Dave Kehr

The picture seems deliberately trite, blunt, and manipulative, as if the producers didn't trust their audience to respond to anything else.

Well, it really is a stinker, a compendium of The Deer Hunter's weaknesses (of plotting, narration, dialogue, and character) with few of its lyrical strengths.

Jessica Lange brings so much energy and personal involvement to her portrayal of Frances Farmer that you can't help but feel sorry for her; nothing else in the film remotely matches her talent and dedication, and she seems alone—and even slightly absurd—in her feverish creativity.

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

Cary Medoway uses backlighting and spatially distorting lenses to give the film the hyped-up look of a rock video, but his handling of actors is so inept that he must rely on the rock score to make the most basic emotional points.

Despite all the anguished huffing and puffing, there isn't a single authentic moment in it, and all you're left with in the end is the fading memory of two overscaled, Oscar-bait performances.

Even Neil Simon fans (and they do exist, believe it or not) will probably be bummed out by this stunningly unfunny 1976 parody of detective films.

Carpenter's direction is slow, dark, and stately; he seems to be aiming for an enveloping, novelistic kind of effect, but all he gets is heaviness.

Though we are largely spared Leonard Nimoy's stentorian presence as a performer, we must endure his miscalculations as a director: the dialogue scenes are often hilariously turgid; the action scenes—when Nimoy can be bothered to descend from his podium and film them—are zanily maladroit.

Remains a sadly earthbound thing, mired in a dismal realism that lies far from its natural environment.

Franklin J. Shaffner's deadpan adaptation of Ira Levin's silly story about Hitler clones. The plot is less suspenseful than the overacting contest between the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, who spend most of their screen time one-upping each other in affectations.

Richard Marquand's dull, literal direction takes all the edge off this variant on the “Will he kiss her or kill her?” formula.

A ski party movie in which the clothes are a little more revealing than they were 35 years ago, the practical jokes are a little more tasteless, and the uncertainty over sex is pretty much nonexistent.

Tricked up with an elaborate flashback structure, subtitled dialogue in three languages and as many gratuitous aesthetic touches as the traffic will bear, Proteus emerges as a heavy, pretentious and derivative film.

Some kind of equality has been achieved when it is impossible to distinguish heterosexual clichés from homosexual ones.

Young French director Luc Besson (Le dernier combat) aims for a little American slickness in this relentlessly empty action film: it zooms along from one arbitrary sequence to the next, and its only aim is to keep the audience pumped up with kinetic stimulation.

Mr. Girod is a fish out of water in the after-hours clubs and deserted industrial districts that constitute the sexual underworld of Brussels. His film feels more like what one would see from the top of a double-decker tourist bus than the work of someone who has immersed himself in a sexual subculture and its particular values.

Starts on a note of relative naturalism and under Mr. La Salle's nuanced direction gradually becomes more and more unhinged until it concludes in an altogether different genre.

This big-budget bubble-gum musical is appalling but compulsively watchable; it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980, complete with roller discos, dreamy boys, fashion shows, and fantasy father figures. Director Robert Greenwald has a lot of ideas, all of them bad: his style could be described as rapid misfire.

Quickly collapses into an overloaded, slow-moving series of predictable jokes and forced situations.

It's a rare sequel that fritters away the appeal of the original so completely: within minutes, this continuation of Romancing the Stone has reduced the Kathleen Turner-Michael Douglas couple to a nightmare pairing of the gushingly idiotic and the sourly venal.

First-rate schlock; overlong and incredibly stupid, but that's part of the formula by now.

The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.

The results, to judge from the examples here, have been stuffy and disappointing, an unholy alliance between Playboy Channel prurience and PBS cultural alibis.

Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).

The bucketloads of sanctimonious message mongering ladled on by director Peter Hyams still can't disguise the sheerly mercenary basis of this 1986 project, a wholly uncalled-for sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

The murder-mystery board game becomes a frantic, unfunny spoof (1985) under the direction of British TV writer Jonathan Lynn. The script recycles Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with six guests invited by a mysterious host to spend the night in a creepy mansion, but instead of parodying the material Lynn simply surrounds it with extraneous pratfalls and wisecracks.

Mr. Piccirillo's direction reflects a basic knowledge of stagecraft but no discernable sense of filmmaking. The dull television-style close-ups march relentlessly across the screen, leaving only the ghostly trails of badly transferred video images behind.

Seems a little too desperate to be liked.

A curdled, unfunny satire made more painful by McGrath’s inappropriately jubilant style.

