Dave Kehr

This 1983 feature was Carpenter's best film since Halloween but still couldn't recapture the perfect balance of visceral shock and narrative integrity that defined his first success.

Ms. Chaiken isn't much interested in melodramatic plot developments. Her talent lies in an evocative, accurate observation of a distinctive milieu and in the lively, convincing dialogue she creates for her characters.

Carpenter creates a vision of the technological future that is both disillusioned and oddly affirmative in its insistence on the unscientific survival of emotional frailty.

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.

Milius can be faulted for reviving a number of ostensibly dead macho myths, but in the context of the subculture his film deftly re-creates, they take on the aura of eternal values. The breathtaking surfing footage, rather than the slightly stunted characters, makes his most eloquent argument.

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.

Functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them.

I don't care for Benjamin's way of using death to validate his sentimental themes, but at this point any American movie that can get past the "I love you”s without audience snickers has to be counted a success.

Nothing convinces, but the film is fitfully appealing.

The film was hugely successful and widely praised in its time, though it's really nothing more than the old C.B. De Mille formula of titillation and moralizing--Roman orgies and Christian martyrs--with only a fraction of De Mille's showmanship.

While the low comedy is undeniably effective, the film leaves behind a bad taste of snobbery and petty meanness.

This stuff is much too strange and much too disturbing to be invented.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The original antimarijuana film, offering the true inside story of the devil weed that drives men to savage lusts and women to unspeakable depravities, along with a little bit of dumb fun.

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.

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.

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 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.

Willis O'Brien did the stop-action animation for this 1933 feature, which is richer in character than most of the human cast.

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.

Whether or not you buy Mr. Broomfield's findings, the film acquires an undeniable entertainment value as the slight, pale Mr. Broomfield continues to force himself on people and into situations that would make lesser men run for cover.

The screenplay is by Norman Krasna, a hack of the lowest degree, but Hitchcock shapes it smoothly to his personal ends.

Classic 1943 canine weepie.

This early Hitchcock film shows more signs of the artist to come than any of his other British movies, pointing forward in particular to the deep sexual themes of Marnie and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Hitchcock was incapable of making an uninteresting film, even when burdened with unsympathetic stars like Julie Andrews and Paul Newman, and Torn Curtain has its moments.

After a summer of computer-generated blockbusters, the amiably low-tech Benji: Off the Leash! seems like a breath of fresh air.

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

Polished, well-structured film.

The tone of this 1980 feature is too muddled for it to be really memorable, but it's impressively slick, with intimations of the adult decadence themes that informed Roger Corman's Poe films of the 60s.

The freer and more sophisticated approach of "Divine Intervention" makes these traditional-minded documentaries look somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned by comparison, but both have a value as reportage that Mr. Suleiman's film does not pretend to have.

Despite Scorsese's efforts, there just isn't much to look at, and the film plays less like a movie than an illustrated record album.

The film is funny in a way few of these toothless exercises are. The gags aren't exactly clever, but there are a lot of them, and the cutting finds a fast, effective tempo. Joe Biroc's witty cinematography gives the picture an authentically flat, artificial Universal look, and Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Stack are around for added iconographical persuasiveness.

It is a funny picture—not too consistently, and certainly not too coherently, but when it hits, it hits.

Fine work carved from minimal materials.

Typically overstuffed MGM prestige product (1940), but one that came out surprisingly well, with a minimum of Eng. Lit. posturing and some elegance of design.

Visually and structurally it's a mess, but many of the situations are genuinely clever, and there are plenty of memorable gags. The perpetual problem is that Allen isn't nearly the thinker he thinks he is.

While previous editions have had six or seven short films, Boys Life 4: Four Play requires only four titles for its 87-minute running time, a sign of how much more substantial and ambitious work in the field has become.

Works in the end because of its commitment to its characters and a handful of fine performances.

Tales of Terror is still lots of fun; Price is paired with Peter Lorre for an adaptation of The Black Cat that veers almost immediately into The Cask of Amontillado.

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.

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.

Mr. Anderson's screenplay provides a steady series of inventive action situations, and the director, Alexander Witt, makes the most of them. His work is fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact.

