On the plus side, Allen's basic movie-making skills are sound. The $13-million film looks crisp and clean. An idiot could follow the story line and two hours could go by without many glimpses at the wristwatch. In short, the perfect made-for-TV movie. [15 Jul 1978, p.E1]

What's missing in Quigley Down Under is precisely what is missing in its star. Selleck is a skilled light comedian -- he's at his best delivering a wry put-down to a British officer -- and he handles John Hill's bantering dialogue deftly. But for all his burly authority, Selleck lacks dynamism on screen. There's no danger in him, nothing unresolved or mysterious. He's likable, but something of a lug.

Unfortunately, the technical hullabaloo gets stale about three-quarters of the way through and we want something to cling to. It's a case of the missing plot, unless you count what writers Reiner (who also directed), Martin and George Gipe weave round the clips to string them together. [21 May 1982, p.13]

The sparkly but flawed sequel to the couple's last caper. [13 Dec 1985, p.29]

Although their film resolves itself into a lurid shambles, screenwriter Gerald Ayres and director Adrian Lyne demonstrate a certain flair for foxy exploitation. [19 Apr 1980, p.C3]

Falling in Love is a nice movie, a holiday movie with a Christmas setting with a happy ending. It's a Christmas shoppers' matinee and a commuters' guide to love in the afternoon, but not exactly an affair to remember.

Chuck Norris fans will not be disappointed by Missing in Action, a bang-bang-you're-dead exploitation flick from the Cannon Group in which the action is rarely missing. [19 Nov 1984, p.C3]

Innovative, lavish and lacking. [30 Mar 1984, p.D1]

A handful of funny brainstorms can be found rattling around the slapdash confines of Ice Pirates. [03 Apr 1984, p.C6]

Overworked by New Waver Luc Besson, it offers visual verve, if not a lot of storytelling savvy...What "The Road Warrior" did for cars, Subway almost does for rapid transit, with its focus on the commuter cars that glide in and shuttle off into the passageways around the Op,era stop, where much of this tragicomic parable takes place. This parable's philosophy, however, is inane, imitative, prepackaged punk. [22 Nov 1985, p.29]

The movie has some beautifully observed moments and a generous spirit, but in the end, it's undone by its own sweetness and charm....It's just not distinctive enough to sustain your interest. A lot of the movie is routine coming-of-age stuff.

Lean never brings the characters' motivations or emotions to life, so they just seem like props gathered together to make a point about imperialism. [18 Jan 1985, p.C1]

The performances are appealing, but Bud Yorkin of "All in the Family" directs as if everyone were going to get bored and run out for popcorn at the next commercial break. [24 Jan 1986, p.23]

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

I suppose there's not much point at this late date to complain about how all movies look and sound alike today, how dull stretches in the story are pumped up with loud music, how handy, so-called "comic" hooks (one character has a flatulence problem, another will do anything for sex, another will do anything for money) have taken the place of characterization, how directors don't even try anymore to create a real milieu. [15 Feb 1986, p.G6]

The two teams, older and mostly fatter, train and play, and I trust I won't be ruining anything for you if I say there are no surprises. Screenwriter Ron Shelton has constructed a stand-up-and-cheer machine, and while the machine works, it doesn't make you feel any better about being run through it.

There are some scenes that rival any in recent memory -- Winger and Hannah escaping a flaming finale in a burning gallery and Winger and Redford escaping an exploding warehouse -- but the whole is less than its parts, a little too careful. Kind of like dinner theater.

Mona Lisa is consistently undercut by sentiment, whether it's the cute routines between George and his best friend, a mechanic and junkman, or the "heartwarming" stuff between George and his estranged daughter. In the end, "Mona Lisa" is another movie about the lovable little people; the movie is mushy where it should be monstrous. [16 July 1986, p.D1]

A bizarre, occult thriller about the implications of religious faith. And, though it doesn't expand upon its shock tactics as much as it would like to or make its theological points, the movie's dread atmosphere begins to seep into your head.

Before it turns slack and sentimental, Power, Sidney Lumet's foray into the world of political consultants, crackles with a kind of moral static. Lumet lets you enjoy the pleasures of sleaze all the while he's shocking you with it -- the movie feels like a joy buzzer. And for a while, at least, you think this is exactly the acidulous, pell-mell satire you've been waiting for.

