Dave Kehr

One of the queasier Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

A typically overproduced 1956 Fox film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, with Yul Brynner as the king and Deborah Kerr as the British schoolteacher who comes to Siam to educate Brynner's army of children. Too long at 133 minutes, but the score is swell.

A Boy and His Dog lacks the density of a Peckinpah film—in spite of some clever ideas and a few well-wrought images, it seems too schematic and its satire too blunt.

The filmmakers build an argument that is both intellectual and emotional, concentrating as much on the forensic evidence as on Ms. Rosario's passionate commitment to finding justice for her son.

The film is still an entertaining and invigorating thriller, with a structure and some curious sexual overtones that suggest Howard Hawks's "A Girl in Every Port."

It's a light, slight premise that seems more suited to a Saturday Night Live sketch than a full-length movie, but it plays pleasantly enough in its video incarnation, where modesty sometimes can be a virtue.

Inhabited by a genuine spirit of cruelty, both toward its characters and its audience.

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

Doesn't have many fresh ideas to contribute to the genre, though it is reasonably good-natured and delivers a handful of solid laughs.

Though the shocks are well conveyed, it's the sweetness that lingers, making this the first cute and cuddly entry in the genre.

Tossed by successive waves of floridity and biliousness, Food of Love finally washes up on the shores of camp.

A finely performed, breezily directed, very funny comedy. [17 July 1996, p.33]

Stone works some imaginative changes on the usual formulas of propagandistic fiction—Boyle is anything but the usual bland audience-identification figure, waiting around to be converted to the ideological position of the filmmakers—but as a director, he still didn't have the chops to bring off such an ambitious, multilayered project: the picture lunges into hysterical incoherence every few minutes, and Stone must resort to platitudinous simplifications to clear things up. It's lively, though, to say the very least.

As a filmmaker, Benjamin is capable of the occasional light, graceful touch, but the overall view eludes him; just as he was unable to bring out the sly blend of satire and psychological drama in Bo Goldman's script for Little Nikita, he's unable to find any harmony of tone in this scattered, cacophonous material. [09 Dec 1988, p.B]

A good-hearted comedy of clashing cultures. The film finds great fun in coaxing out and mocking a range of regional differences, from mutually impenetrable accents to radical variants in dress codes, but miraculously never descends to broad, dismissive caricatures.

William Friedkin's remake of the French thriller Wages of Fear represents an above-average effort by the director of The Exorcist—meaning it's marginally watchable. Friedkin senselessly complicates the simple story—four men drive a truckload of nitro through a South American jungle—with a lengthy exposition and some unfortunate existential overtones. The rhythms are all off—it's either too fast or too slow—but most of the set pieces are effective.

For De Niro, David Merrill represents a rare opportunity to play a leading man without tics or gimmicks, and it is a pleasure to set what a fine, transparent performer he can be after the high technique of Awakenings and GoodFellas.

Fully up to, as well as virtually indistinguishable from, its predecessors… The guarantee of Indiana Jones is that the pace never varies and the tone never changes; when you've had enough, you can feel free to leave. [24 May 1989, Tempo, p.1]

The film slides into its situation in a clever, fresh way, and the balance of wit and horror is well maintained throughout, though Sayles's decision to divide up the protagonist's chores among four main characters costs him something in the intensity of audience identification.

A strange, disturbing and yet occasionally quite funny cultural artifact from the new Russia.

Mario Van Peebles, of course, inhabits a very different world from that of his father: a world that his father, in some small way, helped to create. It is his awareness of this paradox, of the progressive import of his father's film and of the repressive import of his father's personality, that informs this modest but interesting work.

Though the film isn't as psychologically penetrating as some of Disney's later work, it retains the Freudian ferocity of the Grimm brothers fairy tale, as well as a fair measure of the scatological humor of the Disney shorts. David Hand was the supervising director, but Uncle Walt passed on every frame.

The Living End is not a movie even vaguely interested in attracting a wide public. It's a movie meant to please its own niche audience, and at that it seems likely to succeed.

