This sequel to his earlier hit, Every Which Way But Loose, delivers exactly what it promises, namely lots of fistfights, car chases, booze, broads and country music, plus a dollop of the old Eastwood bootstrap philosophy ("Handouts are what you get from the government. A hand-up is what you get from your friends"). As for the comedy, it starts out with Clyde the orangutan defecating in squad cars, and goes downhill from there. [19 Dec 1980, p.23]

Jack Nicholson set out to make himself a Treasure of Sierra Madre, but since he is both the director and star of what he came up with no one apparently told him that Goin' South isn't it. [13 Oct 1978, p.22]

The action sequences are cloddishly orchestrated. And for the most part, the movie simply doesn't make sense.

One can only conclude that the filmmakers know as little of the facts of life as the children.

Blake Edwards directs this unfunny farce, a banal boozer's comedy that relies on the comedic e'clat of Basinger: basically, Barbie doing standup. Meanwhile leading man Bruce Willis is all buttoned-down and leashed.

That's the problem with The Sure Thing. All the good lines are given to Cusack -- he's always "on," narrating his own life in the revved-up spiel of a sports announcer. For Cusack's Gib, life is performance -- his long quill of a nose even seems to look for his audience's ticklish spots. But why would he bother with Alison? Screenwriters Steven L. Bloom and Jonathan Roberts have sketched her as an annoying scold, leaving Zuniga little to do but bray disapproval at everything. [4 Mar 1985, p.B3]

Friday the Thirteenth meets Saturday Night Fever. Good and promising actors -- people who deserve a better film the next time -- are too numerous to name. [16 Aug 1980, p.D2]

Absence of Malice was directed with earnest, straightforward proficiency by Sydney Pollack, and there are crucial public issues involved in the premise. Still, excessively generous allowance must be made if one is to overlook the defects and confuse Absence of Malice with a pertinent, lucid melodrama on a hot topic. A remarkable number of journalists seem to be overcompensating for the film's mildness by treating it as something hard-hitting and usefully purgative. More power to the souls considerate enough to do the filmmakers' work for them, but look out for frustration if you're only prepared to meet them halfway. [18 Dec 1981, p.C9]

An absurdly upbeat romantic vehicle for John Travolta. The film-makers appear to believe that the moviegoing public craves a reassuring love story, at any cost. This film ends up as s counterfeit endorsement of the so-called simpler so-called values.

Heckerling directs this mess with no sense of pace and less sense of where to put the camera. There are pixilated, MTV-style sequences that simply slow up the story, car chases and car crashes, and, of course, aerobicizers boinging out of their leotards. The best thing in the movie is the catchy theme from the last Vacation, which, unfortunately, hasn't the slightest thing to do with Europe.

This belabored charade of mistaken identities is guided by Herbert Ross, who has directed everything from The Sunshine Boys to Footloose. Apparently, he's decided to cater to younger moviegoers with this discordant mix of MTV imagery and classic farce.

A ridiculously self-indulgent spree of satanic bogeymannerisms entitled Suspiria, virtually self-destructs in the opening sequence. Eager to menace the audience from every sensory direction, Argento doesn't so much create and sustain an illusion of terror as invite you to marvel at his garish ingenuity, at the spectacle of a filmmaker who can't resist overstylizing and upstaging his material.

City Slickers II, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, is basically a refresher course. There are couple of good guffaws, but many of the jokes are simply recycled from the prequel.

Suffers from sluggish exposition mediocre direction and a one-closeup-after-another method of composition advertising the film's eventual retirement to the Disney TV series, but it probably salvages things with juvenile audiences by finishing fast. [5 Feb 1977, p.C5]

Tron turns out to be an inorganic Fantastic Voyage, a movie with which only a computer programmer could interface. The acting is everything you'd expect from a Disney film, with Jeff Bridges aping Harrison Ford for all he's worth. There's even a computerized tinkerbell and a computer kiss. It's all a little much too have output. [09 July 1982, p.13]

Perhaps the shrewdest thing the filmmakers have done is call the film The Object of Beauty instead of A Thing of Beauty, which would make much more sense. By doing so they've removed what they must have known was a far-too-tempting opening for reviewers -- of saying A Thing of Beauty is not a joy forever. Even with the change, though, the sentiment fits.