This real-life case of Misery sets your teeth on edge, your blood boiling, your adrenaline surging with the subtlety of a World War II propaganda film.

This conflict between love and ambition is finely depicted as far as it goes, and the period setting, in a time when birth control problems made the choice of marriage a commitment to unlimited family life, could have reinforced the poignancy of the choice. But because the character has been thinly written, her decision seems selfishly arbitrary. [14 March 1980, p.17]

The movie is maddeningly plain...I found the movie infuriatingly underdone, but what is clear about it, and perhaps what reaches sensibilities more sublimely tuned than mine, is the utter seriousness of the piece. It cares about eternal issues and faces them head on. [15 May 1998, p.D05]

By many other directors' standards, Au Revoir would be a major achievement. But Malle has reached higher. If he'd made his childhood movie earlier in his career -- when he didn't have the sense to be so dispassionate -- it might have packed a meatier punch. Now it's just a deftly aimed poke.

Jodie Foster, transcendent in the bravura title role, is far grander than the film itself, and her performance helps camouflage the weaknesses of its structure and the naivete of its themes.

Until betrayed by its essential docility, The Promise promises a fairly stimulating wallow in the tear-jerking depths. [10 Apr 1979, p.B3]

Although Mistress has the spirited participation of De Niro et al, the in-jokiness seems to wear itself out. The tedious journey the movie has to go through to get made is well-defined. But there's something hackneyed about the thematic plight of artists in this modern, commercial world.

As noisy and ludicrous as all this sounds, the movie does have its share of guilty pleasures. Like the kid on steroids, it's revved so high that it's out of control. And just as his coach does, it is possible -- though not easy -- for us to make the best of it.

Taking a courageous cue from Drugstore Cowboy, in which drugs are actually acknowledged to be enjoyable, Rush intoxicates the head for a while. But it peaks way before the movie's over. You're caught in a slow but steady decline, an unwanted comedown.

An intimate, sentimental coming-of-age drama, a sweet little puppy love movie crushed by the enormity of its tragic twists.

It's got a little kick to it.

"Axe" is not art by any means. It's often overly taken up with resolving itself. But Myers and others create an enjoyably loose, anti-slick feeling about the affair.

After 36 years of making movies, Polanski may be off his creative rocker, but he's still having fun.

Written and produced by John Hughes, it's a kiddie action comedy much indebted to Hughes's "Home Alone," but with much less of its meanness.

Undercover Blues offers a perfectly enjoyable, completely forgettable hour and a half. After all, how hard is it to watch pros like Quaid and Turner have a good time knocking around with a lovable baby? As Quaid coos to the toddler, "It's a bad world, isn't it, sweetheart? You 'n me 'n Mom are gonna make it better, right?" Quaid, Turner and the kid do make this movie better, but it isn't good enough.

Another Stakeout -- like the original, directed by John Badham -- feels more like a rousing encore than a bold, new development. It's basically straight-out situation comedy, merely punctuated (or interrupted) by the evil doings of hitmen, FBI agents and other gun-toting suits. To those who seek these things, don't worry: People still get plugged with bullets. But comedy is the main artillery and Dreyfuss and Estevez, effortlessly replaying their elbow-nudging relationship, do most of the shooting.

Crowe has said he envisioned "Singles" as a celluloid album, and like an album, one comes away remembering some parts more fondly than others.

The performers all seem to be relishing this sendup, but we're always aware that it is a vehicle better suited to the stage. In trying to open it up some for the screen, Bogdanovich and scriptwriter Marty Kaplan have presented the original play as a series of flashbacks that come upon Caine as he sweats out the play's Broadway opening. All this does is slow the opening and delay the close.

Final Analysis, an implausible psycho thriller with Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman and Richard Gere, has so many twists, turns and backward leaps, the actors tackle their work like trained poodles in a circus act.

