Dave Kehr

As LaMotta, Robert De Niro gives a blank, soulless performance; there's so little of depth or urgency coming from him that he's impossible to despise, or forgive, in any but the most superficial way.

Ernest Schoedsack's sequel to his monster hit of 1933, rushed out the same year. The slapdash production shows in a wavering tone and a paucity of special effects. With Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack; the animation, what there is of it, is by the legendary Willis O'Brien.

It's very funny, and at times exhilaratingly so. But when real life tragedy is used as a basis for movie comedy, some consideration of responsibility has to enter the equation.

The film in fact consists of a series of dull speeches spun on simple themes; Bergman barely tries to make the material function dramatically.

No matter how you look at it, "The Name of the Rose" is a film best summarized by lists. It's a collection of elements, some well chosen and some less so, that never comes together into a coherent whole. For everything the movie has--which is, by and large, the best that money can buy--it doesn't have a director, someone who can take all the pieces and put them together into a vision. [24 Oct 1986, p.AC]

Graham Greene's screenplay is centered on the pivotal moment when a child first discovers sin, but the boy's perspective is neglected in favor of facile suspense structures and a thuddingly conventional whodunit finale.

Clayton lacks the Jamesian temper, and his film is finally more indecisive than ambiguous. Too much Freud and too little thought.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a strange concoction - a bad taste comedy with a big, beating heart. [12 May 1989, p.B]

There are several solid laughs and some excellent supporting performances. But this is a film to be wary of.

For what it is, it ain't bad, though it serves mainly as an illustration of the ancient quandary of revisionist moviemakers: if all you do is systematically invert cliches, you simply end up creating new ones.

It binds up introductory lessons in music appreciation, Freudian psychology, and fanciful history with a pulp thriller plot.

It's difficult to see, too, what exactly all of this has to do with the twilight of the '60s. With his frequent sentimental allusions to the end of an era, Robinson seems to be grasping for a profundity that his anecdotal reminiscences don't merit or really need. Marwood, the film implies, will leave this life behind and go on to great things, while Withnail will be mired in it forever, a forgotten Falstaff to Marwood's striding Prince Hal. Self- dramatization is one thing; self-Shakespearization is something else. [10 July 1987, p.C]

Steven Spielberg's mechanical thriller is guaranteed to make you scream on schedule (John Williams's score even has the audience reactions programmed into the melodies), particularly if your tolerance for weak motivation and other minor inconsistencies is high.

Enjoyable and even exciting at the start, Dog Day Afternoon degenerates into frustration and tedium toward nightfall—an experience no less painful for the audience than for the actors.

The film looks austere and serious, rather as if it had been shot inside a Frigidaire, and the oppressiveness of the images tends to strangle laughter, even at the most absurd excesses of Alvin Sargent's script.

Brian De Palma demonstrates the drawbacks of a film-school education by overexploiting every cornball trick of style in the book: slow motion, split screen long takes, and soft focus abound, all to no real point...He's an overachiever—which might not make for good movies, but at least he's seldom dull.

Decent 1961 adaptation of the Bernstein-Robbins musical, if you can handle Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood in the leads.

Z doesn't communicate anything—except for the doubtful propositions that pacifists are more threatening to right-wingers than communists and that fascist terrorism and homosexuality go hand in hand.

Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.

The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.

Finally fails to escape the conventions of the Hollywood cinema it so proudly deplores.

The details of this Twin Peaks are slight and repetitious, and their meanings are numbingly obvious. Behind small town America's facade of sweetness and light, there exist darkness and evil-news that is a day late and about $7.50 short. [28 Aug 1992]

Slightly bloated Bond, with too much technology and a climactic slaughter that's a little too mindless to be much fun. Still, Adolfo Celi—with his “heat and cold, applied scientifically”—makes a most memorable villain.

Here, as too often in his career, Stevens is aiming to have the last word on a genre: everything aims for “classic” status, and everything falters in a mire of artsiness and obtrusive technique.

