Dave Kehr

There is little of the gratuitous hysteria that usually mars Lumet's work, and David Himmelstein's busy script (no less than four campaigns are covered, when one or two would do) keeps things moving, though at the price of losing track of a couple of significant subplots.

Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour on an average journey, enlivened by the strange antics of a forgotten vaudeville team called the Wiere Brothers, who do acrobatic stunts and shout “You’re in the groove, Jackson!” on cue.

Richard Attenborough's direction achieves that balance of impersonality and brisk pacing we've come to recognize as "professionalism," and he doesn't clog up the dancing with too many stylistic gimmicks.

Ashby is excellent on atmosphere but fair to middling on character. When the film makes a sudden transition from epic to melodrama, things fall apart.

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.

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.

Bill Murray is the star of this pleasant 1981 comedy, but the late-60s values he incarnates (skepticism, spontaneity, antiauthoritarianism) are seriously out of step with the values of director Ivan Reitman, who prefers conformity, loyalty, and even something a little like patriotism. As a result the second banana of this service comedy, the affable Harold Ramis, becomes its genuine dramatic center: his struggles to keep his buddy Bill in line have a strange urgency and poignance.

As broad and cartoonish as the screenplay is, there is an accuracy of observation in the work of the director, Frank Novak, that keeps the film grounded in an undeniable social realism.

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.

The two different ends require shifts in point of view that are beyond Sayles's talent as a visual storyteller, and the film does not cohere. Yet many of the individual scenes are charming, funny, and pointed, and the movie gives off Sayles's usual glow of goodwill.

William A. Seiter directed this 1935 release, with a light touch but not enough style to transcend the machinations of the trifling plot.

Director Slava Tsukerman doesn't have any new ideas, though this 1982 feature does improve on some old ones, notably its use of a rapid parallel montage technique to enliven the ancient Warholian comedy of boredom and underreaction by cutting to different characters and different shticks.

Garson Kanin directed this late, trivial screwball comedy (1940), and while it’s pleasant enough, the freshness is definitely off the bloom.

For all of its simplemindedness and deck stacking, the film is distressingly well made—Pollack is no artist, but he has a glistening technique (there aren't many American directors left who know how to plan their shots for such smooth cutting) and a strong sense of how to hold, cajole, and gratify an audience.

Wyler lays out all the elements with care and precision, but the romantic comedy never comes together - it's charm by computer. [Review of re-release]

The film comes closer to working than it has any right to, given the curious casting (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) and director Ridley Scott's inability to sustain dramatic tension or build a coherent scene.

The review format, intercut with demythicizing glimpses behind the scenes, aspires to a cynical Brechtian snappiness, but the drama is too thinly imagined, the meanings too familiar and heavily stated, for this 1976 film to gather any real interest.

It is a sincere, thoughtful work, though not a very accomplished one.

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]

[An] amiable, rambunctious New World production, aimed ostensibly at the teen trade but more obliquely and effectively at the new wave cult...It's more cleverly cut than shot—which means that it moves quickly and energetically even as the concepts and characters disintegrate.

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]

Clearly understands its target audience of first-generation Indian-Americans and has its pleasures to provide.

A generally effective sex comedy, distinguished by its origins (Brazil) and the considerable appeal of its star, Sonia Braga. (Review of original release)

Reasonably entertaining, if too long and too literal.

Demented disquisitions on Catholic theology vie for supremacy with camp humor and horror-movie conventions, leading to a conclusion that somehow manages to conflate The Wild Angels and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Informal, pleasant film that ably captures Mr. Traoré's spirit.

There are several solid laughs and some excellent supporting performances. But this is a film to be wary of.

She (Baur) has clearly earned the trust and respect of her subjects, the first qualification for any responsible documentarist, and they have repaid her with an intimate glimpse into their singular lives.

Neil Diamond's remake of the 1927 Jolson vehicle isn't very good, but neither is it the vacuous, sentimental ego trip it's been painted as.

This is compelling stuff, but there is something deeply distracting in the use of recreated material.

Walking Tall has no more fat on it than the Rock himself, a hulking yet curiously ingratiating presence who seems the most likely candidate to replace Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as America's favorite living comic book character.

Boorman deserves credit for trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually, it's fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible, and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only out of curiosity.

