Dave Kehr

This sort of thing was considered high art not so long ago; now it seems forced and ponderously symbolic.

One of the most memorable of Walt Disney's live-action films, perhaps because it stays so close to the traumatic family themes of the cartoon features.

The picture seems deliberately trite, blunt, and manipulative, as if the producers didn't trust their audience to respond to anything else.

The obsessive conjunction of lesbian sex and flowing blood suggests a deep-seated misogyny, but neither this nor any other theme is registered with enough clarity to offend.

This special effects extravaganza from 1966 has proved surprisingly enduring, despite a technical quality crude by contemporary standards.

It has wit, originality, color, warmth and formal intelligence. It tempers its escapist dash with a touch of darkness, and for all of its playfulness, never departs from a fundamental seriousness.... Something Wild is superbly unpredictable. [7 Nov 1986]

What Levinson has created here is a generic memory film, so vague in its particulars that virtually anyone's family experiences can be plugged into it. [19 Oct 1990, p.B]

As directed by Daniel Petrie from the slightest excuse for a story by Stephen McPherson and Elizabeth Bradley, Cocoon: The Return amounts to little more than a desperate effort to fill a couple of hours of screen time, to which the commercially potent title can be affixed. [23 Nov 1988, p.C1]

One of the better Halloween carbons, thanks to an unusually appealing cast and generally good pacing by director Amy Jones.

It's a highly stylized, roaringly dynamic action film that shuns plot and characterization in favor of a crazy iconographical melange—it's like the work of a western punk trucker de Sade...The climactic chase, with its deft variation of tempo and point of view, is a minor masterpiece.

Some kind of equality has been achieved when it is impossible to distinguish heterosexual clichés from homosexual ones.

Charlie, who owes an obvious debt to Chuck Jones' Wile E. Coyote, comes equipped with one of the most expressive faces in cartoon history: Bluth keeps his features-ears, snout, mouth, eyes-in constant flux, a beautiful blend of line and volume that represents the pinnacle of the animator's art. [17 Nov 1989]

Holland's direction is functional, as befits the kind of cable fodder Thinner is destined to be.

Not bad, but far from a classic.

The inconsistencies of Nowhere to Run make it finally unsatisfying, but the film leaves little doubt that Robert Harmon is a major talent, though one still waiting for a project equal to his abilities.

Young French director Luc Besson (Le dernier combat) aims for a little American slickness in this relentlessly empty action film: it zooms along from one arbitrary sequence to the next, and its only aim is to keep the audience pumped up with kinetic stimulation.

Modest, mildly engaging film.

It's like being locked in a roomful of blaring transistor radios—a lot of sound and no evidence of life.

As in the Rocky films, Avildsen's only directorial strategy is to delay the final confrontation for so long that all the audience's pent-up frustration explodes with it. It's primitive, predatory stuff.

(Miike's) work is fun to look at but emotionally unengaging, perhaps because he can't summon enough belief in his pulp-fiction characters to make them come alive.

For director James Bridges, the film looks like a hack job, particularly after the personal anguish of 9/30/55, but it's a very good hack job: strong, simple, and perfectly paced, until the last reel flounders in a bit of overkill.

Mr. Girod is a fish out of water in the after-hours clubs and deserted industrial districts that constitute the sexual underworld of Brussels. His film feels more like what one would see from the top of a double-decker tourist bus than the work of someone who has immersed himself in a sexual subculture and its particular values.

Nothing convinces, but the film is fitfully appealing.

In a movie theater, at least, there are other people to hear you laugh, and the film of MST3K already seems a more communal, less onanistic experience.

Corman's filmmaking runs on unchanneled energy and apocalyptic emotions; his is an art without craft.

Though it`s a handsome film, carefully staged and courageously low-key, the transition to the screen only exaggerates the disposable nature of the material while depriving it of the novel`s one stylistic strength, its unreliable narrator.

A well above average sketch film from 1977, highlighted by a lengthy, hilariously deadpan kung fu parody, A Fistful of Yen.

Alan Johnson`s direction is so limply amateurish that the entire project quickly descends to the level of a cheesy backlot production. The action lurches along without the slightest regard for logic or pacing, and there are Dominick`s commercials with more sophisticated characterization.

Mr. Chandrasekhar's direction is casual to the point of carelessness, but he does give the movie a friendly, convivial atmosphere that contradicts and sometimes overcomes its frequently cruel humor. In short, this is another film that looks as if it was more fun to make than it is to sit through.

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 loose, graceful script is by Preston Sturges (one of his last before he turned to directing), and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films. Mitchell Leisen, the director, serves the material very well with his slightly distanced, glowing style.

Shyer's direction of actors rises instantly to a level of cartoonish hysteria and descends only for occasional wet bursts of sentimentality. But as an exercise in ideological persuasion it works appallingly well, playing on deep-seated guilts and insecurities with a sureness of touch that may make it a hit with the audience it caricatures.

Pretty much of a mess, full of narrative gaps and characters who arbitrarily appear and disappear. But it is at least a sweet, good-natured mess, with none of the overcalculation and condescending cynicism the same material would almost certainly bring out in a Hollywood production.

