Dave Kehr

Not a great film, but a remarkable one, with Hitchcock at his most “innovative,” shooting through plate-glass floors and generally one-upping the expressionist cliches of the period.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece blends a brutal manipulation of audience identification and an incredibly dense, allusive visual style to create the most morally unsettling film ever made. The case for Hitchcock as a modern Conrad rests on this ruthless investigation of the heart of darkness, but the film is uniquely Hitchcockian in its positioning of the godlike mother figure. It's a deeply serious and deeply disturbing work, but Hitchcock, with his characteristic perversity, insisted on telling interviewers that it was a "fun" picture.

This pretentious whimsy (1968) defeated Francis Coppola—though he tries valiantly, he sinks the movie with stolid action sequences and gushy lyrical effects.

Leone brought back a masterpiece, a film that expands his baroque, cartoonish style into genuine grandeur, weaving dozens of thematic variations and narrative arabesques around a classical western foundation myth.(Review of Original Release)

It is hard to imagine a world where films such as Child's Play 2 - essentially, a dim excuse for a prolonged, extremely exploitative display of abused and abusive children - can pass as mainstream entertainment. [13 Nov 1990, p.3C]

The results, to judge from the examples here, have been stuffy and disappointing, an unholy alliance between Playboy Channel prurience and PBS cultural alibis.

In the early scenes, Landis and Goldblum work hard to make the character's depression dramatically real, and this infusion of gravity in a generally weightless genre brings a new meaning to the standard action scenes. But the idea vanishes around the midway mark—at about the point when the sun comes up—and the balance of the film is thin and familiar.

Self-conscious camp, the lowest artistic category known to man.

Raoul Walsh’s heroes had a knack for going too far, but none went further than James Cagney in this roaring 1949 gangster piece.

With this 1961 film Truffaut comes closest to the spirit and sublimity of his mentor, Jean Renoir, and the result is a masterpiece of the New Wave.

A rueful, reflective companion piece to "Born to Lose."

What's oddly appealing about this film is the sweetness that the director, François Velle, manages to extract from Craig Sherman's rather bitter screenplay.

The first two are total stinkers, but things pick up with Joe Dante's creepy, claustrophobic, and very funny study of a brattish kid who lives in a cartoon universe, and come slamming home with George Miller's final sketch about a paranoid airline passenger.

The animation is competent, and some of the gags are quite funny, but Jonah never shakes the oppressive, morally superior good-for-you quality that almost automatically accompanies didactic entertainment.

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

His (Roy's) informed contempt is highly entertaining, but he neglects some of the more problematical and perhaps more illuminating aspects of his story.

Effective filmmaking, and at the moment, when a significant portion of this campaign is being fought in movie theaters, it's also effective politicking.

It’s a funny, rousing, brilliant piece of work. 

Hawks’s great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways.

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

Brilliantly funny, bracingly smart and surprisingly moving. [22 June 1988]

Sidney Lumet's wired-up, hysterical direction overwhelms the minor pleasures of Ira Levin's play.

Kinjite is clearly the work of dedicated industry veterans, all of whom decided to go home after lunch. [03 Mar 1989, p.P]

A fatally compromised, half-realized execution. [ 10 Jul 1992]

Intelligent and handsomely mounted, though it doesn't use its length to build to a particularly complex emotional effect. It's a thin, snaky epic with more breadth than body, rather like watching an entire Masterpiece Theatre chapter play in a single sitting.

Sharp, entertaining, and convincing--discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that Coppola hasn't achieved since.

Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).

The bucketloads of sanctimonious message mongering ladled on by director Peter Hyams still can't disguise the sheerly mercenary basis of this 1986 project, a wholly uncalled-for sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence.

The time-shift plot may be a bit too complicated for a children's film, and the sheer amount of talk necessary to explain it may cause some restlessness. But when the film shifts into the action mode in its second half --the flying saucer returns to aid in David's rescue--it becomes quite bright and lively.

Much of the film`s charm resides in the fact that there is no reason for any of this to happen, except for the director`s sheer will that it be so.

Walter Hill's existential action piece, rendered in a complete stylistic abstraction that will mean tough going for literal-minded audiences. Not quite the clean, elegant creation that his earlier films were, The Warriors admits to failures of conception (occasional) and dialogue (frequent), but there is much of value in Hill's visual elaboration of the material.

It's not very special, but it's nice to see a Disney film that follows the rules of the family-film genre as Walt laid them down, rather than trying to emulate Spielberg's empty, high-tech grandiosity.

Director Ronald Neame brings his impersonal British craftsmanship to this 1979 feature, so it isn't a complete bust, but it's a long way from the apocalyptic satisfactions of his Poseidon Adventure.

