Vacation is missing a sense of direction. With Harold Ramis in the driver's seat, it veers off course and sputters down a bumpy road. [29 July 1983, p.17]

There seem to be big gaping holes, and not just in the characters' carcasses. The only kind of scene Carpenter appears able to direct well is someone sneaking up on someone else. [07 Aug 1993, p.D4]

Nicholson looks severly overmatched against Lange but the basic problem is that the filmmakers miss the mutuality of the obsession envisioned by Cain -- an attraction that enslaves Frank and Cora, inspiring murder and betrayal in the wake of adulterous passion. [20 March 1981, p.C1]

Without a compelling story at the center, this is just a mediocre MTV-Wagnerian fantasy.

Alien Nation wants to be "In the Heat of the Night" as science fiction, but it's neither morally instructive nor prophetic. It proves a lumbering marriage of action and sci-fi that alienates both audiences. It's too dull for one and too dumb for the other.

It's about learning to be human and, on that level, it's utter schlock -- cloying, manipulative and overcute. You could see it on another level, though -- as a comedy about an obnoxious houseguest -- and feel a little kinder toward it.

Although Rohmer's adaptation, shot in German with a cast of actors drawn from the German stage, is pedantically faithful to the letter of the original - almost word-for-word as well as scene-for-scene - it substitutes a style that seems woefully wrong. Rohmer's approach is too static and repressed to release the comic ironies Kleist perceived in the very premise of an honorable man's lapse leading to an honorable woman's distress and built into his brilliantly objective story-telling style. [21 Jan 1977, p.B15]

The only thing that is sustained in Sid and Nancy is a tone of clinical disinterest that leaves you asking why Cox would want to make a movie about them. By the end, you know more about Sid and Nancy than you care to, and about Alex Cox, quite a bit less than you'd like.

It's precisely Henry's coldblooded affectlessness that is meant to shock and disturb us. But "Henry" leaves us feeling more numbed than moved. Half art film, half schlock-horror cheapie, "Henry" isn't quite sure what it wants to be.

About halfway through, the overwhelming fact that the movie is a complete nothing becomes too much to ignore.

Though Warner Bros. boasts this is their most expensive animated project ever, it's hard to see where all that money went in terms of artistry or technical craftsmanship.

Major League is shamelessly formulaic. At the beginning, when it uses Randy Newman's ironic ode to Cleveland ("City of light, city of magic"), the movie has a lovely tone, and briefly, you feel a surge of anticipation, as if the people making it might actually have an original point of view or some feel for the game. All hope is dashed, though, early on, when you realize that they are cannibalizing every other baseball movie. (Newman wrote the music for "The Natural.") This is movie-making by rip-off.

There's nothing wrong with gag-based comedies -- that's what the Sennett comedies were, and that's what "Airplane!" was, too -- but the gags in Better Off Dead aren't all that inventive. Oh, Better Off Dead has its moments -- in particular, a Chinese drag-racing duo who learned their English from watching Howard Cosell on "Wide World of Sports" -- but it's mostly the usual gross-out fare: inhaling Jello through a straw; fat kid; girl with dental retainer; sticking Q-Tips in nose, ears, mouth. [17 Oct 1985, p.B10]

What madcaps! [12 Aug 1986, p.C8]

An opportunity for an unusual film about teen-agers was thrown away, in Taps, in favor of what its own screenplay characterizes as a cinematic stereotype. [18 Dec 1981, p.21]

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a tad too precious. One of those movies that wants to address life's quaint wackinesses, it's full of characters who are quirky, lonely, bizarre or retarded. There's something intensely earnest about the project. But there's something equally manufactured, starting with the casting of Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis.

John Carpenter's remake of The Thing is a wretched excess. It's not that originals are too sacred to be reinterpreted. They're period pieces that would have to be tinkered with to appear contemporary. They've simply been unlucky with their tinkerers, who haven't spruced up the pretexts without laying waste to the accompanying human interest, wit and thematic suggestiveness. [25 June 1982, p.C3]

Having hit a sassy stride in The Great Muppet Caper (after a treacly start with The Muppet Movie) Jim Henson and Frank Oz suffer a relapse in the progressively lackluster The Muppets Take Manhattan. The weakest link in Manhattan is a scenario of incurable listlessness. [14 July 1984, p.C7]

Eyes is somehow too relaxing to be satisfying.

An acceptable scene-setter, Carpenter reveals glaring inadequacies as a storyteller. [15 Feb 1980, p.C3]

For the first 40 or 50 minutes of Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson, I was convinced it was going to emerge as a great human interest comedy. But it takes such a nose dive in the final hour that bailing out early may be the only way to protect a favorable impression.

Sleepwalkers is badly plotted and unimaginatively conceived, though not without a number of seat-squirming scenes.

A weak handshake of a movie, it is slightly repellent -- hardly gripping, much less knuckle-whitening. This "Psycho" for fatsos is as self-aware as it is styleless.

Unfortunately, the fact that these particular stories come from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King can't overcome the direction of John Harrison and the movie's basic television-level aspirations.

Romero's film starts out well and clearly benefits from some higher-on-the-line elements, ranging from the cast to the cinematography of Tony Pierce-Roberts (A Room With a View, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge). But like too many King transfers to the screen, it falls apart in the last reel.

Albert Finney and a fine supporting cast try very hard, but they are frustrated at every turn by directionless direction and special effects that for the most part diminish the shocks and totally gut the climax. [24 July 1981, p.21]

Spike Lee had something in mind while he shot School Daze, his follow-up to the cult hit "She's Gotta Have It." Unfortunately it's still lodged behind his cranium. And the movie's out.

This is basically a story about the pastime of shopping as an antidote to boredom, only the shopper has wandered into a cocktail lounge, instead of a store, and is looking for something live, or nearly so, to try on. That any human activity worth considering should ensue from this situation would be ridiculous to expect. [8 Feb 1980, p.20]