An ungainly collection of one-liners and misdirected sight gags that hardly qualifies as a movie. But as a stand-up routine it's a scream.

The film acquires a pleasant, syncopated rhythm as it bounces from one unlikely event to another, and Seidelman manages some nice detailing in the minor characters. Arquette is consistently charming and inventive in a role that barely exists as written, and Madonna is given ample opportunity to strut her stuff.

With all these safety features built in, this 1985 film is too well padded to qualify as genuinely radical wit, but in an even-toned, TV sort of way it's mildly amusing and inventive throughout.

More impressive than entertaining.

The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.

Because the characters are so well established -- Ms. Perkins is particularly good as the shy, resentful Brigitte -- the film can have fun with its own premises without turning into an empty camp exercise.

Few directors are capable of this kind of structural experimentation so late in their careers, and Hitchcock deserves much credit for his audacity.

Highly original and filmed with perfect assurance, River of Grass is one of the finest independent films of recent years.

A casually assembled Burt Reynolds vehicle, sloppy and loose in an amiable way.

The messages blend seamlessly into the fantasy and comedy in what is surely one of the best films for older children in quite some time.

Mr. Kelemer captures the sad textures of the Rogala brothers' lives with an appropriate balance of sympathy and detachment.

Even the walls seem to be sweating something viscous and unpleasant.

Though marred by Spielberg's usual carelessness with narrative points, the film alternates sweetness and sarcasm with enough rhetorical sophistication to be fairly irresistible.

Friedkin isn't nearly in enough control of his material for the film to qualify as an artwork, yet it's one of his few films with a real emotional current.

Even as the SF cliches fall fast and heavy, this is great to look at, thanks to the sumptuous MGM sets and the fine animation and matte work by Walt Disney Studios.

Sylvester Stallone's follow-up to his runaway success of 1976 is a little more threadbare in spots than the original, but it still has some conviction and spunk.

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.

Though undoubtedly a vanity project -- the music clearances alone must have cost much more than the film could ever hope to gross -- it functions pleasantly enough as an exercise in free association.

Glen's style...goes for the measured and elegant over the flashy and excessive.

Sunny, pleasant, squeaky-clean family film in which nothing surprising happens, and that is the point. Ms. Wood has a poise and wistfulness beyond her years, and she seems likely to follow the path of the child star Diane Lane into more nuanced adult roles.

Has the undiscriminating temperament of a fan, blithely placing Mr. Coppola's magnificently made "Godfather" on the same plane as Mr. Hopper's slapped-together, and today all but unwatchable, "Easy Rider."

The film never transcends the racist, sexist, neofascist implications of its base material, but it works entertainingly within them, and even manages a bit of auto-analysis in John Candy's ironic, adolescent narration of the "Den" episode. Better than it had to be, for which some honor is due.

In trying to reproduce the griot's tone, Mr. Kouyaté rejects psychological nuance and dramatic shading: this is a tale that advances quickly and boldly, peopled by deliberately one-dimensional characters.

Better than it might have been, given the limitations of this kind of brand-name filmmaking. Hodges doesn't shirk his duties, and though the film lapses too often into easy facetiousness, much of it feels surprisingly substantial. The action moves smoothly and logically, finding a rhythm that engages your attention despite the patent lack of inspiration and genuine commitment.

What gives it the Cronenberg feel, in spite of the complete absence of his standard themes, is his manner of filming the dragsters: they become, like the horrible growths that usually dominate his movies, the physical projection of the characters' hostile energies, weapons they use to act out the psychological conflicts that torture them off the track.

There are subtitles to reduce everything to simple English declarative sentences. This gives the viewer a decidedly unfair advantage over the characters: we can understand what they cannot and are invited to laugh at their mutual incomprehension.

The surface plausibility is probably the contribution of Marlon Brando, whose performance has strength and detail enough to counterbalance Bertolucci's taste for pure psychological essence.

A spare, painterly and scrupulously unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants massed at the United States border.

Maquiling creates an unusual and intriguing tone somewhere between sharp, deadpan comedy and a soft, dreamy surrealism.

