Dave Kehr

Elvis impersonators may not be the freshest subject for comedy, but Bergman's sense of structure is sharp enough to develop a basic running gag (a convention is in town, with Elvises of every shape, size and color) into a spectacular final payoff. The parts are there but the whole, sadly, is not. [28 Aug 1992, p.B2]

One of the funniest awful movies ever made.

It is an endearing, likable film, though its benign surface may cover some subtle propaganda on behalf of China's centralized government.

Though it looks bright and the young actors have a couple of sweet moments, the picture is almost unremittingly punishing, hammering home its "be yourself" message with all the gentle persuasiveness of a Marine drill sergeant.

It's meant to be uplifting, but the material is so undernourished that bench-pressing a phone book already seems beyond it. None of the characters has been filled out beyond the underlying conventions and the few distinctive mannerisms contributed by the actresses who portray them.

Less consumed by behavioral details than many of his filmmaking compatriots, Mr. Rasoulof makes bold use of symbolic imagery - a satellite television is confiscated and tossed overboard - suggesting that utopias inevitably come at the price of isolation and authoritarianism.

The whole thing is rather forced and antiseptically cheerful.

Starts on a note of relative naturalism and under Mr. La Salle's nuanced direction gradually becomes more and more unhinged until it concludes in an altogether different genre.

There's always room for debate, but John Schlesinger's The Believers could be the dullest movie ever made about child sacrifice. [10 Jun 1987, p.4C]

In the end, Lisa's revolt seems as predictably programmatic, and as widely abstracted from observable human behavior, as the movie that contains her.

Director Jeannot Szwarc strains hard for spectacular visual effects, though he's barely able to compose a competent close-up.

With its implausible coincidences, inelegant plot twists and minimally characterized characters, The Trip doesn't have much going for it apart from its basic sincerity and decency, which are evident.

Walsh may not have been directly responsible for the structure (the second half is a remake of an earlier Warners melodrama, Bordertown), but his personal response to the material puts it across.

At her best—and even in a hand-me-down project like Point Break—Bigelow is a uniquely talented, uniquely powerful filmmaker. Where the male action directors are still playing with toys-with dolls and models and matte shots-Bigelow has tapped into something primal and strong. She is a sensualist of genius in this most sensual of mediums.

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.

For once a comedy in the Animal House school that knows what it's was about: the vulgarity of the gags matches the vulgarity of the subject, and this 1980 film becomes a fierce, cathartically funny celebration of the low, the cheap, the venal—in short, America. Most of the time, I didn't know whether to laugh or shudder, and I ended up doing a lot of both. It was Steve Martin who said, “Comedy isn't pretty,” but it's Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the writer-directors here, who prove it; this is the Dawn of the Dead of slapstick.

Steve McQueen as a tres chic San Francisco cop, though the real star is his sports car. There isn't much here, and what there is is awfully easy. With Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Vaughn, Robert Duvall, and a chase sequence that achieved classic status mainly by going on too long; Peter Yates directed this 1968 feature.

Well-meaning rot from 1963.

Roger Corman's 1970 retelling of the story of Ma Barker and her three loony sons in Depression-era America is completely out of control, but the smash-and-grab stylistics are exhilarating.

Robert Stevenson directed, and it's one of Disney's more watchable live-action efforts.

Decently budgeted and atmospheric, it’s a sober accomplishment in a cycle that would quickly turn to self-parody.

There is a reason formulas endure: they work. And even under these threadbare circumstances, the developing friendship between the two women carries a faint but effective dramatic charge.

It’s overlong, talky, and sometimes stolid, but these are all familiar Mankiewicz failings. He shines in his deft verbal wit and novelistic propensity for detail, backlit by a highly personal blend of romance and cynicism. An imperfect film, but its excesses are as suggestive as its subtleties.

Though 30 Years to Life doesn't break any new ground, it's a light, engaging, well-carpentered film, with a quick wit and a sense of character just deep enough to lend some weight to the laugh lines.