The film has no qualities beyond its formal polish--and its careful avoidance (or rather, displacement) of the moral and political issues involved can seem too crafty, too convenient.

Much of it is awful, but it's almost impossible not to be taken in by the narrative sprawl: like many big, bad movies, Giant is an enveloping experience, with a crazy life and logic of its own.

All of the film`s female characters are shrill, manipulative and irrational-their only appeal is masochistic.

Alan Pakula's pedestrian 1976 recap of Watergate is a study in missed opportunities.

Huston does a reverse take on the material, underplaying the grotesque situation until it turns into a parody on the problems of the average working couple, but the pacing is so lugubrious that the laughs never materialize.

Somehow Christie’s talent shines through this muck, and Laurence Harvey gets to do an entertaining George Sanders impression as the leader of the revels.

The material has been bowdlerized to the point of abstraction, which makes Richard Brooks's sweaty, emphatic direction look a little silly—there just isn't that much to get worked up about. But Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are highly entertaining as the nightmare parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Jack Carson has one of his last good roles as Newman's competitive older brother.

This 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle.

The director, Henry Hathaway, is another old veteran, and the cinematographer is the great Lucien Ballard, but somehow it comes off like a TV celebrity roast.

The script is funny and observant, full of shocks of recognition, but for all his progress as a writer, Allen's direction remains disconcertingly amateurish. Still, it remains perhaps the only film in which Allen has been able to successfully imagine a personality other than his own.

Based on the comic strip created in 1936 by Lee Falk, The Phantom is a handsomely produced, numbingly impersonal adventure film that fails to do anything new with the format. [7 June 1996, p.49]

Mainly it's marking time: the characters take a definite backseat to the special effects, and much of the action seems gratuitous, leading nowhere.

This is compelling stuff, but there is something deeply distracting in the use of recreated material.

Trust seems ultimately a matter of touches-some cute, some surprising, some even fairly expressive, but none more than superficial. [16 Aug 1991]

Laurence Olivier's famous 1948 interpretation of Shakespeare's play suffers slightly from his pop-Freud approach to the character and from some excessively flashy, wrongheaded camera work—including the notorious moment when Hamlet begins the soliloquy and the camera begins to track back.

First-timer Peter Masterson directed; his notion of film is to point the camera in the general direction of the actors.

This sort of thing was considered high art not so long ago; now it seems forced and ponderously symbolic.

The film handles difficult issues of wartime morality, with clear parallels to the American experience in Vietnam, but Beresford's direction is so placid, distanced, and methodical that the film never admits any doubt or debate; it tends to seal up the issues rather than liberate them.

It's all oddly sweet, and, for the viewer at least, more than a little dull.

Director Peter Weir struggles to create an atmosphere of mystical languor, dissolving his actors in blinding sunlight and filling his sound track with the faintly ominous rustles of nature. But the deenergized drama leads only to anticlimax, as Weir suggests much more than he shows and invites the audience to fill in the meanings.

Steve McQueen as a tres chic San Francisco cop, though the real star is his sports car. There isn't much here, and what there is is awfully easy. With Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Vaughn, Robert Duvall, and a chase sequence that achieved classic status mainly by going on too long; Peter Yates directed this 1968 feature.

Despite a monotonously fashionable mise-en-scene, Lyne generates some genuine erotic tension between his two stars; you believe in their obsessive relationship, even as most of the action and staging registers as ridiculous.

Reasonably entertaining, if too long and too literal.

A few moments of sly inspiration are not enough to carry an entire feature; along with the tears, it leaves behind an aftertaste of phoniness. [16 March 1990, Friday, p.H]

A New York movie with a California soul—superficially gritty but soft in the center, in a silly est sort of way.

The dual-track plot, with constant cutting between mother and daughter, seems less an attempt to establish meaningful parallels between the two stories than the nervous twitches of a compulsive channel changer.