Three short films drawn from the Milne tales by the Disney studio, yoked together to make a feature in 1977. Their charm is undeniable, though it mainly resides in the source material: the late 60s, when these were made, were Disney's darkest days for craft and commitment.

Heightened emotion and nagging banal reality fight each other for screen space, doing final battle in a daringly ambiguous ending.

This 1981 film drips with a sense of anger and betrayal that seems wildly out of scale to its cause—the discovery (less than original) that musicals don't reproduce social reality. The point is made endlessly, though it's in the film's favor that it's made with seriousness, consideration, and a certain amount of imagination.

Mr. Gudmundsson has created a sleek, light and entertaining work, with a few contrasting pockets of darkness and mystery.

The film is best when it takes itself seriously, worst when it takes the easy way out into giggly camp--as it does, finally and fatally, when Lex Luthor enters the action; Gene Hackman plays the arch-villain like a hairdresser left over from a TV skit.

The effects are done with playfulness, zest, and some imagination (they range from a barker batting paddleballs in your face to a murderer leaping from the row in front of you), making this the most entertaining of the gimmick 3-Ds.

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.

A feel-good documentary.

For those looking for a vacation from the irony and the cruelty that have invaded so much of American popular culture, this scruffy little Indian film is a delightful getaway.

An action director, Hathaway isn’t quite at home with this claustrophobic, motel-bound story of adultery and murder, but he gives it his all, most famously in the Freudian rampage that climaxes the film.

This slick and entertaining 1975 film of Ken Kesey's cult novel will inevitably disappoint admirers of director Milos Forman's earlier work.

As with most Thalberg projects (the director of record was Frank Lloyd, but he barely matters), it's tainted by a fair amount of middlebrow stuffiness, but it's a fleet piece of storytelling and serves to enshrine one of the great ham performances of all time, Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.

The film uses standard techniques to tell its tale -- videotaped interviews with survivors interspersed with newsreel images from the period -- but does so with integrity and attention to detail.

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

Americans now want a rooting interest in their journalism, just as they do in their sports and entertainment. Mr. Moore knows how to give that to them, and so - in a much more dignified, documented way - does Mr. Greenwald.

The picture unfolds as a light romantic comedy that adults will probably find familiar but tolerable, while their age-appropriate offspring will be transported to new heights of cinematic enchantment.

Offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is.

The end result is somewhere between Franz Kafka and William Castle, but still worth seeing.

Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet.

Though clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, Scream of Fear is closer to Orson Welles in its baroque visual design and delight in style for style's sake. [21 Oct 2008, p.C4]

The film is split down the middle, with many elegant symmetries and curling plotlines bridging the two halves: one part is a bracing, funny, almost Keaton-esque comedy starring Harry as a deadpan center of disaster; the other is a brooding, brutal film noir, starring Sondra Locke as a vengeful femme fatale.

Revels in directorial assertiveness, including an omniscient narrator and an intrusive use of slick, magazine-style graphics to identify characters and spell out slogans.

Woody Allen's first film as a director, in which he plays Virgil Starkwell, Public Schmuck Number One. This ragged collection of gags and sketch fragments was reportedly pieced together from an incoherent mass of footage by ace film doctor Ralph Rosenblum.

Provides more than enough sentimental catharsis for a satisfying evening at the multiplex.

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.

Light years ahead of Randal Kleiser's 1978 original, this 1982 sequel employs the Shakespearean marriage plot so beloved of classic musicals, in which two mismatched couples are straightened out and the songs express the moral distinctions of love and sex.

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.

Although the last part of the film becomes repetitive and slightly confused, Eastwood manages the picaresque plot with skill, and his visuals have a high-charged, almost Germanic quality. Wales also possesses a touching emotional vulnerability that marks another significant step away from Eastwood's often-overcriticized macho image. All in all, a very creditable film.

Time hasn’t been terribly kind to this 1931 gangster drama, which suffers more than it should from the glitches of early sound. But James Cagney’s portrayal of a bootlegging runt is truly electrifying (he’d already made three films, but this one made him a star), and Jean Harlow makes the tartiest tart imaginable.

The definitive Ben Hecht screenplay.