Let's make things perfectly clear. "Gladiator" is utter trash masquerading as an action picture with a message. You can listen to the lip-service about the importance of an education, about the evils of boxing, and laugh. It's a joke. The filmmakers know it. You know it. "Gladiator" is a fight movie, pure and simple. It's about breaking jaws, cutting eyes open and beating your opponent into a bloody pulp. It's about the joy of winning ugly. If you like your meat red, this one's for you...What makes "Gladiator" so watchable is the primal excitement of those life-and-death bouts. The fighting is choreographed convincingly by boxing coordinator Jim Nickerson and director Rowdy Herrington and it's filmed with gritty vitality by Tak Fujimoto, Jonathan Demme's cameraman.

The overplotted but predictable thriller "White Sands." Written by the same guy who tried to scare Harry Homeowner silly with "Pacific Heights," it's got all the ingredients, though none of the gumption, of a good adventure. It's suspiciously trendy.

Like most thrillers, from "Fatal Attraction" to "Basic Instinct," the ending can't possibly live up to the expectations it creates.

With a few elements drawn from classic weepers, and with fairly spirited performances from the cast, "Heart and Souls" has its moments

"Mr. Jones" does have some things to savor. Director Mike Figgis, who made "Stormy Monday" and "Internal Affairs," has a distinctive, atmospheric touch. There's something memorably restless about Gere's performance. He never stops. Olin gives her white-uniformed, statistics-spouting, let's-work-together role an off-center appeal. And there are likable supporting performances from Delroy Lindo, as a construction worker who befriends Gere; Lauren Tom, a hauntingly beautiful but distraught mental patient; and Lisa Malkiewicz, as a bank teller who giddily falls for Gere when he effortlessly calculates accrued interest on his account. But these worthy elements can't completely disguise the conventional medicine we're ultimately being asked to swallow.

If watched from a mildly amused, forgiving distance, the movie has its enjoyable moments—good and campy.

Filmed in velvety browns, with shafts of sunlight filtered through old windows, The Haunting of Julia is a definite cut above the current horror movie cliche, but yet not up to the classic psychological ghost-story level it aims at.

Kloves has taken us on one more ride down this same old Texas highway, with its cheap motels and gloomy cowboys. Ain't much more to it than that.

Something is missing, and you feel that its absence prevents both the characterization and movie from going decisively over the top.

They're certainly no Aykroyd and Belushi, or even Myers and Carvey, but Farley and Spade manage to wring humor from a series of juvenile setups and predictable pratfalls. The belly laughs come easy when Farley's tumbling down a mountain or being dragged behind a car by his necktie. Director Penelope Spheeris ("Wayne's World") keeps up a head-banging pace, barreling past Spade's flat jokes and Farley's limited character range.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

There's a certain trashy fun to this combination of "Blackboard Jungle," "The Principal," "Dangerous Minds" and the old "Miami Vice" TV series.

Two if by Sea, directed by Australian Bill Bennett, suffers from a symptom common to romantic comedies that begin after the couple have visited the haystack: There's simply no more sexual tension. Without it, you'd better be as good as Tracy and Hepburn.

[An] appealing, if overcooked romantic comedy.

Handsome and well-acted, the film's ultimate success depends on the heat between Ryder and Day-Lewis, and it simply isn't there. The attraction is fatal alright, but it certainly doesn't seem mutual.

Madonna, the real Madonna, is precisely what "Truth or Dare" promises to deliver, raw, kissing-close and uncensored. But what we get in this sometimes engrossing, sometimes appalling, always entertaining film is something other than "real," something that may in fact be just as revealing as the real thing itself.

The result is an unusual movie about acceptance, tolerance, support, sex and fun among a group of longtime female friends who meet for three weekends within a year. Women viewers are not likely to be surprised by their conversation; men may be.

Though appealing in its wispy way, "Manon" is only a continental soap opera.

A faithful adaptation of Craig Lucas's popular play, it proves a feast for love gourmands, especially those with an appetite for body-swapping. The less starry-eyed viewers -- and probably the hard-working leads Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin -- will remain starved for the comparative profundity of a leaky "Love Boat" rerun.

The movie isn't exactly full of twists and turns, but neither is it a long, hard slog.

The movie suffers by taking itself a little too seriously. It's not just that it's a lot less funny than the book. It's also a lot less fun.

It's a hyper-violent buddy comedy. If you like that sort of thing -- think "Training Day," with laughs -- you'll love this.

