Dave Kehr

Russ Meyer's 1968 skin-flick is a hilarious, stylistically adroit compendium of middle-American preoccupations: breasts, fishing, anticommunism.

It’s funny in a coarse, obvious way, and it probably would have been a laugh riot had director Edouard Molinaro possessed even an elementary sense of timing. Still, it’s not very honorable: this is one of those sitcoms, like The Jeffersons, that “explain” a minority to middle-class audiences by making their members cute, cuddly, and harmlessly eccentric.

Robert Wise’s direction is no more accomplished here than in The Sound of Music or any of his later big-budget projects, but Boris Karloff in the title role is surprisingly subtle—at times.

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

In spite of its many flaws, the film never loses its focus on its fascinating central figure.

Strange, funny and powerfully moving… Burton has found a way to move through camp to emotional authenticity, to communicate-through a concentration of style and an innocence of regard-a depth and sincerity of feeling that his deliberately (and often, comically) flat characters could not summon on their own. [14 Dec 1990, Friday, p.C]

The film heaves and sputters from one indifferently rendered number to the next.

The film is very proud of itself, exuding a stifling piety at times, but it works as well as this sort of thing can, thanks to accomplished performances by Fredric March, Myrna Loy, and Dana Andrews, who keep the human element afloat. Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography, though, remains the primary source of interest for today's audiences.

Sayles must have meant his movie to stir and provoke, but the self-contained look of it yields something else-a sense of quaintness, of harmless nostalgia.

A romantic comedy of grace, buoyancy and surprising emotional depth, filled with civilized pleasures.

Unaccountably, it works.

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

If anything, this new film version is cornier and more conventional than the first screen adaption of the novel. [2 Oct 1992, p.C]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is anything but light, though it very nearly is unbearable.

You feel for the first time that Scorsese is trying to distance himself from his characters—that he finds them grotesque. The uncenteredness of the film is irritating, though it's irritating in an ambitious, risk-taking way. You'd better see for yourself.

Deep down inside, a very good film.

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.

A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film.

It remains a documentary at heart, full of astonishing glimpses of human resiliency that have nothing to do with artfulness and everything to do with patience, persistence and sympathy.

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]

Polished, well-structured film.

The mise-en-scene tends toward a painterly abstraction, as Hitchcock employs powerful masses, blank colors, and studiously unreal, spatially distorted settings. Theme and technique meet on the highest level of film art.

One of the funniest awful movies ever made.

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.

John Frankenheimer directed, too much in love with technique, though he ably taps the neuroticism of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Fredric March.

Though the metaphysical overtones of the screenplay are sometimes awkwardly handled and Eastwood's direction of actors (other than himself) is occasionally uncertain, this was one of the better American films of 1985.

Fine work carved from minimal materials.

Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 antiwar film was widely hailed at the time of its release for its power and commitment, though by today’s standards it’s likely to appear uncomfortably didactic.

Miller's work has been compared to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, but where the Leone films are about amorality, the Mad Max movies are purely and simply amoral—some of the most determinedly formalist filmmaking this side of Michael Snow.

A film of fragile and esoteric pleasures, The Man in the Moon is not a movie that can be recommended to the general public and should probably even be protected from it. But for those who can respond to its tiny formal beauties, it is something to treasure. [04 Oct 1991, p.C]

Big moves with polish and assurance. It's too soon to tell whether Marshall has anything of her own to say, but Big is proof that she can handle the Hollywood machine, and that is no small thing.

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.

Robert Aldrich dissects the underlying ideas with just enough craft and thoughtfulness to make the implications of this gritty 1966 war drama unsettling in not entirely constructive ways.

Hitchcock liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with Rear Window.

Dull it is not, but Wong's trademark sense of romantic melancholy fails to jell amid all the excess, and the film turns frankly silly once the mute starts imagining himself in love with a can of sardines. [21 Jan 1998, Pg.37]

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]

Successfully avoids the grandiose mythmaking that has been the bane of the baseball movie from ''Pride of the Yankees'' to ''The Natural.'' Rather than a vapid national epic, it is a warm, droll, deftly cracked romantic comedy. [15 June 1988]

The definitive road movie (1958), the well from which all the genre’s subsequent blessings flow.

The film handles difficult issues of wartime morality, with clear parallels to the American experience in Vietnam, but Beresford's direction is so placid, distanced, and methodical that the film never admits any doubt or debate; it tends to seal up the issues rather than liberate them.

It`s shoddy, lazy and numbingly stupid.

There must be some excuse for this but I can't imagine what it is.

It's the film in which an entertainer at last becomes an artist, dealing with manifestly personal, painful emotions and casting them in a form that gives them philosophical perspective and universal affect. It's Spielberg's finest achievement, a film that will look better and better with the passage of time. [22 Dec. 1989]

A brilliant comeback by a filmmaker, George Armitage, who never should have been away.

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.

Billy Wilder's 1954 version of the Samuel Taylor staple was a perfect vehicle for Audrey Hepburn, though the cut is too tight for her costars, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. [Review of re-release]

It's a good film, sturdily and somberly made, but it never catches fire.

A typically overproduced 1956 Fox film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, with Yul Brynner as the king and Deborah Kerr as the British schoolteacher who comes to Siam to educate Brynner's army of children. Too long at 133 minutes, but the score is swell.

The script, by Budd Schulberg, is pat and badly proportioned, but the picture has a sharp, dirty appeal.