In some ways this 1932 item is the definitive MGM film, in which the direction (Edmund Goulding), screenplay (William A. Drake), and cinematography (William Daniels) all seem deliberately pale, the better to set off the glitter of the stars; they’re like jewels mounted in a deliberately neutral display case.

The acting, showy and instinctual, is most of the movie; the visual style is too forced and chicly distended to let the drama acquire much natural life of its own. It's a film that expresses a great deal of disgust toward homosexuals, while placing a sympathetic homosexual relationship at its core.

The acting is too eccentric and the narrative drive too weak to satisfy fans of the genre, but Herzog's admirers will find much in the film's animistic landscapes and clusters of visionary imagery.

An attempt to blend the war epic and the caper film that doesn't quite come off.

Director Tobe Hooper seriously overplays his hand, losing the shape of this 1985 film in a barrage of overblown special effects and screaming Dolby stereo.

Dario Argento's grossly overstated mise-en-scene adds some perverse interest to this routine (if unusually gory) horror film from 1976. Argento works so hard for his effects—throwing around shock cuts, colored lights, and peculiar camera angles—that it would be impolite not to be a little frightened

The animation is imaginatively conceived, but stiffly executed. A Fantasia designed for heads, the film does no more justice to the music than Disney's artists did. But Disney had the excuse of innocence, whereas this shrewdly conceived commercial project does not.

It is an intriguing subject, though so far all that Morris has brought to it is a combination of the morbid and the cruel; he needs to develop some sympathy, too. [16 Sept 1988]

Wyler lays out all the elements with care and precision, but the romantic comedy never comes together - it's charm by computer. [Review of re-release]

The drama is developed without recourse to flashbacks or cutaways, and it is done cleverly and stylishly, though it lacks Hitchcock's usual depth. At times, the film seems on the verge of rising above its frankly propagandistic intentions, but it never really confronts the Darwinian themes built into the material.

Mr. Freundlich's naturalistic sensibility gets in the way of the film's broad fantasy elements, turning what might have been a stylized romp like Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" into something a little too real for comfort.

Despite the rich associations, the film finally makes little more of its central figure, a hideously deformed young man, than an object of pity.

David Lean's studied, plodding, overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in E.M. Forster's haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India.

Jungle Fever may be a failure, but it is the kind of failure that engenders hope: It finds Lee refining the skills he already possesses and striking out in encouraging new directions. The next ''Spike Lee Joint''

Despite its blatant mediocrity, this 1981 British film knocked 'em dead everywhere, which makes me suspect that audiences weren't responding to the film itself as much as to the attitudes that underlie it.

The film (and Garson’s stiff-backed, Academy Award-winning performance in particular) has dated very badly; it’s difficult now to see the qualities that wartime audiences found so assuring.

Director Taylor Hackford shapes some engaging performances (the surly, withdrawn Baryshnikov of the early scenes is an intriguing figure) but never extricates himself from the plot machinery; this 1985 feature takes off only in the brief but well-filmed dance sequences.

Though the costumes are beautifully designed, the chateau locations carefully chosen and the dialogue full of curling locutions, something cloddish and naive still comes through in Frears' direction, and not only because he can seldom get his shots to match. [13 Jan 1989, Friday, p.A]

The action and sentiments are familiar to the point of cliche, and there isn't much life in Gillian Armstrong's academic direction—she keeps pushing ideas over events, and meanings over emotions. But Judy Davis, as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman, grants the film much charm and passion.

Penny Marshall, the sitcom actress ("Laverne and Shirley") turned filmmaker ("Big," "Awakenings"), manages to make even such elementary material seem labored and phony. The film, which was shot in and around Chicago last summer, is a major disappointment.

Well-intentioned tripe, directed with made-for-TV solemnity by John Korty.

This story of a party girl (Audrey Hepburn) in love with a gigolo (George Peppard) allows Edwards to create a very handsome film, with impeccable Technicolor photography by Franz Planer. [Review of re-release]

The picture has its moments of chilling insight, though essentially it is one more quaint early-70s stab at an American art cinema that never materialized.

