Dave Kehr

The plot line quickly becomes incomprehensible, and the movie, directed in sleek music-video style by Michael Bay, comes to suggest a very long night on Fox-TV. [7 April 1995, p.56]

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.

Credibility, of course, wouldn't matter if the gags were good enough, which they are not. The film quickly falls back on the gross-out jokes that have made recent American comedies such a challenge to the digestive tract.

The Marx Brothers' best movie (1933) and, not coincidentally, the one with the strongest director—Leo McCarey, who had the flexibility to give the boys their head and the discipline to make some formal sense of it.

The polish and unpretentiousness of The Hidden are enough to suggest Don Siegel's original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and there are few compliments in horror films higher than that. [30 Oct 1987, p.41C]

Paul Newman tells 'em where to get off in this slick, popular antiestablishment drama set in a prison camp. Stuart Rosenberg's direction is a horror, but the cast teems with so many familiar faces that this film can't help but entertain.

For the most part, the humor in House II is mild and conventional, and the suspense sequences never amount to much, thanks largely to the film's failure to play by any identifiable rules. In a film in which reality can be bent and rebent, following the director's whim of the moment, it is nearly impossible to establish any real sense of danger. Menace requires integrity, and "House II" doesn't have it.

A stiff in spite of an interesting cast.

A great film, and certainly one of the most entertaining movies ever made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock at his peak.

Aimed squarely at adolescents in subconscious search of strong father figures, most of the movie is dull and familiar. [18 Aug 1987, p.C]

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

Mr. Ratnam is a dynamic, natural filmmaker who happily uses every device at his disposal, from rapid-fire MTV editing to sped-up action scenes that recall silent serials, to keep his lengthy film moving at a brisk pace. The film flags only when Mr. Ratnam must turn his attention to the soggy romantic subplots.

It's quite good, though by the impossible standards the film sets for itself it inevitably falls short: the character design is a little smudgy, the backgrounds are somewhat unimaginative, and the secret of Disney animation's unique depth—its impeccable perspectives and shadings—seems to have been irretrievably lost.

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

Hellbound offers a consistent, low-level queasiness, an effect more of revulsion than horror. It's nothing that a good shot of Pepto-Bismol wouldn't take care of.

A tiny film that reflects a large talent.

A masterpiece of the art of animation. The concept and some of the episodes are tainted with kitsch, but there's no other animated film with its scope and ambition—it is, in Otis Ferguson's words, “one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world.”

Pink Cadillac is the most graceful, warm-hearted and engaging of Clint Eastwood's comedies. [26 May 1989, p.A]

It's a pleasant commercial undertaking, though everything about this $30-million production seems a bit overscaled: the stars are too big for their parts, the mystery subplot is too complicated to take a comfortable backseat to the romantic comedy, the special effects (which include two spectacular fires) are too big for the action, and even the wide-screen image is too big for the intimate, offhanded humor.

For older kids and adults, it's an amazing piece of work, far more complex in its talking-animal effects and far more ambitious in design than the first film.

As an artist, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed this early achievement many times in his career, but for sheer entertainment value it still stands in the forefront of his work.

The film is cut at such a frenzied pitch that it's often possible to believe (mistakenly) that something significant is going on.

It still had some juice a few years ago, when it was Hector Babenco's "Pixote," but "Salaam Bombay!" is a disturbingly professional, self-assured piece of work. [28 Oct 1988, p.A]

It seems that as long as Jason can keep his costs down-by hiring unknown young actors, desperate for any kind of a break, and hiring directors (Rob Hedden this time) straight out of television or film school-he`ll be with us forever. Conveniently devoid of any personality (a variety of anonymous stunt men have filled the role over the years), he`s as infinitely reproducible as one of Warhol`s soup cans, though considerably less expressive. [31 July 1989, p.C3]

Peter Weir's attempt to make a "Casablanca" for the 80s - a romance set against a background of exoticism and intrigue - suffers from hazy plotting and a constant, pretentious mystification.

Cimino's talent is at least 50 percent hot air, but the part that is not—his superb feel for movement across the Panavision frame—seems especially valuable. Say what you will about his overstuffed, overdetailed images, they at least represent a notion of cinema, as opposed to the flat television aesthetic that dominates Hollywood, that no film lover can afford to ignore.

The film looks like an attempt to make a Martin Scorsese movie without Martin Scorsese.

Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus.

This 1944 Hepburn-Tracy pairing is so undistinguished that it's nearly dropped out of the history books.

So little care has gone into the characterizations, the structure, and the situations that the film merely feints at significant comedy.

When the smoke clears, only one thing is certain: Howard the Duck has laid an egg.

Consistently offbeat and entertaining; at such moments, it is also quite moving.

