Dave Kehr

Made for pennies in Pittsburgh. Its premise—the unburied dead arise and eat the living—is a powerful combination of the fantastic and the dumbly literal. Over its short, furious course, the picture violates so many strong taboos—cannibalism, incest, necrophilia—that it leaves audiences giddy and hysterical.

If you can push past the flag-waving, this Warner Brothers effort from 1942 is a superior entry in a dubious genre, the musical biography. Michael Curtiz's direction is supple and intelligent, but what makes the movie is James Cagney's manic blur of a performance.

This film contains one of Hitchcock's most famous set pieces—an assassination in the rain—but otherwise remains a second-rate effort, as immensely enjoyable as it is.

There's something delicious in the way Kaplan, who has been working carefully and naturalistically, suddenly gives in to the excess the screenplay has been inviting all along--the shudder of pleasure that comes with a loss of control. Making a movie isn't only a question of doing everything right, but also of knowing when to make a meaningful misstep. [17 Apr 1987, p.A]

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]

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.

Dean's alienation is perfectly expressed through Ray's vertiginous mise-en-scene: the suburban LA setting becomes a land of decaying Formica and gothic split-levels. An unmissable film, made with a delirious compassion.

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.

Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen.

Beineix stays too close to the themes and emotions of the formula cult film—a morbid romanticism, a lingering cuteness—for this 1981 picture to take off into art, but any film with this much stylistic assurance is impossible to fully resist.

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

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

It may not be a transcendent masterpiece of the Disney canon, but The Little Mermaid is still very heartening: It suggests the Disney magic isn't lost after all.

It's a highly professional piece of Hollywood sentimentalism.

Perhaps Strangers on a Train still hasn't yielded all its secrets.

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.

If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility.

Peck's icy remove works for once—as a kid's idea of a parent, he's frighteningly effective.

Director Robert Zemeckis confronts the oedipal heart of the time-travel genre with this zestfully tasteless 1985 tale.

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.

While it doesn't have the soft-edged sense of wonder that the Travers books have, Walt Disney's 1964 version of the Mary Poppins story does manage to avoid the usual saccharine excesses of his live-action work.

The extraordinary child actress Ana Torrent (Cria) made her debut here at the age of five. Much in the film is derivative, but Erice excels in precise evocations of childhood feelings.

The issues deepen in a subtle, natural way: the film begins as a trifle and ends as something beautiful and affirmative. A classic.

This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing.

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

The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings—the blunt ideas at its core—don't become apparent before several viewings.

In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.

The secret of Sirk's double appeal is a broadly melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly criticized and challenged by the film's mise-en-scene, which adds levels of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection.

Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.

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.

Even when informed by Douglas' characteristic intensity, Spartacus has no real identity apart from "the common man"; at his side, the beautiful Jean Simmons is never anything more than Spartacus' chick - the proof that he's a manly man, as opposed to those mincing Roman aristocrats. Whatever Trumbo's progressive leanings, he was not past equating homosexuality with unspeakable evil and perversion.

As with most Thalberg projects (the director of record was Frank Lloyd, but he barely matters), it's tainted by a fair amount of middlebrow stuffiness, but it's a fleet piece of storytelling and serves to enshrine one of the great ham performances of all time, Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.

Robin Hardy's 1973 cult horror film passed through several distributors, several versions, and several bankruptcies, picking up a powerful reputation along the way.

The film is a classic, and deservedly so: the conjunction of Tracy's sly listlessness and Hepburn's stridency defines "chemistry" in the movies.

A crisp, beautifully paced film, full of Siegel's wonderful coups of cutting and framing.

Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric.

Sex, lies, and videotape discovers a distinctive, laconic rhythm right from the start, thanks to Soderbergh's taste for holding his shots just a bit longer than conventional, slick editing technique would allow. [11 Aug 1989, Friday, p.A]

It could be [Lubitsch's] finest achievement, and it's certainly one of the most profound, emotionally complex comedies ever made, covering a range of tones from satire to slapstick to shocking black humor.

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.

Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it.

It's not his most satisfying, full-bodied work, though it does provide many of the Woo pleasures. [18 Jun 1993]

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.

It's almost too rich in ideas for its own good: The sense of concentration and proportion isn't there. But it remains an astonishing, magnetic, devastating piece of work. [23 Sept 1988]

Way too flabby at 168 minutes, but once this 1963 feature gets going it's good, solid stuff, directed with an unusual lack of rhetoric by John Sturges.

