Bill Cosford

Better Off Dead has the body of a tired teen comedy but the soul of an inspired student film; it's the first movie in a long time to interrupt itself periodically with flights of animated fancy. At one point, romantic foreshadowing is accomplished by a "clay-mation" sequence featuring cheeseburgers in love. At another, a lovesick teen draws a cartoon picture of his faithless girlfriend, and the drawing tells him to get lost. [17 Oct 1985, p.B6]

As an older, slightly less athletic but no less Sybaritic Bond (he carries an attache- case sampler of caviar and pate de fois gras), Connery is perfectly suited. [8 Oct 1983, p.C5]

A film that has too little to entertain grownups, and perhaps too much for children. It's a blunder. [21 Dec 1983, p.C8]

Those looking to Craven for a new spin on an overworked genre are entitled to feel disappointed. [03 Sep 1984, p.B4]

Though Wise Guys isn't a big movie, its gentle parody of gangster mythology, which adopts the pace and tone of a European caper movie from its opening titles, makes Prizzi's Honor seem naive by contrast. [13 May 1986, p.B6]

The Slugger's Wife is awful, easily the most inept mainstream Hollywood entertainment in memory. [29 March 1985, p.D19]

The movie is best when it sends up the whole culture of child stars and commercials -- "I wanna grow artistically," says one well-paid brat. "I wanna work with Michelle Pfeiffer." But it loses its edge, and soon Life With Mikey is awfully close to the thing it sets out to lampoon. [4 June 1993, p.G5]

It's a fine ensemble, and one mark of how well it works is that The Breakfast Club leaves the confines of the library only three times, and yet we never feel claustrophobic. We just feel trapped, like the kids. For much of the film, one or the other is speaking of parents as the alien life form they represent -- "When you grow up, your heart dies" is the bitter slogan -- and that feeling of being trapped by youth and yet terrified to leave it informs the movie even at its most raucous. For getting that one element, Hughes deserves a great deal of credit; for getting it into a "grown-up" movie, Hughes deserves more work. [19 Feb 1985, p.C4]

Pacino is the only real attraction. His character feels ancient, used-up, bone-tired -- vulnerable, maybe, but numb. We need to see this in his face, and Pacino can use his the way Triple-A uses maps. That face is still one of the great instruments of modern movies. [15 Sep 1989, p.G5]

This is a weird piece of work, silly and exhilarating. And yes, the sequel's better. [15 Jun 1990, p.10]

Two predictable disappointments here (among many): As usual, these high school kids appear in fact to be played by folks who have left college well behind them; and, sadder, Just One of the Guys was directed by a woman -- women filmmakers being a worthy cause under almost any circumstances -- yet betrays no higher consciousness regarding kids and sex roles than Porky's 3. [30 Apr 1985, p.B3]

It's a bloodless film, however; a spy story that actually drags for long stretches in the middle. And even though it's based on fact, there's rarely any drama in it. These are odd failures. [25 Jan 1985, p.D6]

Routine chop-sock of the non-Hong Kong school. [04 Sep 1985, p.D5]

So it's all pretty silly. But it does move along, and the range of weapons is formidable. Steve Carver, who did Norris' An Eye for an Eye, knows how to handle action, though Lone Wolf might have been more convincing had he let any of the bad guys shoot straight. [5 May 1983, p.B10]

We get the feeling that whatever it is Scorsese and Price have to say about these marvelous characters, it is not anything very interesting.

The movie is facile and manipulative, but it can't hide the gifts of Jackie Gleason in the role of Hanks' father. [30 July 1986, p.D6]

Roberts looks great bathing under a waterfall. It's just that no one had the heart, during this production, to tell her that it was stupid. And so, while all about her are laughing up the short sleeves of their safari jackets or rattling their Zambooli spears in impatience, Roberts plays Sheena as high drama, as best she can, which isn't so good. [18 Aug 1984, p.C1]

What Spielberg does is use the Lucas tricks to propel an old-fashioned fantasy, played broadly enough so that the laughs come as easily as the thrills. [23 May 1984, p.B1]

Chocolat is as beautiful as it is solemn. It's a meditation on memory and on the nature of innocence in the face of great, irresistible change, but its glory is in the quiet development of its several characters. [12 May 1989, p.5]

Disney's latest incarnation parries and feints somewhere between the "serious" melodramas of vintage Hollywood and the frisky cavortings of Richard Lester's mid-'70s send-ups. [13 Nov 1993, p.G3]

Gag delivery is by shotgun and, as happens when there is even a minimum of talent involved in such projects, some of the material is on target. And some of it is awful. [27 Mar 1984, p.B5]

The film was conceived and executed as a star vehicle. Wrong stars, wrong roles, not much happening here. And for George Harrison and his Handmade Films, the first big bust. [20 Oct 1986, p.C4]

Ribald, wry and even, from time to time, suspenseful, The Name of the Rose is actually a movie-movie -- rich in Hollywood convention, dense with images, with muscular performances (the principals play their types to the maximum), with good, old- fashioned movie stuff. Never a dull moment. How very unlikely. [24 Oct 1986, p.D1]

Testament is determinedly apolitical and wholly unsensational. It is propaganda in the best sense, a cry for life. And it is no fun at all. [09 Nov 1983, p.B6]

Implicit in the artlessness of this scene is the filmmakers' sense of the formulaic nature of their work, which requires no higher art than bartering with the butcher for spare parts; when the teen van moves out, like a fisheries truck loaded with trout for the spring re-stocking, it's a nod to the genre and a wink for the grown-ups in the crowd. The rest is in your face. [16 Aug 1982, p.B4]

Mississippi is full of good will, but it's not preachy, and its story of romance in an ethnic broth is fascinating when it's working right. [14 Feb 1992, p.5G]

Radford's 1984 is a time of relentless oppression in every corner of life, and his images -- corroded, soiled, darkly corrupted -- speak of Orwell as eloquently as the characters. [15 Mar 1985, p.D6]

What the movie is all about is Twin Peaks with the sex, violence and "colorful" language left in...Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is not David Lynch at his most challenged and hence most inventive. The rigid restraints of television, with its prudish codes and goofy winks at prurient-life-as-we-know-it, may now be seen as Lynch's real muse. The movie, lurid as it is, reads like a perverse set of CliffNotes to the series, the details recapitulated explicitly but without a dram of passion. [2 Sept 1992, p.E1]