Robert Bolt's boring historical drama functions best as an anthology of British acting styles, circa 1966.

Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease. This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.

There is surprisingly little emotional amplitude in the film.

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

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.

Though it never quite transcends its status as a simple concert film, Prince's Sign o' the Times gives far greater range to his talent than his widely successful movie debut, the 1984 Purple Rain. [20 Nov 1987, p.A]

Has everything but a personality. [15 July 1988, Friday, p.A]

One of Robert Altman's most charming exercises in cabaret humor and off-the-cuff modernism.

A model French psychological drama in which very little action occurs but feelings and intuitions are documented with precision and discretion.

It's one of the most consistently funny films in the “Road” series, though by this late point (1945) the manic unpredictability of the early films has settled slightly into formula.

Evil Dead 2 is, pardon the expression, consistently lively--a ghoulish splatter comedy that uses wildly excessive gore to provoke the kind of shock that lies between a laugh and a scream. [10 Apr 1987, Friday, p.M]

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.

Soul Man is a slick, frightening piece of work. It's not only because Ron Reagan Jr. has a bit part in it that it seems the definitive Reagan-era film.

The second film version (1964) of Ernest Hemingway's short story, directed by Don Siegel with far more energy than Robert Siodmak could muster for his overrated 1946 effort.

A tiny film that reflects a large talent.

Paul Mazursky hasn’t only remade Jean Renoir’s sublime 1931 Boudu Saved From Drowning: he’s yuppified it, inverting virtually every meaning until the film becomes a celebration of the crassest kind of materialism.

The sheer outrageousness of its attitude is enough to make Heathers a very welcome relief in a field dominated by sanctimonious and second-hand virtue. [31 March 1989]

A stodgy Universal thriller from 1941, redeemed by a name-heavy cast.

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

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

Douglas Sirk's famous 1959 remake was pure metaphysics; this version emphasizes the social content, particularly in its Depression-era attention to class nuances.

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]

Should soon join Mr. Greenaway's last few efforts in obscurity.

The material is simple and irresistible, and Sydney Pollack stages it well (though without transcending the essential superficiality of his talent).

The musical sequences are good enough that they make you wish Ross had been willing to leave the surface realism behind and break out into the high stylization and exuberance of the genre's classic days. Despite the hesitations, it's miles above "Flashdance" in technique and intelligence.

Each of these stories is terribly sad and terribly moving in its own right. Yet the film that Mr. Corcuera has spun around them only increases the viewer's sense of helplessness and passivity. No solutions are suggested, no actions are proposed, no reflection is invited. The misery of these people becomes just another voyeuristic spectacle, to be consumed and forgotten.

Like his father, Mr. Brown has the magical ability to take his public on a two-hour vacation. It's the next best thing to being there, and you don't need to worry about sand in your beer.

As the temptingly pure and fragile Englishwoman, Grace Kelly was closer to Ford’s sympathy and understanding, but Gardner walks off with the movie and the man.

The film is still an entertaining and invigorating thriller, with a structure and some curious sexual overtones that suggest Howard Hawks's "A Girl in Every Port."

The humor is relentlessly cruel, smug, and disconnected from any sense of how human beings might behave in similar situations. But though she's hardly able to dominate the project, director Martha Coolidge does manage to insert some of the sweetly eccentric characterization that distinguished her Valley Girl: one of the heroes, played by Gabe Jarret, is actually believable and sympathetic as a socially insecure adolescent, and a few of the minor figures are brought to life with deft, simple strokes. Though ultimately obnoxious, the film lingers in the mind for a few moments of genuine charm.

Without exaggerating their lovability or condescending to their foolishness, Mr. Siegel makes vivid, likable people out of his three protagonists as they affect one another and are affected in turn.

Ms. Slesin sums up the complicated feelings of Secret Lives with one well-chosen phrase: what these people are suffering from, she says, is the "trauma of gratitude." Her film is as complex and moving as that formulation.

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

It's a movie of a thousand pleasures - of glinting insights and sly twists. [19 Aug 1988]

For all the film's popped eyeballs and severed limbs, Beetlejuice retains an innocence that makes the grotesque humor very appealing. Burton has captured the sweet ghoulishness of a 12-year-old pouring over horror comics, dreaming of the greatest Halloween costume ever invented. [30 Mar 1988]

A shrewd and powerful mix of commercial ingredients and ideological intent.

The screenplay (by Lewis John Carlino, of The Great Santini) collapses into musty moralizing in the second half, and director John Frankenheimer throws in the towel.

Although the film in no way measures up to the features made under Disney's personal supervision, it does contain some far more imaginative and adept animation than the last several post-Walt titles.

It's a tired idea, and it produces an episodic, unstrung film. [6 March 1998, p.49]

One of Romero's most complex and challenging creations. The film shifts effortlessly between playfulness and outrage, between a distanced irony and an awful, immediate horror.

As he did in "The Cup," Mr. Norbu provides a lot of ingratiating comic moments. His Buddhism is the laughing, playful kind, and does not ask the Western audience - for whom the film is clearly intended - to deal with any uncomfortably complex religious issues.

The punky energy of the earlier films has given way to a self-conscious striving for significance, obscuring Miller's considerable kinetic talents in favor of a lumpy didacticism.

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 characters have a fullness and vitality rare in American films of that period, but Towne has so much trouble establishing information visually that the film emerges as choppy, confused, ill-proportioned.

There is something new here, and very fresh.