No Way Out emerges, paradoxically, as a film that is better than it has to be and not as good as it ought to be, but there is skill here, as well as an admirable willingness to try something new.

Guy Hamilton's direction lacks enthusiasm and pace, while even the art direction—long the Bond films' real secret weapon—seems to have fallen to a shrunken budget. Not much fun.

If it doesn't make you laugh, nothing will. [28 June 1991]

A far more stylistically assured film than its fey predecessor, though it still carries almost no conviction.

The virtuoso sequences—the long kiss, the crane shot into the door key—are justly famous, yet the film's real brilliance is in its subtle and detailed portrayal of infinitely perverse relationships.

The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece.

Francis Ford Coppola's gang film is as moony about death as "One From the Heart" was over romance; the film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides.

Dunye's salvation is her sense of humor. She's good at creating light, bantering dialogue, and there are a couple of sharp, satirical scenes.

This stunning work by Iran's leading film maker, Abbas Kiarostami, won the grand prize at last year's Cannes festival. Open and simple in its visual style, the film takes place largely in real time, giving it a firmly anchored sense of reality to set against its abstract philosophical concerns. The atmosphere is calm, yet the film is mysteriously, powerfully affirmative. [20 March 1998, p.60]

These blatantly comic characters undercut the credibility established by Mr. Herzog's naturalistic performance, and sink the horror premise as quickly as it surfaces.

Standard Neil Simon stuff, full of cute grotesques, snappy one-liners, and cheap plays at pathos.

All of the kids have wonderful skin, unblemished by the slightest pimple and never coarsened by the California sun. As sordid as the material may be, Rocco can't help but prettify it. [11 Sep 1992, p.C]

Although the film is fast and consistently clever, it is more deeply flawed than any other Hitchcock film of the period, failing to find a thematic connection between its imaginative set pieces.

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.

There isn't a better time at the movies right now than Earth Girls Are Easy, a delirious pop musical directed by Julien Temple as a widescreen swirl of color and high spirits.

Preston Sturges extended his range beyond the crazy farces that had made his reputation with this romantic 1941 comedy, and his hand proved just as sure.

It's a dim, thoroughly synthetic film, so far removed from its source--much less from any original creative impulse--that it barely seems to exist. [30 Jan 1987, p.A]

It is Field's bursting, big-eyed American-ness - a commodity she has carefully banked since her days as TV's "Gidget" - that generates the film's lurid fascination. [11 Jan 1991, p.K]

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd star as two white boys who love nuns, blacks, and the blues. But for all of the dramatic focus on poverty, the subject of John Landis's mise-en-scene is money—making it, spending it, blowing it away. The humor is predicated on underplaying in overscaled situations, which is sporadically funny in a Keaton-esque way but soon sputters out through sheer, uninspired repetition.

Overlong, stiff, and about as suspenseful as a detergent commercial, The Bad Seed has one small asset, Patty McCormack as the child, but that's about it.

Plympton fails to develop compelling personalities for any of his characters.

Despite the triteness of the theme (Dern is in charge of maintaining the last remnants of the earth's vegetation), the film is enjoyable for its intimacy, seriousness, and intelligent character work, virtues not perpetuated by the subsequent new wave.

In The Living Daylights, Dalton establishes his claim to the role; in the films that will follow, he'll have the chance to dig deeper.

Highly irritating at first, Mr. Koury's passive technique eventually begins to yield some interesting results.

Perhaps the most perfect of the great Disney animated features-the most expressively animated, the least pretentious, the best balanced between horror and joy, adventure and comedy.

For all of his personal familiarity with the material, Mr. Provenzano has turned out a movie that largely owes its tone and style to other movies.

There is no denying the force of Mr. Brisseau's bizarre imagination and the personal conviction he brings to it.

The film has genuine wit, an appealing sense of grandeur, and very little of the overt "philosophizing" that marred much of Huston's previous work. His eye for the strong, clear lines of landscape had never been sharper, and Oswald Morris's photography has a fine sun-saturated brilliance.

It's not, however, a particularly pleasant surprise. Directed by 25-year-old Marc Rocco (son of actor Alex Rocco, who appears in the film), Dream a Little Dream places the usual plot inanities of the genre in the context of a wildly ambitious, baroque-surrealist style. The effect is a little as if the late Russian mystic Andrei Tarkovsky had directed "Police Academy VI." [9 March 1989, p.6]

The film doesn't move to a satisfactory conclusion as much as it fizzles out in a series of protracted anti-climaxes. [15 Dec 1989, p.A]

The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.