The movie is more interesting than achieved: it's the most forthright statement of the transference theme in Hitchcock's work, but it's also the least nuanced.

Whether he's working in nonfiction or science fiction, Mr. Cameron remains an artist of great instinctive power. In Ghosts of the Abyss, he uses every means of probing that modern science has put at his disposal -- electronic, mechanical, sonic -- only to find that the tragic reality of the Titanic, its myths and its meanings, remain tantalizingly beyond his reach.

One of the best of a bad genre, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Sweeping Historical Romance manages some moderately intelligent historical observations amid its lavishly re-created period decor and the puppy-dog pathos of the two central characters (Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman).

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

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

Like most of his British films, Blackmail is a sign of things to come rather than Hitchcock at his height, but it shouldn’t be missed.

Using telephoto lenses to bring us close to the characters, Techine directs Wild Reeds with an impeccable sense of tempo, unhurried by narrative pressures. The actors seem to find exactly the right, internal rhythm for each scene the leisurely rhythm of people discovering each other and discovering themselves. This is certainly one of the year's best films. [30 June 1995, p.54]

Michael Ritchie's 1985 mystery comedy has the pleasant, modest feel of a Fox B picture from the 30s—a Charlie Chan with a sense of humor... It does make for a decent evening's entertainment.

Mr. McElhinney has created a movie that is not without the flaws endemic in low-budget productions but still projects an amazing degree of stylistic assurance and originality.

The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir - particularly in its narcissism and fatalism - of how the hippie movement thought of itself. [Review of re-release]

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s certainly something to see.

The writer and director, David Barker, discards the didactic tone of so much American independent filmmaking in favor of a character study that leads to no easy conclusions.

The plotting of this 1978 biopic is contrived, and director Steve Rash's feeling for Buddy Holly's time and place is virtually nil, but Gary Busey's performance is astonishing—less as an interpretation than as a total physical transformation.

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.

Unfolds, skipping blithely from comic to melodramatic vignettes and back again, it follows the classical structure of a Shakespearean forest comedy, sorting out the mismatched couples and finding appropriate mates (or at least appropriate friendships) for everyone involved.

There is enough stylish sex and amusing character work (the supporting cast includes Ed Lauter, Mickey Rourke, Joe Pesci, and Helen Kallianiotis) to carry the day.

Despite its flaws, the film remains a fascinating souvenir of a vanished avant-garde.

Perhaps too simple and damply nostalgic to rank with Mulligan’s best work, but still illuminated by an intense identification with adolescent confusion, beautifully communicated by Mulligan’s subjective camera technique.

Not great filmmaking, but indispensable to students of 40s pop culture.

It's a light, slight premise that seems more suited to a Saturday Night Live sketch than a full-length movie, but it plays pleasantly enough in its video incarnation, where modesty sometimes can be a virtue.

Impeccably liberal in its time, the film has not aged gracefully, although Dorothy Dandridge's performance in the lead remains a testimony to a black cinema that might have been.

Martin has become a superb physical comic, and Tomlin brings some unexpected warmth to a cruelly written part. A manic fuzziness takes over in the last reel and spoils some of the pleasure, but it's still a sympathetic effort.

James Cagney had his crack at a Huey Long-like character in this overlooked 1953 feature directed by Raoul Walsh; the film suffers from a near-complete lack of originality but Cagney and Walsh, here as always ("The Roaring Twenties," "White Heat"), strike some sparks together. [01 Nov 1992, p.15C]

One of the better Halloween carbons, thanks to an unusually appealing cast and generally good pacing by director Amy Jones.

Not bad, but far from a classic.

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

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.

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.

Cruddy, primal, extremely violent, and fairly entertaining, this 1984 feature from the New York-based exploitation outfit Troma, Inc. (Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz) captures some of the snot-flicking spirit of the old EC comics. How much you'll enjoy its deliberate crudity probably depends on how far you can let yourself regress to surly adolescence.

Ruthless, poundingly violent horror film, directed by Wes Craven. It isn't artistically adroit, but if success in this genre is counted by squirms, it's a success.