One wonders if such a story is worth recycling. [16 June 1978, p.18]

Desperately Seeking Susan is just a woman's version of The Woman in Red, where Gene Wilder chased Kelly Le Brock because she was great looking and rich and he had the middle-class blues. The only difference is that Wilder felt guilty about it.

As a rule, the filmmakers manufacture fake climaxes every 10 or 15 minutes, poop out and lapse into forgetfulness, just as if they were structuring the material for television. Norma Rae seems to reflect the confusion of veteran filmmakers so eager to please that they cease to think straight.

The movie is so shabbily written (by Dennis Hackin) and unevenly directed (by Eastwood himself) that the traditional obstacles to romantic comedy consummation are overwhelmed by superfluous complications and imprecise calculations.

Instead of being touched by this anachronistic road allegory, one is merely puzzled. What prompted this material, redolent of so many failed counterculture romances of a few years ago, to surface at this time? [04 Nov 1977, p.D5]

The remake, alas, must mask its failings with Julia Ormond's toothsomeness, Pollack's poky pacing and the uninspired scribblings of writers Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel.

Some of it is funny -- particularly the physical comedy. Most of it is not.

Take a powerful, revealing nonfiction book, sift through it for its most cliche'd elements and turn it into a terror film and you've got The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Slap Shot comes at you like a boisterous drunk. At first glance it appears harmlessly funny, in an extravagantly foul-mouthed sort of way. However, there's a mean streak beneath the cartoon surface tha makes one feel uneasy about humoring this particular durnk for too long.

It's not a new subject, it's not a subject that requires a lot of moral deliberation -- we know who the bad guys are -- and Winkler has nothing new to say about it. Undeniably, his need to share his feelings on this topic is urgent; unfortunately, it is much more urgent than our need to hear them.

It's a lovely idea, and if the individual sections of the film were more substantial, or if we sensed some connection between them, some governing principle, it might have resulted in a delicate, poetically funny movie. Unfortunately, Jarmusch's lackadaisical minimalist aesthetic and his chronic lack of energy are the only unifying elements.

Wind, an adventure loosely drawn on yachtsman Dennis Conner's run for the America's Cup, won't sail for luff or money. A wonky idea from the weighing of the anchor, it's essentially an attempt to remake Rocky with a spinnaker.

Though Down Periscope is set in the age of the nuclear submarine, the jokes seem to date back to the time of the original battle of the ironclads.

Paul Hogan has an easy plan: Simply be Mick Crocodile Dundee and the rest will follow. The rest is Crocodile Dundee II, and it doesn't follow so much as drag itself along like an alligator on dry land.

The shocks are strictly mechanical and redundant, the script uncomplicated by incidental humor or character byplay. It comes as no great surprise when the killer is revealed to a be a Halloween clone and then allowed to vanish, aggravating the pathetic resemblance. The reviewers who made a fuss over Halloween have a lot to answer for. [25 Feb 1981, p.B12]

A sadly dull and unimaginative outing.

The point is well taken, but, basically, Cradle is a long rapturous interlude of baby pictures, now and then reinforced with pointed pro-momma dialogue. Even with the politics, it remains just so much French Pablum. [09 May 1986, p.28]

If it wasn't for some exciting roundball action, Shaquille O'Neal's hulking-dunking presence and a wonderfully guttural performance from coach Nick Nolte, you'd slither off the bench asleep.

Coarse and haphazardly engineered and never more than intermittently funny.

This movie, set in the '60s and starring Cher, Winona Ryder and Bob Hoskins, doesn't come of age so much as die of it. It's awash in mediocrity, waterlogged with innocuousness and redeemed only occasionally by sweet-faced Ryder.

There is so much violence, as gangs kill gangs, or gangs kill cops, or the predator kills all of them, that it's hard to watch without the brain succumbing to self-protective numbness.

Cryer, a talented comedic actor, struggles mightily but can't wring laughs from the lowbrow humor. The screenplay, written by Jeff Rothberg and Joe Menosky, is statically directed by Bob Giraldi, a maker of Michael Jackson videos and Pepsi-Cola ads, in his faint feature debut.

Actors here perform admirably, though they seem not to know exactly what they're supposed to be playing and so they are reduced to giving us mere moments. But playing these characters would be impossible anyway. They're like composites constructed out of cross-section surveys of baby boomers, and Lumet leaves out any notion of personal psychology or motive. It's as if his characters acted only in response to generational forces.