The first-time director, Harold Ramis, can't hold it together: the picture lurches from style to style (including some ill-placed whimsy with a gopher puppet) and collapses somewhere between sitcom and sketch farce. Male bonding remains the highest value of the Animal House comedies: women are trashed with a fierceness out of Mickey Spillane.

Credibility, of course, wouldn't matter if the gags were good enough, which they are not. The film quickly falls back on the gross-out jokes that have made recent American comedies such a challenge to the digestive tract.

Dismal Stanley Kramer morality play about a middle-class couple facing the prospect of their daughter's marriage to a black man (Sidney Poitier). A disaster on all counts.

Less interested in politics than in profitably flattering the suspicions and resentments of its intended teenage audience.

It's astounding to see Arthur Penn's name attached to this piece of cheese.

It settles uneasily on the back of a verbal comic like Hanks—the movie keeps setting up gags that never quite materialize, and Hanks, unable to fill out his underwritten part with slapstick, is left stranded. Without any big laughs to even out the film's tone, the balance gradually shifts to the grim paranoia of the basic conception, and the movie that emerges seems oddly bleak and melancholic.

Travels fast and straight down a linear plot, and the ceaseless rush quickly becomes monotonous.

What's left is the framework for a graphic, brutal, sickening film (1980), without the violent effects that might have made sense (however illegitimate) out of the conception. Like The Exorcist, it alternates five minutes of shock with ten minutes of dull exposition, plenty of time to watch Al Pacino wrestle with his miserably conceived character.

The question remains: why work so hard to make something deliberately bad, when the world is hardly running a shortage of mediocre movies?

Less a formal documentary than a rambling screed.

Apart from Curtis, no one seems to be trying very hard (least of all director James Bridges, whose excellent work in the 70s seems long behind him here), and the film falls apart from a horribly evident lack of interest, conviction, and imagination.

Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.

Walter Hill's first outright failure, this revisionist western draws on the major themes of his work—the relationship of pursuer and pursued; the beauty of clean, planned action; the attraction to violence and resultant moral revulsion—but none of them ignites.

This time Mr. Burns is trying something in the Martin Scorsese street-realist mode, but his self-regarding sentimentality trips him up again.

It's a failure, less because the odd stylistic mix doesn't take (it does from time to time, and to striking effect) than because Landis hasn't bothered to put his story into any kind of satisfying shape.

The screenplay for this 1985 feature is so riddled with character inconsistencies and unmotivated behavior that it plays like science fiction: the unsuspected presence of body-snatching aliens is the only conceivable explanation for the bizarre twists of psychology the film proposes.

Too dull even to function as camp.

Director John Landis is so deficient in basic storytelling skills that he must spend hours explicating the most elementary plot points while and Murphy are sidelined.

Disappointingly shallow and not terribly funny romantic comedy.

The film dissolves into a series of diminishing anticlimaxes, ending on a note of portentous ambiguity. To the last, Mr. Levin maintains his uneasy balance of reportage and melodrama.

A bland, half-finished film that seems to have been conceived as off-peak cable fodder.

The film exudes complacency and self-congratulation; it is a very cowardly, craven piece of ersatz art.

The action is clotted and murky, and Coppola obviously hasn't bothered to clarify it for the members of his cast, who wander through the film with expressions of winsome, honest befuddlement.

Mr. Allen's work is compromised by an apparent inability to match his shots in a spatially coherent fashion. It's never easy to tell who is chasing whom and in which direction, a needless confusion that dampens many of the thrills and scuttles quite a few gags.

Instantly forgettable film.

The crosscutting between the two plot lines is so feeble and intrusive that it destroys whatever faint narrative momentum the film possesses.

Mr. Cattaneo restricts himself to the smiling blandness that has become the stock in trade of British comedies made for export, turning in a film that is forced, familiar and thoroughly condescending.

Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

Despite the sophistication of the source material, this 1984 film isn't particularly successful: Petersen insists on forcing the superficial moral lessons, and the half hour removed from the film by its American distributors leaves it with a harsh, choppy rhythm.

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

Only adds to the sense that Mr. Konchalovsky has lost his artistic moorings. He has certainly lost his common sense.

Probably should have stayed on a shelf back in Paris.

Should soon join Mr. Greenaway's last few efforts in obscurity.

An unfocused, overplotted, painfully derivative comic fantasy.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

Relentlessly bright and superficial, even when the subject turns to self-destruction.