A very good movie (1946), and by far the best Raymond Chandler adaptation, but it isn’t one of Howard Hawks’s most refined efforts—it lacks his clarity of line, his balance, his sense of a free spirit at play within a carefully set structure.

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.

It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]

A fascinating anomaly.

Jarmusch's eye for blighted landscape (he films in a grainy black and white) is hilariously sharp, and he sends his performers on their zomboid rounds with a keen sense of rhythm and interplay.

It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films, but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.

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

Travels fast and straight down a linear plot, and the ceaseless rush quickly becomes monotonous.

Complex, knotty and at times even uncomfortable; its world has a weight and heft that makes its ultimate romanticism seem genuinely transcendant, genuinely magical. [14 April 1989]

For all its overfamiliarity, this is a good play, easily Simon's best, and Matthau and Lemmon inhabit it with grace and style.

Caustic and chaotic in the arch Sturges manner, it's probably his funniest and most smilingly malicious film.

Patton's personality--conveyed with pointed theatrical flair by George C. Scott--is registered in rich tones of grandeur and megalomania, genius and petty sadism.

The late '40s world Coppola has put together for Tucker is an extremely stylized one: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography has the bright, hard, almost lacquered look of old Technicolor; Dean Tavoularis' sets, built with slanting floors and surfaces, create an imaginary, compacted space in which actors and objects seem to be thrusting out toward the camera; and the transitions between scenes, based on visual rhymes and elaborate wipes, effectively remove the movie from the orderly flow of normal film time. [12 Aug 1988]

A gripping and original piece of work, itself sure to be remembered as one of the finest films of the year.

Although the film in no way measures up to the features made under Disney's personal supervision, it does contain some far more imaginative and adept animation than the last several post-Walt titles.

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.

Under Minnelli’s direction it becomes a fascinating study of a man destroyed by the 50s success ethic, left broke, alone, and slightly insane in the end.

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

Freely adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent, this 1936 study of murderous intimacy is ripe for reevaluation as the masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock's British period.

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

James Jones's antiwar novel was blandly realized by the usual bunch of Hollywood do-gooders in 1953...Sominex is cheaper and probably safer.

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

The most delicate and nuanced of film noirs, graced with a reflective lyricism that almost lifts it out of the genre.

Strange and wonderful.

It's a very funny, very moving work, graced by the cinema's cleanest, most classical style.

The masterpiece of the Disney Studios' postwar style. The animation has been stripped down, in accordance with economic imperatives, but what the images lose in shading and detail they gain in strength and fluidity.

Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space.

The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir - particularly in its narcissism and fatalism - of how the hippie movement thought of itself. [Review of re-release]

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]

To watch the biggest stars of their time in casual conversation, trading riffs and passing bottles, without benefit of publicists, handlers and security goons is to relive an innocent, anarchic time in the entertainment business when music, not marketing, was at the center of the enterprise.

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.

Smooth and smoky, The Fabulous Baker Boys is an impressive debut for Kloves; he's a filmmaker who will be heard from. [13 Oct 1989, p.A]

One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution.

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.

This dark, melancholic film is a reminder -- never more necessary than now -- of what the American cinema is capable of, in the way of expressing a mature, morally complex and challenging view of the world. [7 Aug 1992]

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]

Imamura’s detached, almost scientific style forestalls any pat sympathy for the central character—he is not a sentimental “victim of society,” but the embodiment of its darkest Darwinian forces.

One of the forgotten masterworks of Disney animation...No other Disney feature achieved this level of exuberant abstraction, or displayed the same sheer pleasure in the magic of the animator's art.

It isn't much to say that "Round Midnight" is the best jazz film ever made (there's so little competition), but it's true. Tavernier has an impeccable feel for how the music is played and--more important--why it is played. [24 Oct 1986, p.A]

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.

Malle's slow, deliberate direction tends to flatten out the script's emotional rhythms—he's stern and arty where a lighter sensibility might have been more appropriate—but the film is still a shimmering success.

If the movie has a weakness, it's an over-reliance on Bond-style car chases and mass action scenes, which take away from the much richer and more original character comedy. But Mankiewicz's basic instincts seem admirable. He knows that a movie begins with people, and that`s a very good start.

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.

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.

There is enough intelligence and craftsmanship in the execution of Hoosiers to make it seem, if not exactly fresh, at least respectably entertaining. [27 Feb 1987, Friday, p.A]

Despite Scorsese's efforts, there just isn't much to look at, and the film plays less like a movie than an illustrated record album.

Broadcast News is the crispest, classiest entertainment; it has what Hollywood has been missing. [16 Dec 1987, p.8]