Dear Nicholas Sparks, There's no easy way to say this. But with Dear John, the latest of the five films made so far from your sentimental, best-selling novels, I think our relationship is in trouble.

For real sparks keep a look out for Jared Harris in a supporting role that injects a mildly diverting note of corporate intrigue into an otherwise unsurprising procedural.

A movie that feels written rather than lived; from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Rushmore," it's a story we've seen in better versions before.

Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything.

Call it a Christmas miracle, albeit a minor one: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel isn't entirely awful.

Storywise, Moon fails to live up to the promise of its premise. There's plenty of atmosphere, but little gravity.

Zombieland is sometimes funny. But those of us who have teeny coronaries every time something goes bump in Zombieland might have a hard time relaxing for long enough to really enjoy ourselves.

Antichrist finally embodies the contradiction of von Trier: He's a gifted, even visionary, artist mired in his own pulp pretentiousness.

I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.

It's also a double-barreled bummer. There's no excitement in the bank-robbing, no thrill of the chase, no emotion over justice served or thwarted. Depp's Dillinger is neither charming nor despicable, nor does he occupy that delicious gray area between the two. His spree unspools dispassionately, cold as a Colt .380.

Watchmen is a bore. Sad to say, after a wait of more than two decades, the much-anticipated adaptation of the world's most celebrated graphic novel is long, dull and subject to what might be called the "Lord of the Rings" problem: It sinks under the weight of its reverence for the original.

It will put some viewers in mind of yet another story with the same theme: "Pinocchio."

It succeeds only fitfully. Toggling between Stark's impish goatee and Iron Man's full-metal body condom, and amid so many generic fireballs, kill shots and earsplitting thumps, bumps and crunches, the film finally collapses under its own weight.

Has its moments of fun, many of them having to do with Reilly's deadpan comic style. But the movie lacks the original edge of its better predecessors.

The result is that Revolutionary Road is a hard movie to love. Plenty of people will appreciate the hopelessness, but they might wish for a little less emptiness.

Often astonishingly beautiful, but in a way that's the problem: You wonder what visionaries such as Tim Burton or Michel Gondry might have done with the material. As it is, "Benjamin Button" is little more than "Gump" by way of "Dorian Gray." It plays too safe when it should be letting its freak flag fly.

A genial and surprisingly self-contained performance by Adam Sandler.

That's exactly the problem with this movie: It's not about a killer, or his victims, or the manhunt or the cops. They're all in it, of course, more or less. But it's about a writer.

Oh, the high-octane cast works hard. But there's nothing to suggest anybody off camera tried that hard, which is fatal to a Coen outing.

It's simultaneously arty, arcane and nasty.

What power the movie has comes from its stars, especially the two boys, who give very different but very convincing performances.

If P.S. I Love You proves anything, it's that Hilary Swank may be a great actress, but she can't do cute.

If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.

Still, if for the most part Death at a Funeral is as tame as the tasteful parlor where most of its action takes place, it manages to explode one taboo, in casting mostly black actors in roles originally played by whites.

Might have gone down as an endearing fable, if only the route to its finale had been less cliched.

An overture to the subject rather than a profound study.

It's good for a silly laugh, this stuff. And maybe this movie will draw renewed attention to Carpenter's eminently better movie.

Jigh class briefly gives way to high camp, which then itself dissipates to an anticlimactic thud.

There remains a maddening emptiness where the film's ostensible subject should be.

It's a fascinating story but not so fascinatingly told.

The story fails to really engage on any level save the kinetic.

Though it captures many sharp, stark details of life in poverty-stricken Kazakhstan, Schizo's momentum is so measured, it nearly lulls its audience to sleep.

It's just that, in this world of clanking, hissing machines, even the people seem like robots.

A picnic wine, if you will -- more conversation-starter than collector's item.

Often seems less like a fully realized film than an illustrated story, its paragraphs reduced to neatly contrived set pieces.

Spends too much time being convivial and not enough time looking for the kind of real conflict that begets a good comedy.

If anything, Fever Pitch will give Bosox fans one more chance to relive, in big-screen glory, those fleeting, flavorsome days.