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

As Corky, Mr. Kattan never finds an appealing perspective on his character. Sweetness is not this gifted comedian's strong suit, and in its place Mr. Kattan offers a desperate eagerness to please, a far less charming quality.

For a film ostensibly dedicated to physical grace, Ross's images are unforgivably clumsy. MacLaine and Bancroft, though, work up some sparks in the last two reels.

The action sequences, when they arrive, are so poorly staged and absurdly one-sided that they contain no excitement or suspense. Again and again, the film finds the huge, hulking Seagal beating up on flabby middle-aged men - and even then, resorting to such questionable techniques as wrapping a cue ball in a handkerchief and using it as a club. [15 Apr 1991, p.C7]

The film leaves a sense of entrapment and despair. Its characters are caught in a shrinking world that leaves no room for notions as grand as "good" and "evil," but only a sordid, creeping malignancy that levels everything in its path. [24 Apr 1987, p.AC]

Roger Moore is a pastry chef's idea of James Bond; but Christopher Lee as the archetype of the evil antagonist makes this 007 outing just about bearable.

What remain are a few outrageous sight gags built around an unusual glow-in-the-dark device and a nicely conceived encounter with a shy female body-builder (Raye Hollit) that, in its blend of violence and tenderness, recaptures some of the emotional complexity of the Edwards of old. [3 March 1989, p.M]

There is still some life in the characterizations, though the animation is turning stiff and flat.

The film doesn't transcend its genre, but it's an honorable achievement within it.

The film is finally impersonal, almost anonymous; it's a chilly, lumbering project that carries little of the mark of lived experience. [25 Dec 1992]

If the setup, with its theme of two radically different brothers drawn to the same woman, recalls Moonstruck, the follow-through of The January Man has none of the earlier film's pleasing symmetry or emotional force. Sarandon seems to get lost in the shuffle (in a way that suggests some last-minute trimming of her role), and the picture eventually trails off into a tangle of unresolved plot threads. [13 Jan 1989, p.K]

A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous.

Too campy to work as straight drama and too violent and sordid to function as comedy, Vulgar is, truly and thankfully, a one-of-a-kind work.

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.

Not entirely a pale shadow, but definitely fading. [12 Jan 2012, p.36]

Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film inaugurated his majestic late period: it’s here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters.

This was the last Disney animated feature that Uncle Walt lived to see through personally; it can't be a coincidence that it's also the last Disney animated feature of real depth and emotional authenticity.

His first confrontation with Berenger allows Poitier to display the overwhelming, nearly palpable moral force that was his great strength as a performer, but the balance of the film makes very little use of his special skills. [12 Feb 1988, p.A]

A mildly diverting, mostly forgettable variation on themes the writer-director has treated with more depth and vigor on several past occasions. It's a tentative, tiny film, every bit as inconspicuous as its recessive, occasionally invisible heroine. [25 Dec 1990, p.10C]

All of Cronenberg’s personal obsessions—the distortion of the body, the grotesquerie of sex—are on display, though the treatment is a bit sophomoric. A curiosity item for hard-core Cronenberg fans.

Sidney Kingsley's Broadway hit, modeled a little too clearly on Greek tragedy, becomes a solid film d'art under William Wyler's supple, impersonal direction.

The film (and Garson’s stiff-backed, Academy Award-winning performance in particular) has dated very badly; it’s difficult now to see the qualities that wartime audiences found so assuring.

It's a slick, empty spectacle, with antipathetic stars and a director with no basic sympathy for the myths he's treating.

It's much to Schumacher's credit that Flatliners, for all of its crazy excess, does not turn into camp.

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.

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

The film is full of ingenious details and effective character sketches (Thomas has a mother who would give Woody Allen the willies) that go a long way toward covering up its conventionalities.

Unfortunately the clips themselves are so battered, grainy and sordid that they are more depressing than inspiring.

In The Sandlot's nostalgia for simpler times, a single-sex world seems to be a key component.

Less interested in politics than in profitably flattering the suspicions and resentments of its intended teenage audience.

With most of the action confined to the body of the plane (though there is a brief stopover at a Louisiana airfield), the screenplay poses some significant challenges in staging, none of which Hooks seems to recognize or accept. [06 Nov 1992, p.B]

It's astounding to see Arthur Penn's name attached to this piece of cheese.

Jonathan Demme's debut film is campy, choppy, and generally immature, though his bonding themes are fitfully discernible amid the cartoonish action.

Johnny Handsome does indeed put Hill back in the ballpark, close enough to his best work to make its imperfections seem that much more maddening. [29 Sep 1989, p.A]

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

Jessica Lange brings so much energy and personal involvement to her portrayal of Frances Farmer that you can't help but feel sorry for her; nothing else in the film remotely matches her talent and dedication, and she seems alone—and even slightly absurd—in her feverish creativity.

There is something new here, and very fresh.

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.