It's rich, stimulating thought in spite of itself. Lots of elegant clothes and settings, weirdly linked to a shock rhythm of tension and release. It's a movie dream turned into a movie nightmare, a wonderful idea the film doesn't know it has.

The material continues to carry its inherent emotional power and moral importance. As banal as the telling may be -- and at times, All My Loved Ones more than flirts with kitsch -- the tale commands attention.

The Stepfather is a nearly perfect work of popular entertainment. A thriller about a psychopathic killer, it is absolutely terrifying. At the same time it is a highly personal work, the expression of a gifted individual. [27 Feb 1987, p.A]

First-timer Peter Masterson directed; his notion of film is to point the camera in the general direction of the actors.

A weirdly out-of-scale movie that constantly juxtaposes the trivial and the cosmic, less to comic effect than to a mounting sense of muddle and uncertainty.

Has an edge of cynicism and cruelty that just as often suggests the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone.

Entertaining, lightly mocking documentary.

For much of its length, the film is a surprisingly serious plea for the rights of the mentally ill and the legitimacy of the insanity defense. When the need to make a commercial shocker finally asserts itself, the film shifts gears with unseemly, damaging haste. Though far from a worthy successor to the original the film clearly could have been much worse.

Ms. Gardos is not a particularly flavorful filmmaker, but she is an honest one.

Director Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman) clearly doesn't trust the American audience's ability to handle mixed, emotionally complex tones (and by all the available evidence he's right not to), yet by segregating the feelings he wants to express he makes them seem artificial and programmatic. But the performances do have a redeeming vividness.

Each time Sheen threatens to take the film to another level, director Noton throws in a pratfall or a car chase to knock it down. Three for the Road" is a film that must struggle to be stupid; unfortunately, it succeeds. [15 Apr 1987, p.5]

As a movie, Controlled Chaos is often bumpy, naïve and erratically acted.

A shapely film, considered and concise. And if its rhetorical slickness eventually covers up its emotional core, that slickness has a pleasure all its own. [21 August 1987]

One of the great breakthroughs—the Ulysses of the cinema—and a powerful, moving experience in its own right.

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.

The most visually inventive film of the 60s is also one of the funniest.

The most elegant title for a sequel in film history belongs, happily, to one of the most elegant sequels.

Levinson's dialogue feels fresh and improvised, yet it hits its mark every time, and the performances he gets are complex and original (particularly from Mickey Rourke, who plays a lothario with a late-blooming conscience) - enough so that Levinson's occasional forced "cinematic" effects cause barely a ripple in the smooth, naturalistic surface.

This big-budget bubble-gum musical is appalling but compulsively watchable; it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980, complete with roller discos, dreamy boys, fashion shows, and fantasy father figures. Director Robert Greenwald has a lot of ideas, all of them bad: his style could be described as rapid misfire.

The film feels authentic only during the scenes between Valentín and his selfish, angry father.

None of it is very convincing, thanks to Tuggle's shaky storytelling: on the one hand, he sets up his plot twists with such elephantine emphasis that the payoffs are invariably anticlimactic; on the other, he relies constantly and shamelessly on the most outre coincidence. Still, the action scenes do have a certain punch and vigor, and there are a few fresh, offbeat views of the City of Angels. Part of the point of the project seems to be to prove that Hall can “act” (as if his comic roles were something else), and he does move honorably if not remarkably through a mumbling Method performance.

With its modest, no-nonsense approach, Hamburger Hill seems, curiously, more like the first film in a cycle than a late entry. After the baroque extravagance of the Vietnam films that have come before it, the movie runs a good chance of being overlooked. But it's an intelligent, craftsmanlike job, with a power of its own; it merits recognition. [28 Aug 1987, p.AC]

Legions of Brando impersonators have turned his performance in this seminal 1954 motorcycle movie into self-parody, but it’s still a sleazy good time.