It's bad, all right, but also weirdly compelling, thanks to some mind-boggling special effects work (check out the celestial chorus in the first reel) and some extremely speedy direction by Raoul Walsh, who seems to have decided that if the jokes weren't good, the least he could do was get through them fast.

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

The Belly of an Architect is less a movie than a filmed script--it lacks the sense of surprise and discovery of a world freshly unfolding before the camera that makes the cinema come alive--but it remains an intelligent, provocative effort. [14 May 1987, p.7N]

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.

Slightly above average 50s science fiction (1958), enlivened by a nearly literate script by James Clavell (Shogun).

Half self-parody, half deadly serious, The Killer Elite is an intriguingly enigmatic movie from one of our most committed and most maligned film artists.

Clearly, it’s an affront to Holiday’s art, but just as clearly, it’s a good piece of low entertainment.

Certainly it's the weakest of Ford's major westerns, burdened with a schematic and pretentious Dudley Nichols script (the "cross section of society" on board the stagecoach), but its virtues remain intact.

A rowdy, cheerful film on the surface, it has a disturbingly sour undertone supplied by Ford's realization that this paradise cannot be, and never was.

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

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]

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

Some scenes are banal and offensively simpleminded. But patience, ultimately, is rewarded with a welter of detail and some mighty fine camerawork.

The film is more strange than good, yet its self-conscious treatment of the politics of beauty seems eerily prescient.

As usual, blood flows freely and gratuitously, but you could do worse.

The film never moves far from the conventions of Italian sex farces—that is, it’s a comedy of embarrassment and frustration—but the flip Marxism adds a little flavor.

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.

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

Zappa's most ambitious compositions (performed by the London Philharmonic) share screen time with nostalgic freak humor. [26 Dec 2013, p.30]

It’s pretty much all genre and no nuance, though Michael Curtiz’s direction is surprisingly soft and light.

Archetypal 50s science fiction—light on brains and heavy on sexual innuendo (1954). But director Jack Arnold has a flair for this sort of thing, and if there really is anything frightening about a man dressed up in a rubber suit with zippers where the gills ought to be, Arnold comes close to finding it.

Redeemed a bit by Adrien Joyce’s Preston Sturges-inspired screenplay, Nichols’s film is nonetheless as unfunny as Carnal Knowledge, and just as vicious.

Elvis made a few better films (including Peter Tewksbury’s The Trouble With Girls and Don Siegel’s Flaming Star), but none that drew so well on the bad-boy side of his personality.

Gregory La Cava's improvisational style received its highest critical acclaim for this 1936 film, a marginally Marxist exercise in class confusion during the Depression.

An amiable adventure illuminated at odd moments by some genuine inventiveness. [21 Dec 1986, p.12C]

Mr. Sawyer eventually overreaches, striving for tragedy with a grim, cautionary ending that seems meant to evoke "Frankenstein." But the film's offhand, homemade quality sustains a quirky appeal.

Though the film is far from polished, the force of its significance to Mr. Frey, as well as the urgency of its political message, give it some genuine impact.

Joins the small pool of films that have dared to use Imax to tell a story.

Special-effects buffs generally cite this 1963 effort by Ray Harryhausen as the master’s masterpiece, and his work does a great deal to enliven the tired plot and vacuous stars (Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack).

Bright, good-spirited and blissfully short.

There isn't a lucid moment in it (and much of the dialogue is rendered unintelligible by Russell's subversive direction), but it has dash, style, and good looks, as well as the funniest curtain line since Some Like It Hot.

The filmmakers build an argument that is both intellectual and emotional, concentrating as much on the forensic evidence as on Ms. Rosario's passionate commitment to finding justice for her son.

William Friedkin's remake of the French thriller Wages of Fear represents an above-average effort by the director of The Exorcist—meaning it's marginally watchable. Friedkin senselessly complicates the simple story—four men drive a truckload of nitro through a South American jungle—with a lengthy exposition and some unfortunate existential overtones. The rhythms are all off—it's either too fast or too slow—but most of the set pieces are effective.

A strange, disturbing and yet occasionally quite funny cultural artifact from the new Russia.

Universal's classic from 1931, directed by Tod Browning. The opening scenes, set in Dracula's castle, are magnificent—grave, stately, and severe. But the film becomes unbearably static once the action moves to England, and much of the morbid sexual tension is dissipated.