It's a mad whirl, and Rodman his hair changing color like a traffic light seems right at home in it. [4 Apr 1997, p.49]

It’s a funny film, and it’s even charming in a shaggy way, but there isn’t a light moment in it—Cassavetes demands that comedy be played as passionately as drama.

Nothing special, but it's a decent example of a vanished genre—the small character comedy.

By and large Mr. Hoch's portrayals are as harsh and authentic as a police photograph, but an occasional touch of sentimentality creeps in.

Not quite good enough to jump out of the pack of Asian swordplay movies but is too well crafted to sink into utter anonymity.

Peter Cushing carries most of the ho-hum script as Dr. Van Helsing, though the well-lit color photography, central to the Hammer formula, can't compare with the shadowy magnificence of Nosferatu (1922) or Dracula (1931).

Has the sense of gritty, practical politics of a Japanese samurai epic combined with the high-flying stunt work and magical special effects of a Hong Kong romp. Ultimately this film by Yojiro Takita is satisfying on neither level, but not for lack of trying.

City Hall can't decide whether to be melodrama or sociology. In the end, it isn't enough of either. [16 Feb 1996, p.49]

One of the most technically proficient of David Cronenberg's early gnawing, Canadian-made horror movies, though it lacks both the logic and the queasy sexual subtext that made his still earlier work - "Rabid," "They Came From Within" - so memorably revolting.

The resulting compromise does not produce a perfect film, but it is a fine record of a classic production and an important reminder of an event that has not stopped echoing in American culture.

Minnelli's comedy had its serious underpinnings: by the end of the film, a girl had become a woman. By the end of Ms. Gordon's film, the girl is still a girl, but a girl with much cooler stuff, including a stately home, a butler and a cute British boyfriend.

The film is at once a sort of Indian "Stella Dallas," which finds the heroine making sacrifice after sacrifice on behalf of her family, and a "Gone With the Wind"-style epic of social change.

Sustains the charm of an early 60's New York romance.

Poltergeist at this point is a brand name without a distinctive product to sell-no vivid characters, no unique situations, no look or meaning of its own.

For an outside observer, Saints and Sinners doesn't make particularly compelling viewing, but Ms. Honor has given her subjects an excellent present on their big day: the ultimate wedding video.

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

A wan, wistful Generation Y romance.

Beaches is a melodrama in the original sense of the term: a drama with music. And as long as the melo is handled by Bette Midler, who performs half a dozen songs, Beaches can`t be all bad. But the drama, as transacted between Midler and Barbara Hershey, is pretty dreadful.

Still reeling from the success of Carrie, De Palma turns this 1978 film into an endless series of shock effects, some of which work but most of which don't.

James Cagney gives it all his drive and speediness, but this plodding, straight-line 1957 biography of Lon Chaney Sr. never comes close to capturing the actor's obsessiveness or offering any insights as to how he made his personal pain and humiliation accessible and meaningful to a mass audience.

Ernest Schoedsack's sequel to his monster hit of 1933, rushed out the same year. The slapdash production shows in a wavering tone and a paucity of special effects. With Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack; the animation, what there is of it, is by the legendary Willis O'Brien.

The film gets by on the sheer good-naturedness Reitman is able to place in all of his efforts, though it doesn't seem likely to inspire the same level of affection as the original. Innocence is one quality that can never quite be recaptured. [16 Jun 1989, p.28]

There is a genuine sweetness in Reitman's work that balances the innate cruelty of much '80s film comedy. But this time the gags are too feeble to provide a counterweight and the film tips into the cute, benign and pointless. [9 Dec 1988, p.A]

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.

The movie is full of dead ends, logical gaps and bizarre inconsistencies. Yet Donaldson is deft enough, both in his composition of shots and his direction of actors, to create a scene-by-scene sense of competence and control that carries the picture across some very rough spots.

As a movie, this sort-of sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show ain't much—but then neither was the original, and we all know how much difference that made.

Suspect smothers in misapplied seriousness-it's the thriller as civics lesson. [23 Oct 1987, p.A]

This mild 1984 comedy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New York City yuppie (Tom Hanks) isn't at all hard to take (John Candy, in a supporting role, is hilarious and original, and Hannah has a pleasant naive charm), but its appeal is based almost entirely on regression—a thematic regression to infancy (now endemic to the American cinema) and a stylistic regression to the most lulling kind of TV blandness. No wonder it's relaxing: it's a lullaby.