The picture is heartfelt and naive in ways that seem totally secondhand. The questions it asks -- This boy or that boy? Should I or shouldn't I? -- have been played out in countless other coming-of-age films, from "Where the Boys Are" to "Dirty Dancing." And though the palpable enthusiasm of its creators carries you further into the film, and further into the lives of the four friends than you might otherwise go, it is eventually replaced with a sense of weariness at the worn-thin material.

A low-key, high-tech, out-of-touch tale of a teen who builds his own personal nuclear projectile for a science project. It's an ambivalent adventure patterned on the likes of WarGames, but without the humor or action. [13 June 1986, p.29]

If your teenage sons are looking for heroes, send them to Toy Soldiers. Even if they're not, send them anyway. They'll probably enjoy watching a judge being thrown out of a helicopter. Too bad the judge didn't take the script with him. Most reasoning adults will probably reject this far-fetched clash between American preppies and Colombian terrorists.

Bird on a Wire lords its star power over us; it thinks the sheer cumulative adorableness of the principals will win us over and make up for its multitude of sins. It should think again. There is nothing to this John Badham movie except the spectacle of determined stars turning the brilliance of their personalities on us. That and chases -- car chases, motorcycle chases, airplane and helicopter chases.

Much of the problem lies with Howell, a dilute, rabbity actor in the Tim Hutton mold. Everyone acts Howell off the screen, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who displays an easeful gruffness as the girl who joins Jim. With Howell's weightlessness, the deeper elements of the story -- the byplay between guilt and innocence, for example -- never accumulate.

A Roman circus of guts, glory and gallows humor, this lavish action thriller should sate the genre's increasingly bloodthirsty audience. Like the evening news, it fairly hemorrhages blood and sorrow.

Who's Harry Crumb? might have worked as a 20-minute skit, but the script and the direction are both sadly undernourished, which is certainly not the case with Candy. He remains a jovial character actor, but asking him to carry any film on those broad shoulders is a bit too much. The laughs are few and far between, even with Candy resorting to occasional disguises, and the humor has a depressing sense of de'ja` ha-ha.

In Mercury Rising, the mercury may rise but pulses never do. A promising thriller with tough guy Bruce Willis wearing an ever-more radiant tapestry of bruises on his face, the film ultimately surrenders to the entropy of stale plotting and familiar formula.

Victory, the latest effort from veteran director John Houston, represents a remarkable triumph of artificial obliviousness. The misbegotten hybrid screenplay struggles to cross the tradition of POW escape films like The Wooden Horse, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape with recent rabble-rousing sports sagas like The Longest Yard and Rocky. [31 July 1981, p.B3]

This kind of macho bantering quickly wears thin, too -- I guess it's not surprising that men who spend most of their time with other men would lard their conversation with taunts of homosexuality and allusions to male gonads, but it's not particularly interesting either. And as a storyteller, Carabatsos is no better than a competent hack. The plot is schematic, the characters are cliche's.

St. Elmo's Fire is about people who go to lunch and feel nostalgic for breakfast. The latest kiddie angst movie, it's thin gruel for introspective whelps.

A frustrating update. Take away the comedy and you're left with a pallid version -- a sort of Reader's Digest condensation -- of the original.

Such an attenuated plot might be fine if Hines were allowed to dance (he isn't) or the jokes were funnier (they're not). Director Peter Hyams has the comic timing of a tax auditor, but at least he can build a car chase, and if you stick around till the end (you shouldn't), there is an expertly photographed shoot-out staged in the Illinois State Building, a 14-story glass and metal bird cage that would have fit nicely into Hyams' previous film, "2010." [30 June 1986, p.C3]

Private Benjamin seems coarse, sluggish and interminable as a comedy scenario.

Stallone will never disappoint his fans intentionally. He cowrote the script (if writing is the right word) with Stirling Silliphant to formula specs, but Over the Top hasn't got the muscle of his Rocky hits. It's Stallone showing his vulnerable side, a sort of Father Knows Best -- But Can't Put It Into Words.

How maddening Dune is! As you would expect from visionary director David Lynch, it is a movie of often staggering visual power, the most ambitious science fiction film since "2001"; it's also stupefyingly dull and disorderly. Dune doesn't get going till fully two hours have elapsed, so only the most patient will wait for the images to build to their crescendo. Lax in its storytelling, Dune gives us sublimity unmoored.

