Dick Tracy 1990

Vincent Canby, New York Times: Summer hasn't officially arrived yet, but it's unlikely to offer a big-budget commercial movie as thoroughly entertaining as this stylish real-life cartoon. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: This has an appealing two-dimensional comic-book look, but lacks the vision to go with it, not to mention an interesting hero or a feeling for action. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Beatty and his team of collaborators have heightened the vibrantly tawdry urban night world of Chester Gould's classic comic strip. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: This is a movie in which every frame contains some kind of artificial effect. An entire world has been built here, away from the daylight and the realism of ordinary city streets. Read more

Keith Phipps, Slate: The film moves at a chug when it should put the pedal to the floor. Read more

Time Out: A spectacular movie whose technical achievements -- notably the sharp editing -- will surely provide a gauge by which subsequent comic strip films are judged. Read more

Variety Staff, Variety: Though it looks ravishing, Warren Beatty's longtime pet project is a curiously remote, uninvolving film. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: Tracy is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood 'fun' assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc. Read more

Rita Kempley, Washington Post: Dick Tracy is Batman in a fedora -- a much-ballyhooed cartoon noir that's as skimpy on substance as it is burgeoning with jujube-colored, jutt-jawed style. Read more