Sam Wood's direction is limited to forced perspective compositions and hollow, incantatory line readings, but the craggy landscape shines under Ray Rennahan's Technicolor cinematography.

The film, too artfully conceived to deliver many overt shocks, often feels long and aimless.

The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.

Cher plays a footloose, life-loving mother of two fatherless daughters who sports a bouffant hairdo and, at one crucial point, a Mylar mermaid costume that looks as if it were constructed, on a bet by designer Bob Mackie, entirely out of common household objects. The part isn't much of a stretch for America's reigning queen of wacky non-conformity, though it should please her established fans while scraping the nerves of the unconvinced as lightly as possible.

The gags are slighted in favor of John Denver-style homilies, mouthed by John Denver, while the film collapses under the weight of missed narrative connections, the apparent victim of excessive recutting.

The opening and closing passages of this 1954 adaptation of Lerner and Loewe rank with Vincente Minnelli’s finest, most purely cinematic work—magnificent orchestrations of textures, colors, and movements. What comes between is soggy: a stiff and literal interpretation of the book, filmed on obvious sound stages with a “natural splendor” you could put your fist through.

Only the engaging lightness of the two lead performances prevents the film from falling into utter treacliness.

Alien Nation is a sluggish, forced and hopelessly derivative action thriller, sporadically redeemed by the wit of its stars and the velvety sheen of Greenberg's night photography.

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.

Fans of the genre -- or "gore hounds" as they are known in fandom -- will find plenty to enjoy in Mr. West's enthusiastic approach to his work.

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.

A Boy and His Dog lacks the density of a Peckinpah film—in spite of some clever ideas and a few well-wrought images, it seems too schematic and its satire too blunt.

Doesn't have many fresh ideas to contribute to the genre, though it is reasonably good-natured and delivers a handful of solid laughs.

Stone works some imaginative changes on the usual formulas of propagandistic fiction—Boyle is anything but the usual bland audience-identification figure, waiting around to be converted to the ideological position of the filmmakers—but as a director, he still didn't have the chops to bring off such an ambitious, multilayered project: the picture lunges into hysterical incoherence every few minutes, and Stone must resort to platitudinous simplifications to clear things up. It's lively, though, to say the very least.

As a filmmaker, Benjamin is capable of the occasional light, graceful touch, but the overall view eludes him; just as he was unable to bring out the sly blend of satire and psychological drama in Bo Goldman's script for Little Nikita, he's unable to find any harmony of tone in this scattered, cacophonous material. [09 Dec 1988, p.B]

The Living End is not a movie even vaguely interested in attracting a wide public. It's a movie meant to please its own niche audience, and at that it seems likely to succeed.

Glen's willingness to give the action sequences a certain weight and seriousness produces some genuinely exciting moments, yet his work is everywhere undermined by the flatness of the characterizations and the uncertain architecture of the plot. Still, Maud Adams makes a nice impression and Roger Moore has shed some of his smarminess.

The sentiments expressed are really no more noble or refined than those of a Chuck Norris picture, though Joano's style tries to stamp art all over the sequence. It sure isn't that, but it isn't good action either. [14 Sep 1990, p.B]

The movie is as flat and plain as a television program, and most of the supporting characters (including Louise Fletcher as a kindly schoolmarm) seem equally two-dimensional, as if they had wandered in from the set of "The Andy Griffith Show."

Drawing purely on his technical skills, Reynolds is finally able to get some momentum going in the picture's final half-hour, when a defeated Robin musters the remains of his band and makes a last-ditch attempt on the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle. It seems to be enough to erase memories of the movie's painfully slow start and send the audience out reasonably happy and stimulated. But Robin Hood does not seem to be the defining blockbuster this summer still needs.

It has a few good laughs in it thanks to Murphy, but mainly depends for its appeal on an uncomfortable manipulation of racial stereotypes. [04 Dec 1992]

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 crazy color schemes and visual effects once made this a popular head picture, though you'd have to be stoned to tolerate the score, which includes The Candy Man.

