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.