Nolte does his standard lovable-lug routine with his usual ease and assurance, though a more daring producer might have allowed Madsen, stranded again in a second-banana role, to step up to the lead. This crafty, insinuating actor has been ready for his closeup for a while now. Can't somebody make him a star? [26 Apr 1996, p.47]

Child's Play would probably be sickening if it weren't so relentlessly stupid.

There's a lot of allegorical baggage on board, but the film's virtues lie in its relative simplicity.

Glen's willingness to give the action sequences a certain weight and seriousness produces some genuinely exciting moments, yet his work is everywhere undermined by the flatness of the characterizations and the uncertain architecture of the plot. Still, Maud Adams makes a nice impression and Roger Moore has shed some of his smarminess.

The sentiments expressed are really no more noble or refined than those of a Chuck Norris picture, though Joano's style tries to stamp art all over the sequence. It sure isn't that, but it isn't good action either. [14 Sep 1990, p.B]

One of the shining glories of the American musical, this 1952 feature was fabricated (by screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green) around a collection of old songs written by producer Arthur Freed and brought to bright, brash, and exuberant life by directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The setting is Hollywood's troubled transition to sound, and there is just enough self-reflexive content (on the eternal battle between illusion and reality in the movies) to structure the film's superb selection of numbers.

As silly as it sounds, but strangely dull.

As played by the smooth-faced, cheerful Lou Diamond Phillips, there seems to be something almost supernatural about the young man of La Bamba. He's a chosen one, and his rise to the top will be swift and smooth. If only he could shake those nightmares about a crashing plane . . . . [24 July 1987, p.A]

Impeccably liberal in its time, the film has not aged gracefully, although Dorothy Dandridge's performance in the lead remains a testimony to a black cinema that might have been.

This is filmmaking meant to engage the heart-and other visceral organs-more than the mind; its effects are simple, broad and directly put.

The film's real subject is the unacknowledged intensity of the father-daughter bond and the difficulty of separation, though Shyer, true to his name, shies away from the more painful implications of the material. [20 Dec 1991, p.B]

The movie is as flat and plain as a television program, and most of the supporting characters (including Louise Fletcher as a kindly schoolmarm) seem equally two-dimensional, as if they had wandered in from the set of "The Andy Griffith Show."

This 1983 feature was Carpenter's best film since Halloween but still couldn't recapture the perfect balance of visceral shock and narrative integrity that defined his first success.

Works because it's able to draw so many side issues into its central conflict, spreading its concerns culture-wide. [11 Dec 1992]

A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film.

Drawing purely on his technical skills, Reynolds is finally able to get some momentum going in the picture's final half-hour, when a defeated Robin musters the remains of his band and makes a last-ditch attempt on the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle. It seems to be enough to erase memories of the movie's painfully slow start and send the audience out reasonably happy and stimulated. But Robin Hood does not seem to be the defining blockbuster this summer still needs.

The camera work is so self-conscious and so intrusive that it consistently overrides our interest in the characters and their individual dramas.

It has a few good laughs in it thanks to Murphy, but mainly depends for its appeal on an uncomfortable manipulation of racial stereotypes. [04 Dec 1992]

At 70 minutes, Cupid's Mistake is short, but then, so is our time on this planet.

The film is full of carefully balanced moral proclamations, to the point where it begins to resemble an episode of "Nightline." [15 Jan 1988, p.B]

Universal's classic from 1931, directed by Tod Browning. The opening scenes, set in Dracula's castle, are magnificent—grave, stately, and severe. But the film becomes unbearably static once the action moves to England, and much of the morbid sexual tension is dissipated.

The mise-en-scene tends toward a painterly abstraction, as Hitchcock employs powerful masses, blank colors, and studiously unreal, spatially distorted settings. Theme and technique meet on the highest level of film art.