And all this twaddle about how people are more important than dollars, in a sequel that was rushed out by producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus to capitalize on the summertime windfall of "Breakin' " is almost hilarious.

It's difficult to view Sudden Impact as anything more exciting or authentic than the action movie equivalent of drawn-out foreplay and faked orgasm.

No need to buy a Christmas present for Redford and Fonda this year. They've already made a movie calculated to smother each other in garlands of self-congratulation. [21 Dec 1989, p.C1]

Stanley Donen's otherwise witty and diverting science-fiction thriller Saturn 3, a parable of jealousy set on a remote, futuristic Eden suddenly contaminated by insane lust, suffers desperately for the lack of an epilogue. As a result, an hour and a half of tense, funny sexual melodrama is squashed flat by a dud of a fadeout. [18 Feb 1980, p.B1]

The trouble is, since few characters are fully developed, it's hard to care who's doing what to whom and why.

The most perfunctory and least imaginative of the recent cycle of horror melodramas, Motel Hell may be credited with a fleeting wry touch, but it wears out its welcome by running a minimum of ghoulish stunts into the ground. [25 Oct 1980, p.F4]

For my taste a little bit of Steve Martin goes a long way. Moreover, a rickety vehicle like The Jerk is apt to wear out as aspiring comic star's welcome in one swift stroke.

It becomes apparent during the stuttering course of the movie itself that exploiting a nuclear power plant as an effective deathtrap in a doomsday thriller requires more than melodramatic wishful thinking. [16 March 1979, p.B1]

Over the Edge is an oafishly made movie that claims to deal with a documented case of adolescent unrest in an authentic upper-middle-class social setting, then manipulates the situation only for hypocritical suggestions of teen-age vice and picturesque sprees of teen-age violence. [04 Mar 1982, p.C13]

An overwhelmingly friendly climate of opinion awaited "New York, New York." Scorsese has squandered it by backing off from the very challenge of rationalizing and sustaining a musical romantic drama.

Overheated and recklessly violent.

The doting phoniness of the text has probably been aggravated rather than improved by a formidable casting coup -- uniting Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn for the first time in their illustrious careers and creating the shallowest heartwarmer in recent memory. [22 Jan 1982, p.C1]

Unfortunately, this loosen-up-Sandy-baby allegory, full of heavyhanded sexual/mythic symbols is more of a poetic nudist's delight than a movie. Its characters (from fussy Grant to voluptuous MacPherson) are only mildly appealing. Writer/director John Duigan, maker of the charming Flirting, took a recent tumble with The Wide Sargasso Sea. He has yet to regain his footing.

As directed by Steve Miner and shot by Gerald Feil, the film's use of 3-D is spectacularly and viciously effective. (Gray-lensed Polaroid glasses are handed out at the door; this 3-D process works much better than that used on recent 3-D TV broadcasts.) Not only sabers and butcher knives are tossed into the movie house, however; there are also such relatively benign protuberances as popping popcorn, a leaping snake and a blue yo-yo. From the back of a van, a hippie reaches out with a joint, and very early in the film the audience gets poked at with a pair of rabbit ears atop a television set. An opening scene of sheets flapping on a clothesline is attractively eerie, and a later shot of a victim sitting on a pier that juts into a pool of water is actually pretty. The playfulness is so engaging it's really too bad that the gore has to be so unrelenting, but the producers of these films are now trapped in their own excess [17 Aug 1982, p.B1]

Even the premise for this sputtering attempt at a picaresque farce seems to anticipate a vehicle prone to misfires and breakdowns. [12 Aug 1982, p.E1]

It's no accident that the word "great" appears in the title of the new film featuring Jim Henson's felt television puppets. The Great Muppet Caper. Like its predecessor, this film is its own best fan.

Alongside this silly kiddie Halloween comedy, reruns of Hee Haw seem works of great comic sophistication.

When he crushes a patrolman's head between his hands, you think you're watching a happy campesino lusty for coconut milk; when he skewers a depraved camp counselor with a knife in the temple, he is the happy barbecuer on a sunny Sunday afternoon. "Soup's on!" he might have cried. Then he tears a girl's head clean off. Well, the head probably wasn't doing her much good anyway. [6 Aug 1986, p.D10]

A pretty dry cracker.

