Dave Kehr

Mr. Sawyer eventually overreaches, striving for tragedy with a grim, cautionary ending that seems meant to evoke "Frankenstein." But the film's offhand, homemade quality sustains a quirky appeal.

Poltergeist at this point is a brand name without a distinctive product to sell-no vivid characters, no unique situations, no look or meaning of its own.

Though the film is far from polished, the force of its significance to Mr. Frey, as well as the urgency of its political message, give it some genuine impact.

For an outside observer, Saints and Sinners doesn't make particularly compelling viewing, but Ms. Honor has given her subjects an excellent present on their big day: the ultimate wedding video.

If anything, this new film version is cornier and more conventional than the first screen adaption of the novel. [2 Oct 1992, p.C]

A wan, wistful Generation Y romance.

Joins the small pool of films that have dared to use Imax to tell a story.

Special-effects buffs generally cite this 1963 effort by Ray Harryhausen as the master’s masterpiece, and his work does a great deal to enliven the tired plot and vacuous stars (Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack).

Beaches is a melodrama in the original sense of the term: a drama with music. And as long as the melo is handled by Bette Midler, who performs half a dozen songs, Beaches can`t be all bad. But the drama, as transacted between Midler and Barbara Hershey, is pretty dreadful.

Still reeling from the success of Carrie, De Palma turns this 1978 film into an endless series of shock effects, some of which work but most of which don't.

James Cagney gives it all his drive and speediness, but this plodding, straight-line 1957 biography of Lon Chaney Sr. never comes close to capturing the actor's obsessiveness or offering any insights as to how he made his personal pain and humiliation accessible and meaningful to a mass audience.

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.

Bright, good-spirited and blissfully short.

The film gets by on the sheer good-naturedness Reitman is able to place in all of his efforts, though it doesn't seem likely to inspire the same level of affection as the original. Innocence is one quality that can never quite be recaptured. [16 Jun 1989, p.28]

There is a genuine sweetness in Reitman's work that balances the innate cruelty of much '80s film comedy. But this time the gags are too feeble to provide a counterweight and the film tips into the cute, benign and pointless. [9 Dec 1988, p.A]

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.

The movie is full of dead ends, logical gaps and bizarre inconsistencies. Yet Donaldson is deft enough, both in his composition of shots and his direction of actors, to create a scene-by-scene sense of competence and control that carries the picture across some very rough spots.

As a movie, this sort-of sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show ain't much—but then neither was the original, and we all know how much difference that made.

Suspect smothers in misapplied seriousness-it's the thriller as civics lesson. [23 Oct 1987, p.A]

This mild 1984 comedy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New York City yuppie (Tom Hanks) isn't at all hard to take (John Candy, in a supporting role, is hilarious and original, and Hannah has a pleasant naive charm), but its appeal is based almost entirely on regression—a thematic regression to infancy (now endemic to the American cinema) and a stylistic regression to the most lulling kind of TV blandness. No wonder it's relaxing: it's a lullaby.

Sam Wood's direction is limited to forced perspective compositions and hollow, incantatory line readings, but the craggy landscape shines under Ray Rennahan's Technicolor cinematography.

There isn't a lucid moment in it (and much of the dialogue is rendered unintelligible by Russell's subversive direction), but it has dash, style, and good looks, as well as the funniest curtain line since Some Like It Hot.

The film, too artfully conceived to deliver many overt shocks, often feels long and aimless.

Though the slow, obvious "Two If By Sea" probably won't do much to advance Bullock's standing as America's current sweetheart, it shouldn't do irreparable damage to it, either. [13 Jan 1996, p.21]

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

Cher plays a footloose, life-loving mother of two fatherless daughters who sports a bouffant hairdo and, at one crucial point, a Mylar mermaid costume that looks as if it were constructed, on a bet by designer Bob Mackie, entirely out of common household objects. The part isn't much of a stretch for America's reigning queen of wacky non-conformity, though it should please her established fans while scraping the nerves of the unconvinced as lightly as possible.

Well-meaning and hopelessly bland, You'll Get Over It, instantly drops into the tone of didactic realism that rules most television fiction, drawing easy moral lessons from a scrubbed-up simulacrum of everyday, middle-class life.

The gags are slighted in favor of John Denver-style homilies, mouthed by John Denver, while the film collapses under the weight of missed narrative connections, the apparent victim of excessive recutting.