Awakenings is a film that unquestionably succeeds on its own terms, though those terms are deeply suspect. It is a canny piece of false art, one that consistently swaps meaning for superficial effect. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]

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

The crazy color schemes and visual effects once made this a popular head picture, though you'd have to be stoned to tolerate the score, which includes The Candy Man.

Martin has become a superb physical comic, and Tomlin brings some unexpected warmth to a cruelly written part. A manic fuzziness takes over in the last reel and spoils some of the pleasure, but it's still a sympathetic effort.

This tiny film is heartfelt, well made and worthy of attention.

Loaded down with rhetorical devices -- writer and director, Marco Amenta, drowns it in a flood of sentimental effusions.

The Bedroom Window is not at all an unskillful film, but that, in some ways, is what is most discouraging about it: Hanson is more than good enough to do something of his own. In its drive to imitate the past, Hollywood is leaving itself without a present. [16 Jan 1987, p.L]

William Golding's 1954 allegory on man's innate inhumanity is too facile by half, which makes it ideal for high school English classes but rather too gaseous and predictable for the movies.

From his long experience in television, [Reiner] has learned how to create characters with just enough depth to hold together but not so much that they become too individualized, too stubbornly complex. [12 July 1989, Tempo, p.1]

Serreau directs for maximum freneticism, with her actors rushing around and regurgitating great torrents of imperfectly subtitled dialogue (a gratuitous subplot involving drug traffickers seems to have been inserted just to double the hysteria), and while there are more than a few laughs, most of them are laughs of recognition—seeing these gags again is like coming across long-lost (and vaguely embarrassing) relations.

An overdose of morbid sentimentality.

The failure of director-writer Peter Hyams to put any weight whatever behind the moral issues (crude as they are) makes this merely violent nonsense. 

Once again, violence (more than 30 on-screen deaths) makes a poor substitute for suspense, while sloppy, rear projection work drains most of the excitement from the climax.

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.

A ferociously creative 1985 black comedy filled with wild tonal contrasts, swarming details, and unfettered visual invention--every shot carries a charge of surprise and delight.

Ultimately unsuccessful, the film is nevertheless a fascinating first draft for Vertigo.

Ms. Chaiken isn't much interested in melodramatic plot developments. Her talent lies in an evocative, accurate observation of a distinctive milieu and in the lively, convincing dialogue she creates for her characters.

As the movie slowly slogs along to its dreary, moralistic conclusion, Ryder`s sharp presence seems to recede into a candy-colored fog of sentimentality.

James Cagney had his crack at a Huey Long-like character in this overlooked 1953 feature directed by Raoul Walsh; the film suffers from a near-complete lack of originality but Cagney and Walsh, here as always ("The Roaring Twenties," "White Heat"), strike some sparks together. [01 Nov 1992, p.15C]

Carpenter creates a vision of the technological future that is both disillusioned and oddly affirmative in its insistence on the unscientific survival of emotional frailty.

The musical sequences are good enough that they make you wish Ross had been willing to leave the surface realism behind and break out into the high stylization and exuberance of the genre's classic days. Despite the hesitations, it's miles above "Flashdance" in technique and intelligence.

Milius can be faulted for reviving a number of ostensibly dead macho myths, but in the context of the subculture his film deftly re-creates, they take on the aura of eternal values. The breathtaking surfing footage, rather than the slightly stunted characters, makes his most eloquent argument.

Though the gags make great use of embarrassment, they stop short of actively humiliating the characters, a gesture that these days counts as something fine and noble. [10 March 1989, p.E]

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.

Stanley Kramer issues the final warning to Mankind, in a tiresome, talky 1959 film set in the shrunken aftermath of World War III.

Russell offers a relatively restrained, Gary Cooper-ish performance, though most of the laughs are left to the four kids-Brian Price, Jared Rushton, Jamie Wild and Jeffrey Wiseman-who crack wise with arch sitcom precociousness. And Hawn, batting her baby blues, does make you want to hug her-at times very tightly, right around the throat.