Though the broad outlines of the plot are the same - a disparate group of human survivors takes desperate refuge in a Pennsylvania farmhouse while waves of flesh-eating zombies roll up from the surrounding countryside - the characters have been deepened and the thematic emphasis shifted. [19 Oct 1990, p.C]

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

In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute. [17 Nov 1989, p.A]

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.

The dialogue is sharp and justly famous, though writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz has trouble putting it into the mouths of his actors: nothing sounds remotely natural, and the film is pervaded by the out-of-sync sense of staircase wit—this is a movie about what people wished they'd said. The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.

A John Hughes-ish teen drama unaccountably complicated by politics and method acting.

Only director Apted`s admirably low-key, matter-of-fact approach to the material keeps it from becoming unbearably artificial.

A handsome, ambitious film that fails to satisfy—perhaps because the director, Ivan Passer, insists on an ambiguity on the plot level that muddies and dilutes the thematic thrust.

Far more ambivalent and ambiguous film than Mr. Spielberg's. Both North and South are portrayed as brutal, abusive regimes that use their citizens as so much cannon fodder.

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.

Shot in astonishingly elaborate long takes, this is the kind of film that finds the most brilliant poetry in the slightest movement of the camera—a paradigm of cinematic expression.

The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.

With Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton, in hog heaven as Long John Silver.

A product neither of Hollywood nor the New York-Sundance indie axis, Manna From Heaven is a true outsider film, and while it would be easy to fault its lack of technical polish, somewhat discursive script and uneven performances, it is also refreshingly sincere, gentle and good-natured.

Major League is a movie that knows what it's up to. It skims along agreeable surfaces, expertly balancing its comedy with melodrama and fulfilling expectations right on schedule. As a movie, it`s a superior industrial product.

Godawful allegorical western from the height of the cold war (1958), with lanky Yankee Gregory Peck caught between two superpower ranchers who are fighting it out over water rights. Directed by William Wyler in that glassy, studied way of his that gives craftsmanship a bad name.

It's a movie that doesn't have an original thought in its head, and seems to like it that way.

The landscape photography is magnificent...But its stereotypical characters, melodramatic plotting and audience-pleasing close-ups of adorable children all suggest the profound limitations of filmmaking by committee, whether that committee meets in Beijing or Burbank.

Even without Marlon Brando in it, Andrew Bergman`s The Freshman would be a very funny movie; with him, it seems likely to become a classic.

Miller's finely crafted, highly moving new film, seems meant as a new beginning, grounded in an entirely different kind of material and told in an entirely different manner than anything Miller has attempted before.

The first starring vehicle for shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, turns out to be the kind of detective spoof worn out 30 years ago by Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, though refitted with salty language, graphic violence and an attitude toward women that makes the Marquis de Sade look like Phil Donahue. [11 Jul 1990, p.18]

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.

The artificial plotting is all Christie’s, but the film eventually becomes Wilder’s—thanks to a trick ending that dovetails nicely with a characteristic revelation of compassion behind cruelty. His theatrical mise-en-scene—his proscenium framing—serves the material well, as does Charles Laughton’s bombastic portrayal of the defense attorney.

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

Deep down inside, a very good film.

Lopes along amiably enough, offering a few smiles and the standard bromides about the importance of being yourself and pursuing your dreams. It's tolerable but forgettable.

In both Twist and "Idaho," the act of placing a larger-than-life literary figure in a constrained, narrowly naturalistic environment merely strips the characters of their scale and interest.

Deep Cover is a rousing entertainment but also a cunningly subversive piece of work, one that burrows from within genre conventions to defeat expectations and undermine smug certainties. It`s a movie that gets under your skin in a way that no amount of speech-making can.

An unusually successful attempt to mate good drama with political analysis.