Ultimately unsuccessful, the film is nevertheless a fascinating first draft for Vertigo.

A competent, unpretentious entertainment destined to fill the after-school slot at shopping mall theaters across the country.

The 1980 sequel to Every Which Way but Loose, and a better film—smoother, more controlled, with more time for the casual elucidation of place and character. Though it's a loud, vulgar, and occasionally brutal comedy, it never succumbs to the fashion for facetiousness: Clint Eastwood always takes his work seriously, even in a relatively impersonal project like this, and there are moments of moving emotional candor amid the slapstick, flashes on loneliness, forgiveness, and loyalty.

Much of it is awful, but it's almost impossible not to be taken in by the narrative sprawl: like many big, bad movies, Giant is an enveloping experience, with a crazy life and logic of its own.

The material has been bowdlerized to the point of abstraction, which makes Richard Brooks's sweaty, emphatic direction look a little silly—there just isn't that much to get worked up about. But Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are highly entertaining as the nightmare parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Jack Carson has one of his last good roles as Newman's competitive older brother.

Part wish fulfillment and part social moralizing, the film never resolves its point of view, but a few of the apocalyptic images stay in the mind.

The verbal and conceptual gags, however, belong wholly to Martin's own brand of goofiness, and some of them are pretty funny.

This 1939 release is still watchable, though the spirit is now sitcom.

The tension is intriguing and expressive (perhaps this is what Beineix had in mind for The Moon in the Gutter), though the unstable mixture is clearly limited as a sustainable style. 

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.

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.

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

Entertaining, lightly mocking documentary.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Good-natured, mildly appealing video feature.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Laurence Olivier's famous 1948 interpretation of Shakespeare's play suffers slightly from his pop-Freud approach to the character and from some excessively flashy, wrongheaded camera work—including the notorious moment when Hamlet begins the soliloquy and the camera begins to track back.

The film's mechanical workings are still impressive, but between the unsympathetic characters and the coldly precise direction, there is little here for an audience to clutch to its heart.

Amiable comedy western, with James Garner expanding on his Maverick image as a boom-town sheriff who’d rather use his cunning than his guns.

Edwards directs this farcical material in an unexpectedly intimate, naturalistic style, giving the characters a conviction that makes the slapstick sequences much funnier and more suspenseful than they might have been. But the film still has a rushed, slapdash feel to it.

Emerges as an uncommonly sober, well-researched film of its type.

No real film lover could help but muster some affection for this bedraggled action movie, shot in an extremely unpicturesque Yugoslavia on a budget that must number in the hundreds of dollars. The lead, Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas, is clearly a stranger to the thespian arts, but it's pointless to single him out in a cast that seems to have been assembled from all the expatriate American used-car salesmen living on the Adriatic coast.

This 1985 western does a decent job of developing some dry 80s humor without completely undermining the genre, yet Kasdan's considerable skills as a plot carpenter seem to desert him as soon as the story moves to the town of the title--the action turns choppy, confused, and arbitrary.

An amiable, offhanded comedy about ethnic identity and last-chance romance.

The dual point of view is used effectively, though it's less valid as social criticism (where Penn's observations tend toward facile revisionism) than as an index of the uncertainty that characterizes most of Penn's heroes.

In trying to cover so many bets, Petersen has created a film without an identifiable style or subject of its own.

Director Ron Howard brings a quality of gentleness and whimsy to the performances, but basically this is a highly calculated project brought in by those two old pros, producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown (Jaws, The Verdict).

This is a bumpy ride, but one worth taking.

This isn't quite up to the original, but it has its moments, as Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) sets out to solve a murder in an English country house.

Engaging entertainment, but far from Minnelli’s peak.

As soon as the medallion appears, so do the digital maneuverings -- speeded-up movement, composite images, objects and people morphing into supernatural thingamajigs -- that undercut the genuine thrills of the genuine action.

Those seeking a serious sociological examination of the role of stock car racing in late capitalist America will probably want to search elsewhere, but audiences looking for a kick will find one -- almost literally -- in Mr. Wincer's work.