The Bedroom Window is not at all an unskillful film, but that, in some ways, is what is most discouraging about it: Hanson is more than good enough to do something of his own. In its drive to imitate the past, Hollywood is leaving itself without a present. [16 Jan 1987, p.L]

William Golding's 1954 allegory on man's innate inhumanity is too facile by half, which makes it ideal for high school English classes but rather too gaseous and predictable for the movies.

Serreau directs for maximum freneticism, with her actors rushing around and regurgitating great torrents of imperfectly subtitled dialogue (a gratuitous subplot involving drug traffickers seems to have been inserted just to double the hysteria), and while there are more than a few laughs, most of them are laughs of recognition—seeing these gags again is like coming across long-lost (and vaguely embarrassing) relations.

Russell offers a relatively restrained, Gary Cooper-ish performance, though most of the laughs are left to the four kids-Brian Price, Jared Rushton, Jamie Wild and Jeffrey Wiseman-who crack wise with arch sitcom precociousness. And Hawn, batting her baby blues, does make you want to hug her-at times very tightly, right around the throat.

For most of its length, Revenge of the Nerds II is pleasantly stupid summer fun, though it does have a nasty way of turning inspirational on you.

As much as film buffs might enjoy recognizing references to "Motel Hell" and other drive-in classics, Mr. Zombie's encyclopedic approach to the genre results in a crowded, frenzied film in which no single idea is developed to a satisfying payoff.

Something in me admires George Stevens's perversity in shooting this film about entrapment and compression in 'Scope, but that's the only interesting quirk in this otherwise inert work, which represents Stevens at the height of his pretentiousness and the depths of his accomplishment (1959).

It might have worked if Apted were as adept at creating an emotional atmosphere as he is in his portraiture of the suburban milieu, but too many unshaped scenes and redundant dialogue passages take their toll.

Here, as too often in his career, Stevens is aiming to have the last word on a genre: everything aims for “classic” status, and everything falters in a mire of artsiness and obtrusive technique.

Routine war adventure, imitating the callousness of Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen but without Aldrich's nihilist zeal. Still, you have to admire any film that casts Clint Eastwood opposite Richard Burton; the real violence is in the clash of acting styles.

This sort of thing was considered high art not so long ago; now it seems forced and ponderously symbolic.

The obsessive conjunction of lesbian sex and flowing blood suggests a deep-seated misogyny, but neither this nor any other theme is registered with enough clarity to offend.

What Levinson has created here is a generic memory film, so vague in its particulars that virtually anyone's family experiences can be plugged into it. [19 Oct 1990, p.B]

The inconsistencies of Nowhere to Run make it finally unsatisfying, but the film leaves little doubt that Robert Harmon is a major talent, though one still waiting for a project equal to his abilities.

Modest, mildly engaging film.

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

As in the Rocky films, Avildsen's only directorial strategy is to delay the final confrontation for so long that all the audience's pent-up frustration explodes with it. It's primitive, predatory stuff.

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.

Shyer's direction of actors rises instantly to a level of cartoonish hysteria and descends only for occasional wet bursts of sentimentality. But as an exercise in ideological persuasion it works appallingly well, playing on deep-seated guilts and insecurities with a sureness of touch that may make it a hit with the audience it caricatures.

Pretty much of a mess, full of narrative gaps and characters who arbitrarily appear and disappear. But it is at least a sweet, good-natured mess, with none of the overcalculation and condescending cynicism the same material would almost certainly bring out in a Hollywood production.

There is a crazed, dark poetry here, but Mary Lambert's direction of Pet Sematary captures none of it, and the film falls into a flat, frequently laughable literalism. [24 Apr 1989, p.C2]

Rather than explore the promisingly dark relationship between Sweeney and Sheen-or take advantage of a superior supporting cast that includes Quaid, Bill Duke, Arlen Dean Snyder and M. Emmet Walsh-Werner and Wolf prefer to lose themselves in short-term suspense sequences and elaborate car chases. It's the kind of pointless action that helps kill time on television-where the continuing format prohibits any deep resolution to character drama-but which, in a movie, quickly turns dull and superfluous. [23 Oct 1987, p.G]

Instead of deepening the material, however, the narrative twists feel like purely formal interventions, intended to keep the film moving toward its foregone, heavily moralistic conclusion. Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler is faultlessly professional but finally slight.