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the directors of the smash Airplane! and the underrated Top Secret!, here turn their hands to a more traditional character comedy, yet this film's funniest effects still come through their imaginative, frequently astonishing manipulations of the narrative line. It's a rare kind of craftsmanship, and it produces a rare kind of pleasure.

Despite its blatant mediocrity, this 1981 British film knocked 'em dead everywhere, which makes me suspect that audiences weren't responding to the film itself as much as to the attitudes that underlie it.

While Walters is no Cukor, he's not without his pleasures. His simple but polished shooting style, once a routine satisfaction of the cinema, carries the aura of a long-lost classical grace.

Quickly collapses into an overloaded, slow-moving series of predictable jokes and forced situations.

It's a rare sequel that fritters away the appeal of the original so completely: within minutes, this continuation of Romancing the Stone has reduced the Kathleen Turner-Michael Douglas couple to a nightmare pairing of the gushingly idiotic and the sourly venal.

This movie is Ms. Davis's fourth film as a director, and she has a bright, chipper style that keeps things moving, while never quite managing to connect her wish-fulfilling characters to the human race. Like someone who smiles too much, Amy's Orgasm seems rather sad at heart.

Even for John Hughes, who writes movies in less time than most people write postcards, The Great Outdoors seems unusually slapdash.

First-rate schlock; overlong and incredibly stupid, but that's part of the formula by now.

Once upon a time this was known as "the power of positive thinking," and it didn't involve nearly so much math.

The drama is developed without recourse to flashbacks or cutaways, and it is done cleverly and stylishly, though it lacks Hitchcock's usual depth. At times, the film seems on the verge of rising above its frankly propagandistic intentions, but it never really confronts the Darwinian themes built into the material.

John Steinbeck's painful biblical allegory—Genesis replayed in Monterey, California, circa 1917—is more palatable on the screen, thanks to the down-to-earth performances of James Dean as Cal/Cain and Richard Davalos as Aron/Abel.

In this third outing for the Griswolds - following the dismal "National Lampoon's European Vacation" in 1985 - the satirical edge has given way to sentimentality and a whiff of smugness, while the black humor has degenerated into broad slapstick. It's a tribute to first-time director Jeremiah Chechik's fine sense of timing that the obvious physical gags still generate some substantial laughs, though they arrive almost in spite of Hughes' tired script. [1 Dec 1989, p.Friday A]

The film is a celebration of youthful romanticism and youthful nihilism, two philosophies that are often indistinguishable from each other where Nadja is set: Manhattan's East Village, with its tiny, secretive bars and tumultuous street life.

Over all, the humor has been sanitized a bit compared with the darker, more grotesque comedy of the French original.

Mr. Davis has a lot of ideas, but when it comes to dramatizing them, he is unable to give them an engaging form.

Children will not quibble over the fine points, and The Aristocats remains a first-rate entertainment for little ones. Compared to Saturday- morning television, the animation seems truly magical, although even in very young minds it probably will not linger with the same weight as "Snow White" or "Pinocchio." [13 Apr 1987, p.C3]

Joyce Chopra's independent feature plays uncomfortably like two movies jammed into one: the first is a slow, exaggeratedly naturalistic portrait of teenage alienation in the shopping mall culture of California, the second is a violent, stylized gothic shocker. Both films have their modest qualities; it's just that Chopra hasn't found an intelligible transition between the two very different approaches.

Hitchcock disliked the film, but it offers an unusual glimpse of the master before he settled into thrillers.

The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.

The pretty-pretty visual style is evidence of a close study of Days of Heaven, as well as a complete misunderstanding of it. With Leo McKern and William Daniels; photographed by Nestor Almendros, forced into garish effects far below the level of his talent.

Ambassador Gregory Peck finds that he's adopted the Antichrist (and he's a cute little feller too), in the slickest of the many demonic thrillers that followed in the wake of The Exorcist. Richard Donner directs more for speed than mood, but there are a few good shocks.

American audiences will probably find it familiar and insufficiently cathartic.