The murder-mystery board game becomes a frantic, unfunny spoof (1985) under the direction of British TV writer Jonathan Lynn. The script recycles Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with six guests invited by a mysterious host to spend the night in a creepy mansion, but instead of parodying the material Lynn simply surrounds it with extraneous pratfalls and wisecracks.

Armed and Dangerous is an extremely violent, often mean-spirited comedy in which most of the gags depend on the absurdly excessive use of force. Jokes like these are designed to appeal to adolescent power fantasies, and while kids may love them, adults are likely to be bored by their repetitiousness and senselessness.

Emerges as just one more formulaic action film as the title character bounces around the globe in a deadly treasure hunt.

Mr. Szklarski doesn't seem to have a strong point of view on his material. Too often, the film drifts into a kind of passive voyeurism, offering the unhappy spectacle of these wasted lives without perspective and without hope.

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.

It's no masterpiece, but compared to the toothless comedies of its era, its attack on American mythology seems almost worthy of Preston Sturges.

Slack and unconvincing throughout with the exception of Ringwald, who remains natural and appealing as the thin world of the film collapses around her.

Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop is a stylish piece of work that leaves a sour aftertaste. [17 Jul 1987]

The Rookie is a generally enjoyable variation on some extremely familiar themes, filled out with the most spectacular action sequences Eastwood has ever filmed and a good dose of the dyspeptic humor that is becoming the hallmark of his late career as an actor. [07 Dec 1990, p.C]

The film is sober, serious-minded and paced like a funeral march.

The most densely allegorical of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpieces (1954), moving from psychology to morality to formal concerns and finally to the theological. It is also Hitchcock's most innovative film in terms of narrative technique, discarding a linear story line in favor of thematically related incidents, linked only by the powerful sense of real time created by the lighting effects and the revolutionary ambient sound track.

Sarah Jessica Parker makes an unflatteringly tense appearances as a nurse who knows more than she's telling, and David Morse dredges up his hulking soulfulness as a maverick FBI agent. But no one involved in "Extreme Measures" is displaying a commitment beyond showing up for work. [27 Sept 1996, p.42]

Good-natured, mildly appealing video feature.

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.

A few of the one-liners are snappy and clever, but the project sinks under an overelaborated superciliousness.

In "Crossing Delancey," veteran independent filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver returns to the Jewish milieu of her early hit "Hester Street." This time, however, she turns ethnic drama into romantic comedy. [16 Sep 1988, p.A]

Sanitized it may well be, but agonizing nonetheless—it's a domestic squabble that somehow touches history.

Mr. Piccirillo's direction reflects a basic knowledge of stagecraft but no discernable sense of filmmaking. The dull television-style close-ups march relentlessly across the screen, leaving only the ghostly trails of badly transferred video images behind.

Seems a little too desperate to be liked.

A curdled, unfunny satire made more painful by McGrath’s inappropriately jubilant style.

The dual-track plot, with constant cutting between mother and daughter, seems less an attempt to establish meaningful parallels between the two stories than the nervous twitches of a compulsive channel changer.

What's lacking is the sense of structure that might have made Van Wilder more than a meandering succession of random gags.

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]

Dario Argento's grossly overstated mise-en-scene adds some perverse interest to this routine (if unusually gory) horror film from 1976. Argento works so hard for his effects—throwing around shock cuts, colored lights, and peculiar camera angles—that it would be impolite not to be a little frightened

Archangel is a perfectly self-contained aesthetic object, maddening in its arbitrariness and opacity, yet wholly absorbing in its flurry of urgent yet incomprehensible significations.

Mitchell Leisen's polished direction serves this 1941 melodrama written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

Robert Wise brings his Academy Award-winning sobriety and meticulousness to a pulp tale that cries out for the slapdash vigor of a Roger Corman.

A dubious proposition, but in Sturges’s hands a charming one, filled out by his unparalleled sense of eccentric character.

It seems meant to recapture Allen's lost audience: the verbal wit is fast and frequently hilarious, and the grating self-pity that has come to mar his films has been tempered.

Given the complexity of attitudes and the ambiguous take on the family represented in such Spielberg films as “E.T.'' and “Poltergeist,'' the bland affirmations of Jurassic Park seem platitudinous and insincere. He's forcing it here, and it shows. [11 June 1993, Friday, p.A]

The first-time director, Harold Ramis, can't hold it together: the picture lurches from style to style (including some ill-placed whimsy with a gopher puppet) and collapses somewhere between sitcom and sketch farce. Male bonding remains the highest value of the Animal House comedies: women are trashed with a fierceness out of Mickey Spillane.

One of the most innovative, engaging, and insightful films of that turbulent era of American moviemaking.

Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks.