Dave Kehr

Made in 1937 by a relatively young and innocent Alfred Hitchcock, this British feature tends to be overshadowed by The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, but actually it’s only the uncharismatic casting that holds it back from being one of the most entertaining of Hitchcock’s English films.

Well-intentioned tripe, directed with made-for-TV solemnity by John Korty.

This story of a party girl (Audrey Hepburn) in love with a gigolo (George Peppard) allows Edwards to create a very handsome film, with impeccable Technicolor photography by Franz Planer. [Review of re-release]

The sinister mise-en-scene is compromised only by a few overripe lines from screenwriter Steve Shagan, and Reynolds reveals himself as an actor of depth and complexity.

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]

A strong and subtle horror film.

The picture has its moments of chilling insight, though essentially it is one more quaint early-70s stab at an American art cinema that never materialized.

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 is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance.

Zuniga's support is winningly low-key.

Sid & Nancy is a movie that features head-bashings, drug overdoses, stabbings and a more-or-less constant round of pointless, stupid violence, and yet its most prominent quality is its sweetness. This is a love story--an unlikely, perverse, disturbing love story, but a genuine one.

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]

Boys N the Hood wants to be “The Learning Tree'' and “Super Fly'' at once, an ambition that doesn't seem quite honest. [12 July 1991]

Rudolph’s off-center characterizations and looping dramatic rhythms keep the tone complex and varied, and the film has a lovely choreographed quality that’s only slightly marred by some indifferent cinematography.

A film of honorable ambitions severely compromised by a creeping show-biz phoniness.

Warren Beatty's shapely 1981 epic, based on the life of radical journalist John Reed, is a stunningly successful application of a novelistic aesthetic—a film that makes full and thoughtful use of its three-and-a-half-hour length to develop characters, ideas, and motifs with a depth seldom seen in movies.

Postwar Disney (1953) and not quite up to snuff. Disney's depersonalizing habit of putting different teams in charge of different sections of the story really shows up here, with work ranging from the flat and cloying (the animation of Peter himself) to the full-bodied and funny (Captain Hook and his alligator).

The movie is never less than entertaining, but it fails to satisfy—it gives us too little of too much. Oddly, much of its pleasure is in the acting, which up to this point hadn't been Carpenter's strong suit: Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton offer excellent turns.

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]

It's a beautifully proportioned, wonderfully complete movie.

Nightwatch is more stylish and well-plotted than your typical slasher film, but it doesn't quite stand out in a world where the horrific has become routine. [17 Apr 1998]

Siegel avoids the cliches of the butterflies-and-brotherhood school (cf All Quiet on the Western Front), opting instead for a study of the brutalizing power of sanctioned violence.

It’s exactly what you’d expect: tepid, artsy, and grayish, though it has surprising bursts of sincere sentiment.

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

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.

Desplechin's film sustains its running time by continually revealing new aspects to its characters that reverse our initial judgments.

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.

The film is uncharacteristically rigid and pious for Hitchcock; it feels more like a work of duty than conviction.

It took (Cronenberg) several films to come into his own as a filmmaker, but even his earliest work reflects his obsessive interest in the human body as raw material that can be transformed -- for better or for worse -- by strong emotions. [08 Jun 2004, p.E3]

Hugely funny, but it's also liberating-precisely because it centers its aim on that cold, closed system and blows it apart. The straight lines are shattered; the empty spaces in the images are packed full until they burst. [2 Dec 1988]

A decent piece of do-good cinema...Director Norman Jewison stages their confrontations for effectively flashy, immediate effects, though he unnecessarily neglects the action-movie underpinning.

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.

George Stevens, a tireless moralizer and part-time embalmer of American myths (Shane), directed this melodramatic adaptation of Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and what does not seem facile in it seems overwrought.

It is a moving and entertaining work, executed with high finesse by a master cineast.

The film is an impressive technical achievement: the full-figure animation is dimensional and elegant, the perspectives imaginative, and the color design superb. But without the (old) Disney genius for emotional structure and character design, the results are rather flat—the film concentrates on Disney horror and trauma without the relief of Disney charm.

A satire is only as good as its subject, and in the very funny I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Keenen Ivory Wayans has found a rich and relatively untapped one. The wit and openness of I'm Gonna Git You Sucka has more to contribute to race relations than the smug piety of "Mississippi Burning." As a positive image, a good, shared laugh is hard to beat. [14 Dec 1988, p.1]

A hesitant, conservative approach that yields great elegance and a rhythm that carries the viewer along. Yet the film is haunted by a sense of opportunities not taken, of an artist deliberately reining in his artistry. [9 Dec 1987, p.2]

A stiff in spite of an interesting cast.

Orson Welles's 1946 film reproduces his personal themes of self-scrutiny and self-destruction only in outline, though it is an inventive, highly enjoyable thriller.

Powell had made The Red Shoes five years earlier; here he was clearly hoping to expand the style of the final ballet segment into feature length. But without dramatic grounding Powell’s voluptuous visuals seem empty, and his manic inventiveness operates in a void.

Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn’t survive on television; it should be seen in a theater or not at all.

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.

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

Straw Dogs has the heat of personal commitment and the authority of deep (if bitter) contemplation. It is also moviemaking of a very high order.

Ultimately, this is the kind of film that gets more points for what it isn't—i.e., a typical teen comedy loaded with boob and fart jokes—than for what it is.

Spencer Tracy does his cuddly curmudgeon turn as Clarence Darrow; it's a lazy, vague performance, but its wit provides the only crack of light in the film's somber, gray overcast.

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]

Phil Kaufman's version of the Don Siegel SF classic is good as remakes go, but not as good as the original. Where Siegel was swift, compact, and efficient Kaufman tends to be slow, garrulous, and needlessly baroque. Ideas that Siegel knocked off in a few shots are expanded to fill entire sequences—but they're good ideas, and can stand a little stretching. Good allegories never die; they just expand and contract to fit the times.

It's a thoroughly professional job, but even in making a feature film, Giraldi still seems to be working to please a client. He shoots the script, supplying just enough style to make it stand up but not enough to make it move.

A fascinating anomaly.

Jarmusch's whole method consists of reversing expectations. The problem with that method is that you quickly begin to expect the reversals; the unpredictability becomes predictable. Jarmusch is a talented filmmaker, with an original sense of humor and a sharp and distinctive visual style, but he won't be a great filmmaker until he stops approaching his material from the outside.

An awesomely, stiflingly professional piece of work, with a fleet, superficial visual style, perfectly placed climaxes, and a screenplay (by Douglas Day Stewart) that doesn't waste a single character or situation - everything is functional, and nothing but functional.

The film is one of Donen’s most formally perfect works—innovative, involving, and, in case there’s any doubt, finally optimistic.

Taking off from the format of a typical teenage sex comedy, Brickman deepens the characters and tightens the situations, filming them in a dark, dreamlike style full of sinuous camera movements and surrealistic insinuations. Brickman found a tone I hadn't encountered previously - one of haunting, lyrical satire.

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

This 1970 feature was the directorial debut of Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home, Being There), and for a first effort it isn't that bad.

Like any good work of popular culture, Rob Reiner's film of Stephen King's best-selling book Misery functions on more than one level.

A Cry in the Dark has been conceived as a director's film-a movie that works through imagery and narrative rhythm, through visual and aural resonance. But when Streep enters a movie (and it isn't something she can help by now) it immediately becomes an actor's film, a movie about performance-her accent, her gestures, her walk. Meryl Streep upstages Ayers Rock. [11 Nov 1988, p.A]

Ryder is particularly impressive in her destructive passion. [27 Nov 1996, p.39]

A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.

It looks like a potboiler: only a few of Peckinpah's themes are present, and they're mostly left undeveloped. But Peckinpah can still stage a fight scene better than anyone, and the film establishes its own crazy rhythm as it runs off wildly through most of the southwest.

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.

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

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.

A good summer movie, directed with great verve and imagination and filled with innovative, eye-popping effects. Cameron never relinquishes his grip on the audience, smoothly segueing from action sequence to action sequence and topping himself each time. [3 July 1991, Tempo, p.1]

It's a wholly passive performance, and one that touches not at all on Pryor's special gifts. This man desperately needs a new agent.

A strange and funny film, smart, complex and difficult to shake.

for all its flaws, Born on the Fourth of July provides the final proof that Tom Cruise is the real thing-a movie star with all the natural, unforced ability to connect with an audience that the title implies. [20 Dec 1989, p.1]

The screenplay tends to constrain rather than liberate Hitchcock's thematic thrust, but there is much of technical value in his geometric survey of the scene and the elaborate strategies employed to transfer audience sympathy among the four main characters.

Droll, pungent, and superbly told, Peggy Sue Got Married is more than a return to form for Francis Coppola. It's a film that reveals a new depth, a new sensitivity and a new sureness of technique for the 47-year-old director, a film that marks Coppola's entry into a rich, mature period.

Though much of Naked Lunch is flip, hip and hilariously funny, it never wanders far from a profoundly melancholic undertone - Cronenberg's unshakable sense of loneliness, isolation and anxiety. [10 Jan 1992]

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.

A very minor contribution to the great corpus of Iranian cinema that has emerged in the last 20 years.

Wilder's strategy is to play a bubbly romantic comedy in a mise-en-scene of destruction and despair. As usual, it's more clever than meaningful, but this 1948 film is one of his most satisfactory in wit and pace.

Manhunter is full of useful tips on interior decoration, but a movie it's not. [15 Aug 1986, p.JC]

Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

It may be questionable history (though the film is anything but jingoistic), but it is superb filmmaking, personal and vigorous.

Mike Nichols had the Burtons for his first film (1966), but he felt compelled to drag in so many jazzy camera tricks that Richard and Elizabeth seem largely superfluous for the first couple of reels. When Nichols finally settles down, it's almost too late.

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.

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).

Allen`s over-reliance on narration to create his emotional effects reminds us that his art is primarily, if not exclusively, a verbal one. He has never engaged the visual side of movies, never grasped film`s capacity to express emotions and ideas in images. Allen is a teller, not a shower.

George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.

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.

Carol Reed's careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed descended to in the last years of his career.

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]

The direction occasionally rises to the level of marginal competence, but for most of the film it is hard to tell who is chasing who or why.

It aims for a hushed, hypnotic, incantatory effect, and it does succeed in inducing some kind of trance.

Lewis's long takes and sure command of film noir staples (shadows, fog, rain-soaked streets) make this a stunning technical achievement, but it's something more--a gangster film that explores the limits of the form with feeling and responsibility.

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]

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.

What was wonderful in the Kurosawa film—the recruiting and training of the mercenaries—is just dead time here, though the icon-heavy cast helps out: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, and Robert Vaughn.

Everyone concedes that this 1941 Hitchcock film is a failure, yet it displays so much artistic seriousness that I find its failure utterly mysterious—especially since the often criticized ending (imposed on Hitchcock by the studio) makes perfect sense to me.

Obscure by nature and unwieldy by design, Darger's work is difficult to confront and consume; Ms. Yu has brought it a little closer, and that is as fine a public service as an art documentary can provide.

Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals, draining the Hitchcock moves of their content and complexity. He's left with a collection of empty technical tricks—obtrusive and gimmick-crazed, this film has been “directed” within an inch of its life—and he fills in the blanks with an offhand cruelty toward his characters, a supreme contempt for his audience (at one point, we're compared to the drooling voyeurs who inhabit his vision of Bellevue), and a curdled, adolescent vision of sexuality.

Consistency isn't the chief virtue of Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle, but at its best this ragged satire is bracingly, caustically funny. [27 Mar 1987, p.F-C]

The Walt Disney animators returned to top form with this beautifully crafted and wonderfully expressive cartoon feature, the first major work to come out of the Disney studios in a decade. There are limitations to Disney's naturalistic style, but for every failure of imagination there is a triumph of craftsmanship.

The picture is amazingly compact (70 minutes), and the swift pacing helps temper the goo. The film is no classic, but it's a good example of its type.

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