Decent 1961 adaptation of the Bernstein-Robbins musical, if you can handle Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood in the leads.

A pleasant, good-natured picture that struggles, gallantly if vainly, to recapture the style and sensibility of a studio musical on the severely limited budget of an independent film.

Shag still has its pleasures, though they're mostly among the casting. Annabeth Gish, as the shy Pudge, remains one of the most refreshingly natural performers in American films; a master of understatement, she scales down her gestures and reactions in a way that draws the camera to her, never asking for attention but quietly commanding it. [21 July 1989, p.A]

An air of embarrassing familiarity hangs over the entire project, as if it were a story told by an aging relative not quite aware of how many times, and how much better, he has been over the same material before. [25 Dec 1990, Tempo, p.1]

Robert Altman's busy, detailed mise-en-scene, flattened cartoon-style through space-compacting long lenses, does capture some of the frenetic atmosphere of the Fleischer cartoons, but it tends to crowd out, and neutralize, the story values.

Elvis impersonators may not be the freshest subject for comedy, but Bergman's sense of structure is sharp enough to develop a basic running gag (a convention is in town, with Elvises of every shape, size and color) into a spectacular final payoff. The parts are there but the whole, sadly, is not. [28 Aug 1992, p.B2]

Though it looks bright and the young actors have a couple of sweet moments, the picture is almost unremittingly punishing, hammering home its "be yourself" message with all the gentle persuasiveness of a Marine drill sergeant.

It's meant to be uplifting, but the material is so undernourished that bench-pressing a phone book already seems beyond it. None of the characters has been filled out beyond the underlying conventions and the few distinctive mannerisms contributed by the actresses who portray them.

The whole thing is rather forced and antiseptically cheerful.

There is a reason formulas endure: they work. And even under these threadbare circumstances, the developing friendship between the two women carries a faint but effective dramatic charge.

For much of its length, the film is a surprisingly serious plea for the rights of the mentally ill and the legitimacy of the insanity defense. When the need to make a commercial shocker finally asserts itself, the film shifts gears with unseemly, damaging haste. Though far from a worthy successor to the original the film clearly could have been much worse.

Each time Sheen threatens to take the film to another level, director Noton throws in a pratfall or a car chase to knock it down. Three for the Road" is a film that must struggle to be stupid; unfortunately, it succeeds. [15 Apr 1987, p.5]

A John Hughes-ish teen drama unaccountably complicated by politics and method acting.

Only director Apted`s admirably low-key, matter-of-fact approach to the material keeps it from becoming unbearably artificial.

It's a movie that doesn't have an original thought in its head, and seems to like it that way.

The landscape photography is magnificent...But its stereotypical characters, melodramatic plotting and audience-pleasing close-ups of adorable children all suggest the profound limitations of filmmaking by committee, whether that committee meets in Beijing or Burbank.

Finally fails to escape the conventions of the Hollywood cinema it so proudly deplores.

Lopes along amiably enough, offering a few smiles and the standard bromides about the importance of being yourself and pursuing your dreams. It's tolerable but forgettable.

Despite its blatant mediocrity, this 1981 British film knocked 'em dead everywhere, which makes me suspect that audiences weren't responding to the film itself as much as to the attitudes that underlie it.

This movie is Ms. Davis's fourth film as a director, and she has a bright, chipper style that keeps things moving, while never quite managing to connect her wish-fulfilling characters to the human race. Like someone who smiles too much, Amy's Orgasm seems rather sad at heart.

Even for John Hughes, who writes movies in less time than most people write postcards, The Great Outdoors seems unusually slapdash.

Once upon a time this was known as "the power of positive thinking," and it didn't involve nearly so much math.

In this third outing for the Griswolds - following the dismal "National Lampoon's European Vacation" in 1985 - the satirical edge has given way to sentimentality and a whiff of smugness, while the black humor has degenerated into broad slapstick. It's a tribute to first-time director Jeremiah Chechik's fine sense of timing that the obvious physical gags still generate some substantial laughs, though they arrive almost in spite of Hughes' tired script. [1 Dec 1989, p.Friday A]

Over all, the humor has been sanitized a bit compared with the darker, more grotesque comedy of the French original.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This 1948 effort is probably the last of their watchable films, though it’s a long way from their best.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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]

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.

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.