There's a genuinely tragic side to Stuart's character, and for the movie to work the filmmakers have to keep it in balance with the comedy so that the pathos of his life doesn't kill all the laughs. But Ramis can't keep the movie's tone under control, and, as a result, it teeters precariously between farce and wake.

Shrill and slovenly opus.

Vapid.

Better than the ubiquitous PBS show in some places, not as good in others. [03 Apr 1998, p.N53]

Spouses Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger -- the latest flavors of the month to tie the knot -- slum their way through a glam-noirish extended video. Amid director Roger Donaldson's pseudo-atmospherics and the ersatz Thompson fare hacked up by screenwriters Walter Hill and Amy Holden Jones, they shoot guns, plan heists, talk tough and make love in silhouette.

In the hands of a less amateurish director, The Philadelphia Experiment, now at area theaters, might have emerged as an ingratiating sleeper. [09 Aug 1984, p.D6]

Let's Spend the Night Together is a disappointing souvenir, at best a sweet substitute for the many who couldn't catch the Stones live. The Stones' status has always excused their shortcomings, so this film won't shake the believers. But it won't convince the skeptics, either. [12 Feb 1983, p.C1]

High Road to China suggests "Raiders of the Lost Ark" slowed to a crawl. [18 March 1983, p.D3]

Critters 2 is flat, lacking the kinetic energy, tight pacing and generally better acting of its predecessor.

Exorcist II seems to have evolved out of delusions of cinematic grandeur shared by Boorman and writer William Goodhart. It's obvious that they wanted to contrive a metaphysical thriller that would be astonishing and spiritually inspiring, but their thought processes are so muddled that the movie degenerates almost instantly into a confounded shambles. [18 June 1977, p.B1]

If a movie can be said to snore before your eyes, Damien sustains an ungodly, unstimulating buzz. [13 June 1978, p.B1]

There's sure nothing purgative about the kind of anxiety the filmmakers are exploiting. If anything, it condemns them to strictly degenerate company. [24 Mar 1981, p.B8]

Romero and his original partners apparently made no money from the original, and Romero admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the reasons for remaking the film were "purely financial." It shows...This Night of the Living Dead is resurrected, but it's never brought to life.

Blue Steel is a mean and unsavory celebration of misplaced misogyny milked for dollars, a mindless soup of urban neurosis and sexual loathing. It's a case of slam, bam, no thankee ma'am.

Talk Radio, despite its collective intensity, is itself just another unenlightening late-night call-in session.

The level of unintentional mirth in Silent Rage is convulsive enough to endear it to connoisseurs of the preposterous. Still, the movie may be too much of a dumb delight to retain a shred of credibility. As an exercise in brawling action combined with blood-curdling terror, it represents a botched experiment. [2 Apr 1982, p.C6]

Silent Night, Deadly Night takes off from the notion that Santa Claus is an ax murderer, but it never quite lives up to the delicious perversity of its premise. An idea this shocking has to be earned; instead, director Charles Sellier Jr. ("The Boogens") gives us another casually constructed splatter flick that has more to do with morbid arithmetic (the body count continues!) than movies.

An unholy union of dark comedy, spectral effects and splattered gore that few filmgoers will dare embrace. [19 July 1996, p.B07]

The one bright spot in this film is Modine's performance as Louden. Modine is so earnest and likable that even the oft-seen "big match" climax holds your attention. But a fine leading performance and a muscle-bound villain can't rescue this trite tale.ick. [15 Feb 1985, p.30]

The movie is full of half-witted Hollywood satire (the Devil's an agent -- get it?), lame wordplay, and easy moralism about family being more important than career blah blah blah. [09 Nov 1984, p.F8]

Oh, God! Book II revives that excruciating game of false piety in which Hollywood humorists grovel for brownie points in eternity by presuming to be God's chummiest press agents. [03 Oct 1980, p.C1]

Invasion USA might actually be fun in a campy way if it weren't so dourly exploitative.

The screenplay, by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby, is just one long passage of exposition: someone blows up or dries up or whatever, you wonder why that's happening, and then someone explains it. This they call suspense. [25 June 1985, p.C8]

Sounds hard to mess up, but Death Hunt is so unconvincing that you never once stop asking yourself, "Why is this manhunt necessary?" [27 May 1981, p.B6]