It is a smart, generous, genuinely funny affair. Sometimes, like the camel who almost ambles away with the picture, it's longish in the tooth, but it is based on an extremely astute vision of life.

Reasonably genial and diverting.

Ishtar is a good movie, but you can't help but wonder if, lurking somewhere in those cans of outtakes, there isn't a great movie, too.

This Elaine May comedy was the most underappreciated commercial movie of 1987. It isn't quite as good as May's previous features, but it's still a very funny work by one of this country's greatest comic talents.

Though far from a masterpiece, the movie is often hilarious in a sly, seemingly improvisational way.

It's a film that resists categorization, staking a claim on a weird, absurdist territory of its own. For that, in the maddeningly generic landscape of '80s multiplexes, it was crucified. Now it's celebrated. And rightfully so.

This big, overblown comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty is thoroughly likable despite all the hype.

..an undeniably messy movie that you nonetheless want to treasure just for its oddball existence.

Maybe [it's] actually okay; maybe parts of it [are] even great.

The 1980s saw the release of so many truly atrocious films (Xanadu, Stroker Ace, Bolero, Shanghai Surprise, etc.) that it's absurd "Ishtar" became shorthand for the worst of the worst and continues to be blasted by folks who haven't even seen it.

Besides droll supporting work from an excellent Charles Grodin, Ishtar also gets a lot of mileage out of its terrible and terribly funny songs.

If Ishtar has a personal stamp, it's not in what it has to say about Reagan-era militarism, but in what it has to say about collaboration, and how well-meaning people can goose each other to greatness-and folly.

Desert sequences provide some of the film's high points as Beatty and Hoffman finally develop some genuine rapport under adverse conditions.

Better then you've heard. Paul William's songs are genius.

The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful and, here and there, even genuinely inspired.

better than it's given credit for

Now come one, this movie was not bad.

Ishtar is an unabashed vamp for a pair of household names, and as such it works, often hilariously.