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

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

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 to Robinson's personal credit - though probably to the film's commercial debit - that he doesn't emphasize the exploitation elements of the story. By current standards, the violence is relatively sparse and discreet, though there does come a moment when the blind and vulnerable Thurman - or at least, her body double - must strip down and stretch out in a bathtub as a mysterious figure hops around, silently (!) taking flash pictures. [6 Nov 1992, p.C]

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.

Bogdanovich is trying to do an interesting and commendable thing in dramatizing aesthetic passion; his failure is as noble as it is conspicuous.

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.

Director Caton-Jones has given the film a few moments of charm and gentleness, though the movie would be a lot more beguiling if it weren't so sure of itself. Its charm has the practiced, impersonal touch of the professional salesman.

Schumacher's work in The Lost Boys consists of turning undertones into overtones--of taking the latent, the implied and the mysterious, and turning them into the loud and the obvious. He takes a story and turns it into a bunch of scenes, each of which contains its own payoff and none of which seems to draw on what has come before. And in these days of concept films, a story is a terrible thing to waste. [31 Jul 1987, p.D]

A moderately competent formula film.

The film flies away in 50 directions, leaving only a vague, unctuous impression behind. [22 Jun 1990, p.C]

This 1975 film's inventiveness begins to flag about halfway through, but by then it's a relief.

Parts of it are colorful and imaginative, but the film flattens out toward the end.

Beeman and Tolkin drain every trace of real life friction from the story line, pumping it up instead with the standard Hughes synthetics: kids who are preternaturally smart, sophisticated and poised (Haim's best friend, played by Corey Feldman, has a swagger that suggests Robert Mitchum at his cockiest); adults who are monstrous, cretinous and ultimately pathetic. [07 July 1988, p.3C]

Director Ridley Scott's Black Rain belongs to the blunt instrument school of filmmaking. This cop thriller, set largely in Osaka, Japan, is so full of screeching tires, flashing neon and extravagant violence that it's almost physically painful to watch, yet that seems to be the effect the director had in mind. If you smack the audience around enough, you'll be respected for your power.

An idealized, dreamy fantasy of life in the business world-harmless as airplane reading, a bit dull on the big screen. [2 Mar 1990, Friday, p.C]

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.

It's the submarine barn and Richard Kiel's steel-toothed Jaws you remember from this one; the ostensible hero is just a fleshy blur.

True Stories is a great-looking and, with Byrne's score, great-sounding film, but it's marked by a flaw of sensibility, a too-great division between the one who is looking and the ones who are being seen. [31 Oct 1986, p.A]

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]

Well-meaning tripe from 1966, crossbreeding Swinging London and social consciousness as Sidney Poitier tries to educate some East End ghetto kids.

Berenger and Rogers look right and move right, but there is no spark behind the emotions they dutifully mime. Shading is something the director reserves for inanimate objects: He makes things come alive and turns people flat.

A movie that must spend most of its running time explaining its hopelessly complicated premises, which leaves very little room for anything much to happen. [22 Nov 1989, p.C1]

Adapted by Australian filmmaker Phillip Noyce ("Dead Calm") from Tom Clancy's best seller, "Patriot Games" is an uncomfortably angry, completely bald-faced fantasy about violence as an answer to middle-class, middle-age ennui. Sadder still, it isn't a very effective one. [5 June 1992, p.C2]

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.

In some ways this 1932 item is the definitive MGM film, in which the direction (Edmund Goulding), screenplay (William A. Drake), and cinematography (William Daniels) all seem deliberately pale, the better to set off the glitter of the stars; they’re like jewels mounted in a deliberately neutral display case.

Provocative but never challenging.

A few moments of sly inspiration are not enough to carry an entire feature; along with the tears, it leaves behind an aftertaste of phoniness. [16 March 1990, Friday, p.H]

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 material is disparate and wide ranging, and it is often difficult to follow Mr. Friedman and Mr. Nadler down all the side streets and back alleys of their investigation.

We're No Angels is a small, quiet film trapped inside a big, noisy one; no longer a tale of transcendence, its a sad lesson in the weight of Hollywood machinery. [15 Dec 1989, p.C]

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.

Once again, Schrader tries to elevate a set of pimply sexual hang-ups to the level of Wagnerian opera; if this 1985 film were any heavier, it would probably crash right through the screen.

