struggle to get anything out of this picture.

A comedy without one foot on the ground is no more than a flight of fancy, as directionless as a balloon; the master clowns of silent cinema knew that, and so does Mr. Fletcher, the gravid elder statesman of this film. As he says to Mike and Jerry, “I appreciate your creativity, but let’s be realistic for a second.” Be kind. Erase.

For some viewers, the acidity level of Perry’s movie will be too high to stomach. For others — anyone who thinks that there are too many warm hugs in Strindberg, for example — Queen of Earth awaits.

M-G-M's wartime salute to gallant England, engineered to make the audience choke up.

Burnham’s eye for detail and nuance is keen, and several scenes...have a tightly scripted tension, but he smothers the story in sentiment, stereotypes, and good intentions. Despite Fisher’s calm and vivid performance, Kayla remains merely a collection of traits.

Sandler lacks any kind of discernible comic energy; he's just meandering around the film waiting for something to happen, and almost nothing funny does.

"Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness," Captain Jack says. Sir, you speak for us all.

Coppola's efforts to bring depth to this material that has no depth make the picture seem groggy. It's as if he were trying to direct the actors to bring something out of themselves when neither he nor anyone else knows what's wanted.

The film is comatose; you're brought into it only by the camera tricks or the special-effects horrors, or, perhaps, the nude scenes.

A dog of a movie about a horse.

I’m not sure that the story is the right receptacle for big notions about imperialism, racism, militarism, the balance of power, religiosity, the end of reason; it is a bit like loading the history of philosophy into an egg-and-spoon race.

As in life, intelligence in movies isn’t one-dimensional; it may be woefully lacking from one aspect of a film but shiningly present in another. Although the fight scenes in Nobody offer clever touches, they are nonetheless too stiffly convention-bound to give the movie energy.

The whole thing makes Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Levinson’s “Rain Man” seem like a triumph of underplaying.

The plot would seem more ingenious if the movie itself didn't copy so many other thrillers (notably "The Silence of the Lambs"), and if it weren't so easy to spot every twist half an hour in advance.

An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering.

The director, Hugh Wilson, aims for harmless froth, and what he winds up with, as the hysteria level rises, is something brash and strident.

Emotions are not toyed with glancingly but stretched out and blazoned forth, and the result is that the new film is nearly an hour longer than the original cartoon.

Sloppy, clumsy Hitchcock thriller. Brian Moore is credited with the original screenplay, but probably his friends don't mention it.

Script lacks satiric insolence, and the picture grinds on humorlessly. The villain Christopher Lee's fanged smile is the only attraction.

The filmmakers, I think, got in over their heads and couldn't decide whether they were making an action thriller or a drama of conscience; they wound up flubbing both.

In movies like this one, Poitier's self-inflicted stereotype of goodness cancels out his acting.

The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.

What's strange about the movie is that the best things in it aren't developed, and what Superman and the other characters do doesn't seem to have any weight. [11 July 1983, p.90]