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.

The Disney version (1951) lightens and sweetens Lewis Carroll's tale, but what's really disappointing is the undistinguished animation: the film looks and plays more like the Disney shorts than the Disney features, though the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Sterling Holloway) is a small masterpiece of elusive menace.

The essential humanity of the characters shines through, giving face and form to a subculture the movies have largely neglected.

Unfortunately, its inescapable comparison is to David Gordon Green's "George Washington," made the same year as Mr. Davidson's film but with a far greater sense of style and a more profound grasp of the fragility of young lives. Way Past Cool can't stand up to that kind of competition.

John Boorman's 1981 retelling of the Arthurian legends is a continuation of the thematic thrust and visual plan of his Exorcist II, though the failure of that bold, hallucinatory, and flawed film seems to have put Boorman into partial retreat.

Zuniga's support is winningly low-key.

Dustin Hoffman is superb as Lenny Bruce, but he gives an actor's performance where a less declamatory, more comedic delivery would have worked better.

The greatest disappointment is Shepard's own inability to play a Shepard character: a distant, stiff presence, he never seems to enter the emotional battles (with Kim Basinger, as the woman he can't live with and can't live without) that are the play's reason for being.

The film has no qualities beyond its formal polish--and its careful avoidance (or rather, displacement) of the moral and political issues involved can seem too crafty, too convenient.

The action and sentiments are familiar to the point of cliche, and there isn't much life in Gillian Armstrong's academic direction—she keeps pushing ideas over events, and meanings over emotions. But Judy Davis, as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman, grants the film much charm and passion.

Mr. Burger has a performer who can dart between stentorian self-assurance and cringing pathos, maintaining his character's ambiguity until the final sequence of this resourceful and ingenious entertainment.

Depending on your choice, the film is either an unpleasantly masochistic fantasy or an unpleasantly sadistic one.

It's bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying. Studio pressure apparently forced Murch to back off from the full fury of his conception, but this is still strong stuff.

Emerges as an engaging if occasionally hokey inspirational melodrama about the importance of community in the face of life's disappointments.

Most impressive, and the only segment that dares to criticize the terrorists directly, is Mr. Imamura's contribution, the last part of the film.

Comic book stuff, helped out by the presence of Rae Dawn Chong as an airline stewardess whose sarcastic commentary adds some comic counterpoint to the deliberately overscaled action.

Handsome, well-executed film that nonetheless feels a bit long at 111 minutes. Those who are already anime fans will certainly find it stimulating; but this may not be the one to convert the uninitiated.

Veers between the light naturalism of American television and the pulsing melodrama of Bollywood entertainment.

Its luxuriant, nearly three-hour running time allows lots of room for spectacular musical numbers and dramatic climaxes that are extended to the breaking point and beyond.

This was one of De Palma's early efforts, and its excesses can be chalked up to youthful enthusiasm—the ideas seem appealingly audacious even when they misfire, which is more often than not.

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.

I wanted to like it more than I did, but it'll do.

Typical Nilsson mix of the audacious and the cringe-inducing.

Nick and Nora investigate a jazz-club killing in this final entry (1947) in the series, which gets by—just barely—on the charm of stars William Powell and Myrna Loy.

An enjoyable, noisy romp.

Here is one performer (Testud) whose features -- small sad eyes, sharp nose, wide rueful smile -- can sustain a feature by themselves.

Ken Kwapis' Dunston Checks In contains not a single surprising moment. But it is well crafted enough to squeak by. Kids should get a few laughs from it. Accompanying adults will be only moderately bored. [12 Jan 1996, p.33]

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.

Slick and often funny, but the smugness of the satire and the stunted emotions are finally wearying.

It binds up introductory lessons in music appreciation, Freudian psychology, and fanciful history with a pulp thriller plot.

The picture isn't bad, really—it's just a little too soft and eager to please, like the family films (circus pictures and suchlike) that John Wayne made in the 60s to soften his image.

Has the bad luck to come on the heels of Kathryn Bigelow's beautifully made and politically impassioned "K-19," making this submarine picture -- a relatively modest, low-budget affair -- seem skimpy by comparison.