Dave Kehr

Gremillon seems the master of every style he attempts, but his genius lies in the smooth linking of those various styles; the film seems to evolve as it unfolds, changing its form in imperceptible stages.

This is one of the greats, and I’m too much in awe of it to say much more than: See it—as often as you can.

One of the most deeply and disturbingly nihilistic films ever made, as well as one of the most heart-pounding thrillers. [06 Mar 1992, p.C2]

The original antimarijuana film, offering the true inside story of the devil weed that drives men to savage lusts and women to unspeakable depravities, along with a little bit of dumb fun.

Hot Shots! is very sharp and very funny, and if it doesn't have the aggressive, anarchic edge of "Airplane!" (attitude seems to be the specialty of David Zucker, who has just released "The Naked Gun 2 1/2 "), it is consistently, almost exhaustingly hilarious.

Though The burbs is hardly an actor's film, Hanks continues to demonstrate the ease and maturity that has been his since Big, while Dern, Ducommun and Feldman lend broad but effective support.

Buñuel conjures with Freudian imagery, outrageous humor, and a quiet, lyrical camera style to create one of his most complex and complete works, a film that continues to disturb and transfix.

Nimoy directs the comedy in a loose, relaxed, almost sketch-like manner, but when the film moves into its multiple-cliffhanger climax, he's still able to generate some genuine dash and tension. The only drawback is that the Enterprise gang is starting to look a little long in the tooth for such strenuous action.

Homicide isn't easy to take, but its vision is chillingly persuasive. [18 Oct 1991, p.B]

Ousmane Sembene’s 1977 Senegalese film was attacked for daring to depict life in precolonial Africa as something less than paradisiacal.

Sid & Nancy is a movie that features head-bashings, drug overdoses, stabbings and a more-or-less constant round of pointless, stupid violence, and yet its most prominent quality is its sweetness. This is a love story--an unlikely, perverse, disturbing love story, but a genuine one.

One of the few remaining Hollywood filmmakers who can function at this level of pure cinema, Hill delivers here with a renewed force and assurance. After a string of tired films (including the exhausted "Another 48 HRS."), Hill seems revitalized. [25 Dec 1992, p.C]

An excellent film, still as fresh as the day it was made.

The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?

It remains an engaging, energetic film. [22 Jan 1987, p.9B]

Boomerang, a sleek, confident and very funny urban comedy that may not entirely overcome Murphy's more discomfiting tendencies, but at least manages to put them to good use. [01 Jul 1992]

The film represents a studied, sophisticated approach to instinctual emotions: it's carefully, calculatingly naive, and amazingly it works.

Burton's direction rises to a Wagnerian hysteria (an impression backed by Danny Elfman`s roaring orchestral score) as the two mortal enemies fight it out on the brink of a zillion-foot drop. Burton achieves a genuine majesty at that moment-though he would need one or two more like it to make Batman a genuinely memorable film.

This 1950 Hitchcock film came between Under Capricorn and Strangers on a Train, and if it isn’t the equal of those two sterling achievements, it’s still an intriguing experiment.

Renegades steams along very nicely, with more than enough momentum to compensate for the callowness of its stars. [05 Jun 1989, p.3C]

This is fun but, compared with Kurosawa’s other 60s efforts, relatively slight.

A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.

Through its first two-thirds it is as perfect a myth of adolescence as any of the Disney films, documenting the childlike, nameless heroine's initiation into the adult mysteries of sex, death, and identity, and the impossibility of reconciling these forces with family strictures.

If Godard's use of sound is as inventive as it was in his Dolby "Detective" of 1985, that's reason alone to check it out. [08 Apr 1988, p.B]

It's a well written, well staged and well acted piece, though there is something musty in its aesthetic - that of the huge, bellowing method performance, plastered over a flimsy, one-set world. [02 Oct 1992, p.A]

The beauty of Mr. Naderi's filmmaking lies in his combination of acute social observation (with the subway population providing its habitual cross section of New York classes and cultures) and pure, almost mathematical formalism.

It's the best kind of homemade movie, created with skill, modesty and a pleasing awareness of what works in an ultra-low-budget format that tends to be performance and storytelling, rather than visual expressiveness and technical polish.

It is a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work, an original and distinctive expression by a gifted young Philadelphia-based filmmaker who here confirms the talent he displayed in his 2001 film, "A Chronicle of Corpses."