Whimsical fluff (1967) that weighs in on the far side of 50 tons; it's so clumsy and pounding that taking a child to it might be grounds for a visit from family services.

Isn't very successful at evoking the dream state, but does a good job of inducing it.

The project would have been much more palatable as a TV special; as it stands, it's just another symptom of the American cinema's addiction to facile mythmaking.

This 1965 hit is the sort of film that reeks of emotional Muzak, the most elemental responses programmed right into the scenario. Every audience sniffle and tear has been taken into account.

The emotional impact of Shark Skin Man is negligible.

Sluggish, repetitive, and strangely timorous, with little of the zap and imagination of the Pythons' television work.

The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances.

This 1979 movie adaptation of the cult TV series is blandness raised to an epic scale. Robert Wise's bloodless direction drains all the air from the Enterprise.

Every moment is hyped for maximum visual and visceral impact, but Scott doesn't display the slightest bit of interest (or belief) in the actual characters and situations.

Tired, poorly paced Bond from 1967, with Sean Connery displaying his discontent. Donald Pleasence's Blofeld has a memorably creepy softness, but that's about it.

McBride's presentation of Richard Gere is frankly pornographic, perhaps the only way to handle this Victor Mature of the 80s; Valerie Kaprisky costars—meekly.

Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals, draining the Hitchcock moves of their content and complexity. He's left with a collection of empty technical tricks—obtrusive and gimmick-crazed, this film has been “directed” within an inch of its life—and he fills in the blanks with an offhand cruelty toward his characters, a supreme contempt for his audience (at one point, we're compared to the drooling voyeurs who inhabit his vision of Bellevue), and a curdled, adolescent vision of sexuality.

The film is flat, dull, and sloppy.

It's fast-paced and full of gaudy action, yet it's thoroughly unsatisfying, largely because it's so lazy: once Stallone (also the screenwriter) and director George Pan Cosmatos have sketched out the standard genre archetypes, they leave it at that, not bothering to fill in the niceties of characterization, plausibility, motivation, and suspense.

A series of gun battles follow, none staged with quite enough verve or imagination to break through the pervasive torpor.

Little remains of the original but its weakest element - its overelaborate intrigue - and Hackford seems only to scramble it further.

Milius has nothing to say: this 1982 film only hints at the romantic heroics of "The Wind and the Lion" and has none of the personal quality of "Big Wednesday."

I can't remember another film that took so little care with the details of ambience: the cruddy sets and flat, underworked sound track drain any sense of life from the project, to the point where it looks like the cheapest kind of TV—canned theater.

Even the imaginative gore can't hide the musty scent of Todd Farmer's screenplay.

Starts to seem less like a political documentary than a one-sided "Battle of the Network Stars," with the younger generation clearly winning the charisma challenge.

The film runs through most of Leni Riefenstahl's bag of tricks as it builds up a patriotic frenzy, yet the crazed flag-waving would be a lot easier to take if it weren't so clearly a commercial calculation meant to salvage what is otherwise a crass, careless, shamelessly padded film.

George Roy Hill's 1969 film moves with steady, stupid grace from oozy sentimentality to nihilistic violence.

Loses its way in rhetorical excess and blatant sentimentality.

James Jones's antiwar novel was blandly realized by the usual bunch of Hollywood do-gooders in 1953...Sominex is cheaper and probably safer.

Ward, a gruff, amiable presence, has the stuff of an appealing blue-collar hero, but he hasn't got a chance with the feeble setup the filmmakers have given him: he's made the butt of meathead jokes for 60 minutes (as he tries to cope with the rigors of Chiun's training) and then plopped down in the middle of a slipshod intrigue, where his success has more to do with luck than any of the skills he has supposedly mastered.

There is little here to hold the attention of anyone older than 9. For families in search of entertainment, it may be time to find Nemo again.

Michael Mann (Miami Vice) produced this exercise in fascist chic, and it plays like a TV pilot filled out with a few cusswords and strokes of excess violence.

Hughes invokes the classical unities of time, place, and plot symmetry, yet he trashes his careful structure every time he needs a gag - destroying the integrity of his characters, shattering the plausibility of his situations.

He's (Marco Filiberti) his own best audience, and Adored is best left to his own enjoyment.

Disturbingly superficial in its approach to the material.

Seemingly endless and punishingly unfunny.

It sounds like standard Cinderella stuff (and the script comes complete with plenty of allusions to princesses in towers), but it's played here with an emphasis on possessions and possessing that borders on the obscene… It's a pretty ugly movie. [23 Mar 1990, Friday, p.C]