Zuniga's support is winningly low-key.

Boys N the Hood wants to be “The Learning Tree'' and “Super Fly'' at once, an ambition that doesn't seem quite honest. [12 July 1991]

Postwar Disney (1953) and not quite up to snuff. Disney's depersonalizing habit of putting different teams in charge of different sections of the story really shows up here, with work ranging from the flat and cloying (the animation of Peter himself) to the full-bodied and funny (Captain Hook and his alligator).

The movie is never less than entertaining, but it fails to satisfy—it gives us too little of too much. Oddly, much of its pleasure is in the acting, which up to this point hadn't been Carpenter's strong suit: Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton offer excellent turns.

It’s exactly what you’d expect: tepid, artsy, and grayish, though it has surprising bursts of sincere sentiment.

Mr. Chandrasekhar's direction is casual to the point of carelessness, but he does give the movie a friendly, convivial atmosphere that contradicts and sometimes overcomes its frequently cruel humor. In short, this is another film that looks as if it was more fun to make than it is to sit through.

The film is uncharacteristically rigid and pious for Hitchcock; it feels more like a work of duty than conviction.

It took (Cronenberg) several films to come into his own as a filmmaker, but even his earliest work reflects his obsessive interest in the human body as raw material that can be transformed -- for better or for worse -- by strong emotions. [08 Jun 2004, p.E3]

A decent piece of do-good cinema...Director Norman Jewison stages their confrontations for effectively flashy, immediate effects, though he unnecessarily neglects the action-movie underpinning.

George Stevens, a tireless moralizer and part-time embalmer of American myths (Shane), directed this melodramatic adaptation of Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and what does not seem facile in it seems overwrought.

The film is an impressive technical achievement: the full-figure animation is dimensional and elegant, the perspectives imaginative, and the color design superb. But without the (old) Disney genius for emotional structure and character design, the results are rather flat—the film concentrates on Disney horror and trauma without the relief of Disney charm.

A stiff in spite of an interesting cast.

Powell had made The Red Shoes five years earlier; here he was clearly hoping to expand the style of the final ballet segment into feature length. But without dramatic grounding Powell’s voluptuous visuals seem empty, and his manic inventiveness operates in a void.

Ultimately, this is the kind of film that gets more points for what it isn't—i.e., a typical teen comedy loaded with boob and fart jokes—than for what it is.

Spencer Tracy does his cuddly curmudgeon turn as Clarence Darrow; it's a lazy, vague performance, but its wit provides the only crack of light in the film's somber, gray overcast.

It's a thoroughly professional job, but even in making a feature film, Giraldi still seems to be working to please a client. He shoots the script, supplying just enough style to make it stand up but not enough to make it move.

Jarmusch's whole method consists of reversing expectations. The problem with that method is that you quickly begin to expect the reversals; the unpredictability becomes predictable. Jarmusch is a talented filmmaker, with an original sense of humor and a sharp and distinctive visual style, but he won't be a great filmmaker until he stops approaching his material from the outside.

Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks.

for all its flaws, Born on the Fourth of July provides the final proof that Tom Cruise is the real thing-a movie star with all the natural, unforced ability to connect with an audience that the title implies. [20 Dec 1989, p.1]

A very minor contribution to the great corpus of Iranian cinema that has emerged in the last 20 years.

Mike Nichols had the Burtons for his first film (1966), but he felt compelled to drag in so many jazzy camera tricks that Richard and Elizabeth seem largely superfluous for the first couple of reels. When Nichols finally settles down, it's almost too late.

Dunye's salvation is her sense of humor. She's good at creating light, bantering dialogue, and there are a couple of sharp, satirical scenes.

Allen`s over-reliance on narration to create his emotional effects reminds us that his art is primarily, if not exclusively, a verbal one. He has never engaged the visual side of movies, never grasped film`s capacity to express emotions and ideas in images. Allen is a teller, not a shower.

George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.

Carol Reed's careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed descended to in the last years of his career.