This is not really riveting material if you didn't go to high school with these boys, and perhaps not even if you did. Played by Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon and Timothy Daly, they seem fundamentally decent, but hopelessly trapped in the limits of the time and place. That grubby atmosphere, looked upon as endearing, is the only thing the film has to offer, and while it's amusing at first, one quickly gets the idea. [5 March 1982, p.11]

The Quick and the Dead is made bearable by director Sam Raimi, who bombards us with frenetic editing, crazy-angle shots and enjoyably cartoonish cliches. But all the stylistic sleight of hand in the world can't hide the central problem: The star of the show is more Dead than Quick.

Douglas again takes on the symbolic mantle of the Zeitgeist. But in Falling Down, he and Schumacher want to have their cake and eat it too; they want him to be a hero and a villain, and it just won't work.

Our culture may be drifting toward the sort of calamity that Stone describes in Natural Born Killers, but the hysteria he depicts seems to come from within him. His soul is in turmoil and so he keeps trying to convince us that we're sick.

In his zeal to break the book down into bite-size, cutting-edge nuggets, adapter Paul Attanasio has squandered—and arbitrarily altered—many of those details.

I don't care what Dylan said, everyone must not get Stoned.

A wham-bam encounter, it gives you everything you (presumably) want, sets itself up for another sequel, and it makes sure you don't recall a thing about it in the morning.

There's nothing embarrassing about Zeffirelli's brisk new version, nor anything particularly remarkable; it's an entirely credible, middle-of-the-road production.

As a screenplay -- as a story -- Change is a silly mess. Its direction is also perfunctory, a bland rendition of the usual chain of Hollywood events. But the main reason to watch Change is for Murray, of course. And no matter what formulaic claptrap is around him, he always redeems it with something comic.

A movie that celebrates the life of the mind and the uniqueness of the individual but does so in glib slogans and is, itself, a sort of knockoff.

After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. [12 Mar 1999]

A lot of this stuff is irresistible. In the early going especially, the movie's infantilism is snappy and surprising. But this is a great idea for a sketch, not a feature, and if Heckerling had resisted padding it out, it might have made a brilliant short. A comedy can ride only so far on high concept. It has to deliver the jokes, and this one doesn't.

The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]

A star vehicle from its onset, this peculiar, mediocre comedy strains to accommodate the talents of both Mutt and Jeff, Terminator and troll. It's a Frankensteinian thing, an unsettling combination of two-fisted beefcake and mean-spirited shtick.

This is exactly the kind of weird, sardonic texture the movie is aiming for - and unfortunately, most of it occurs in the first half of the story.

The story, which includes a prolonged display of McGregor’s no-longer private parts, is simplistic and banal rather than exacting and mannered.

UHF is not a uniformly funny experience, unless you have to wear a bib and tend to laugh at anything, such as sudden gusts of wind. Yankovic, co-writing with manager Jay Levey (who also directed), goes for gag after gag. Some hit, some miss. You laugh, you cry.

The movie is so beautifully filmed by Bojan Bazelli, and so skillfully edited, that its art house surface belies its exploitation content, making this a trip through a cool world rather than a cruel one.

There's plenty to scratch your head about here. Is it a drama? A comedy? And if it's a farce, what's it making fun of?

Getting teens to look past the superficial may be a noble goal, but when they're staring at the pretty but talentless Pettyfer, it's a hard lesson to take seriously.

A thoroughly unnecessary but nonetheless satisfying adaptation of the cheeseball 1980s TV series.

Unlike its forebears, "Greek" lacks a truly sympathetic central character to hold things together when it's time to get sappy.

The insecurities that seem to feed Rivers's often angry humor -- and that have left her face looking like a mask frozen in horror -- are left unexamined.

Micmacs brings an infectious note of caprice to the old-fashioned caper film.

An energetic if empty-headed adventure based on the popular video game.

Except for the last five minutes, Robin Hood is the story of the radicalization of some guy named Longstride. Who?

The first dumb-fun action movie of the summer season has arrived early with The Losers, a loud, loving homage to guns and testosterone based on a series of comic books about a renegade band of CIA operatives. How dumb is it? You might actually kill a few million brain cells just watching it.

It's a pretty scathing satire of reality TV, including itself, which makes it both what it is, and a critique of what it is.