A handsome, entertaining though emotionally thin animated feature.

Though the metaphysical overtones of the screenplay are sometimes awkwardly handled and Eastwood's direction of actors (other than himself) is occasionally uncertain, this was one of the better American films of 1985.

Peter Weir, the standard-bearer of the Australian Tradition of Quality, is on hand to smother all the contrivances in his solemn, academic style, and the result is a moderately effective, highly affected thriller.

A competent, unpretentious entertainment destined to fill the after-school slot at shopping mall theaters across the country.

For most of its length, Revenge of the Nerds II is pleasantly stupid summer fun, though it does have a nasty way of turning inspirational on you.

As much as film buffs might enjoy recognizing references to "Motel Hell" and other drive-in classics, Mr. Zombie's encyclopedic approach to the genre results in a crowded, frenzied film in which no single idea is developed to a satisfying payoff.

The 1980 sequel to Every Which Way but Loose, and a better film—smoother, more controlled, with more time for the casual elucidation of place and character. Though it's a loud, vulgar, and occasionally brutal comedy, it never succumbs to the fashion for facetiousness: Clint Eastwood always takes his work seriously, even in a relatively impersonal project like this, and there are moments of moving emotional candor amid the slapstick, flashes on loneliness, forgiveness, and loyalty.

A feature-length commercial for the Nintendo electronic games system, so thinly disguised that it wouldn't even fool a Reagan-appointed FCC commissioner. [15 Dec 1989, p.G]

Functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them.

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.

South Central treats its violent, often melodramatic storyline with a spareness and deliberation that lends the material an unexpected, quiet power. [18 Sep 1992, p.F]

Moving away from the gag-based comedy of his films with Chong, Marin has discovered a richer humor of character and circumstance, and although old habits surface long enough to permit unfortunate lapses in continuity and consistency, he proves surprisingly adept at his new mode. [24 Aug 1987, p.C5]

Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) was brought in to salvage the runaway production (with the cost adjusted for inflation, it may still qualify for the title of Most Expensive Movie Ever Made); though his name stands alone on the credits, a lot of other hands contributed to the general muddle.

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.

Lagaan may look naïve; it is anything but. This is a movie that knows its business — pleasing a broad, popular audience -- and goes about it with savvy professionalism and genuine flair.

Irma Vep is a glorious mishmash, like the medium it celebrates.

Something in me admires George Stevens's perversity in shooting this film about entrapment and compression in 'Scope, but that's the only interesting quirk in this otherwise inert work, which represents Stevens at the height of his pretentiousness and the depths of his accomplishment (1959).

As in The Human Factor, Preminger approaches the mystery of human irrationality and emotion through logic and detachment; the effect is stingingly poignant.

I don't care for Benjamin's way of using death to validate his sentimental themes, but at this point any American movie that can get past the "I love you”s without audience snickers has to be counted a success.

This 1946 film is a key work of the postwar period, dripping with demented romanticism and the venom of disillusionment. Tay Garnett directed, finding the pull of obsession in every tracking shot.

Issues are raised and dismissed with dizzying, dismaying speed.

Saving the big number for the climax, like any good musical director, Mr. Yuen finishes up with a spectacular variation on the traditional kung fu pole fight.

It might have worked if Apted were as adept at creating an emotional atmosphere as he is in his portraiture of the suburban milieu, but too many unshaped scenes and redundant dialogue passages take their toll.

James Whale's 1933 film plays more like a British folk comedy than a horror movie; it's full of the same deft character twists that made his Bride of Frankenstein a classic.

It's a good film, sturdily and somberly made, but it never catches fire.

Part wish fulfillment and part social moralizing, the film never resolves its point of view, but a few of the apocalyptic images stay in the mind.

The film's superb first two hours, which weave social and historical themes into rich personal drama, turn out to be only a prelude to the magnificent final hour--an extended ballroom sequence that leaves history behind to become one of the most moving meditations on individual mortality in the history of the cinema. (Review of 1983 Release)