By and large this is an admirably sober, responsible piece of work, one that covers much of the same ground as Dances With Wolves but with far less self-importance and New Age babbling. Kleiser's use of the Alaskan landscapes is stirring without dipping into postcard prettiness, and the animal action (which includes a guest appearance by Bart of The Bear) is smooth and expressive.

The film was hugely successful and widely praised in its time, though it's really nothing more than the old C.B. De Mille formula of titillation and moralizing--Roman orgies and Christian martyrs--with only a fraction of De Mille's showmanship.

There is a crazed, dark poetry here, but Mary Lambert's direction of Pet Sematary captures none of it, and the film falls into a flat, frequently laughable literalism. [24 Apr 1989, p.C2]

It’s amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, so of course it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1936.

Rather than explore the promisingly dark relationship between Sweeney and Sheen-or take advantage of a superior supporting cast that includes Quaid, Bill Duke, Arlen Dean Snyder and M. Emmet Walsh-Werner and Wolf prefer to lose themselves in short-term suspense sequences and elaborate car chases. It's the kind of pointless action that helps kill time on television-where the continuing format prohibits any deep resolution to character drama-but which, in a movie, quickly turns dull and superfluous. [23 Oct 1987, p.G]

Ludicrous and inept, this low-budget 1985 splatter film directed by former Chicagoan Stuart Gordon tries to compensate for its complete failure to establish even a sliver of credibility by inflating the usual quotient of giggly camp humor and squishy gore effects...It's this kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.

After White Hunter there is no doubt that Eastwood is one of our most committed filmmakers, and perhaps our most profoundly introspective. [14 Sep 1990, p.C]

The verbal and conceptual gags, however, belong wholly to Martin's own brand of goofiness, and some of them are pretty funny.

The story, from a book by Daniel Mannix, was Disney's best material in a decade or two, the stuff of rending family melodrama on the order of Dumbo or Lady and the Tramp. Unfortunately, the execution is only adequate: the character work relies too much on celebrity voices (as was Disney's habit in the dark 60s) and the whole film has a sketchy, underpopulated feel that hardly represents Disney at the studio's baroque best.

Instead of deepening the material, however, the narrative twists feel like purely formal interventions, intended to keep the film moving toward its foregone, heavily moralistic conclusion. Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler is faultlessly professional but finally slight.

Roemer's comic style draws brilliantly on the '60s vein of twitchy psychological realism first explored by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and his humor is backed by a fine eye for sociological detail. [16 Feb 1990, p.C]

This 1939 release is still watchable, though the spirit is now sitcom.

While the low comedy is undeniably effective, the film leaves behind a bad taste of snobbery and petty meanness.

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

A little windy and rhetorical for my taste, but still one of John Huston’s best efforts (1948), a melodrama of ethics that soundly represses the Maxwell Anderson play it was based on (the ending is actually a lift from To Have and Have Not).

A pleasant, good-natured picture that struggles, gallantly if vainly, to recapture the style and sensibility of a studio musical on the severely limited budget of an independent film.

If Make a Wish is meant to be a parody, it lacks one essential element: humor. If it's meant to be a horror movie, it lacks the corresponding qualities of shock and suspense. It's almost enough to make "Friday the 13th" look like a masterpiece. Almost.

Ottman doesn't have the firm grasp of tone necessary to make his deliberate ambiguities seem other than simple confusion, nor the sense of humor necessary to turn the deliberate clichés into effective satire.

This eroticized vampire tale resulted from the last significant surge of creative energy at Britain's Hammer Films, which thereafter descended into abject self-parody.

This stuff is much too strange and much too disturbing to be invented.

Well, it really is a stinker, a compendium of The Deer Hunter's weaknesses (of plotting, narration, dialogue, and character) with few of its lyrical strengths.

Postcards From the Edge is alive only when it's being as mean and vicious as its little heart can be, which is more than often enough. [12 Sep 1990, p.1]

The film has undeniable power, but it's an unusual and unsettling power, a product of a collision between red-hot material and the cool serenity with which Kubrick observes and accepts it. [26 June 1987]

In many ways the ultimate Hawks film: clear, direct, and thoroughly brilliant.

Shag still has its pleasures, though they're mostly among the casting. Annabeth Gish, as the shy Pudge, remains one of the most refreshingly natural performers in American films; a master of understatement, she scales down her gestures and reactions in a way that draws the camera to her, never asking for attention but quietly commanding it. [21 July 1989, p.A]

A sweet, sincere labor of love that just isn't very good.

What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were?...Kane is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take "Ambersons," "Falstaff," or "Touch of Evil"), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking about Welles - or for that matter about movies in general.

Pretentious, overenergized, muddled, intellectually bogus, and very entertaining for it.

An air of embarrassing familiarity hangs over the entire project, as if it were a story told by an aging relative not quite aware of how many times, and how much better, he has been over the same material before. [25 Dec 1990, Tempo, p.1]

Robert Altman's busy, detailed mise-en-scene, flattened cartoon-style through space-compacting long lenses, does capture some of the frenetic atmosphere of the Fleischer cartoons, but it tends to crowd out, and neutralize, the story values.

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

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

The tension is intriguing and expressive (perhaps this is what Beineix had in mind for The Moon in the Gutter), though the unstable mixture is clearly limited as a sustainable style.