Emerges as cutty, indistinct and confused, full of shots that don't match and spatial conceptions that would look flat even on TV. The more Branagh strains to appear “cinematic,'' the more he looks like a man of the theater. [23 Aug 1991, Friday, p.B]

Bland but harmless.

The B-17 was a machine designed to accomplish a specific task, and so is Memphis Belle. The mission of this movie is to provoke a strong but narrow range of emotions in the viewer. It may succeed, but its mechanical nature is never in doubt. [12 Oct 1990, p.C]

A decent example of that strange new genre that has arisen to serve the home rental audience-a soft-core porn film directed primarily toward women. [29 Apr 1988, p.L]

Mr. Brugge has perhaps succeeded in avoiding vulgar melodrama, but he has hit on something far worse -- a bloodless melodrama, with bottled water running in its veins.

You don't have to be a horror-movie scholar to know that nothing significant is going to happen in any movie with "2" in the title; the creature has to stay around long enough at least to complete a trilogy and fill out a nice boxed set of DVD's.

The details of this Twin Peaks are slight and repetitious, and their meanings are numbingly obvious. Behind small town America's facade of sweetness and light, there exist darkness and evil-news that is a day late and about $7.50 short. [28 Aug 1992]

This 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle.

It's also likely that audiences other than the very young will find the action too restricted and too repetitive. It's far too modest and leisurely a film for children who have been exposed to MTV. Still, there is a charm in Camp's relaxed, low-tech approach; his is a cottage industry that merits a degree of respect and support. [19 June 1987, p.G]

Part philosophical dialogue, part macho thriller, John Frankenheimer's The Fourth War never really finds its identity as a movie. [23 Mar 1990, p.O]

A sturdy, well-made piece that never quite overcomes its structural flaws.

Davis and Garcia are both fine, and Hoffman gives an entertaining performance that still smells a little much of acting. But it's in the supporting roles that Frears makes his taste and talent felt, guiding such performers as Kevin J. O'Connor, Tom Arnold and Cady Huffman to quick, quietly efficient characterizations. [02 Oct 1992, p.B]

There is little to dislike in The Mighty Quinn, but neither is there any compelling reason to see it. [17 Feb 1989, p.C]

As paranoid thrillers go, The Package manages to commit both of the genre's primary sins. It's at once nearly incomprehensible and totally predictable. [25 Aug 1989, p.A]

Jungle Fever may be a failure, but it is the kind of failure that engenders hope: It finds Lee refining the skills he already possesses and striking out in encouraging new directions. The next ''Spike Lee Joint''

McTiernan, regrettably, seems more interested in spectacle than suspense, and the attack sequences are filmed for splashy visual impact. And an apocalyptic finale that raises the antiwar message to the nuclear level is more than McTiernan's metaphor can bear. [12 June 1987, Friday, p.J]

It's too smoothly controlled to be funny, which is Big Business's problem as a whole. [10 Jun 1988, p.A]

Toy Soldiers is a movie that appeals at once to adolescent self-pity and adolescent anger-a film that takes feelings of rejection and inadequacy and transforms them into a violent revenge fantasy, directed against all those distant daddies. It's hardly the first teenpic to do so, but it's certainly one of the most thorough, the most methodical and, not coincidentally, the least fun.

Kuzui has imposed a heavily block-lettered feminist message on the movie, suggesting that Buffy discovers her empowerment as a woman by driving huge, phallic stakes through the hearts of her enemies. In this case, having it all means being feminine and bloodthirsty, too. [31 Jul 1992, p.B]

When Gosnell's script does wander into some emotionally complex territory--in the depths of the jungle, Max encounters an old army buddy from Vietnam (John Rhys-Davies)--Thompson does rouse himself momentarily to provide some sequences of unexpected sensitivity, but he quickly returns to his dull, professional indifference. [21 Nov 1986, p.L]

Elliott Gould as a conscience-stricken graduate student in a radical chic exercise that seemed hilariously dated even at the moment it came out (1970).

It's Mary Stuart Masterson, bringing a depth and tenacity to her role that nowhere appears in the screenplay, who leaves the lasting impression. She escapes the airiness of Hughes's vision to establish something like a human being. [22 Feb 1987]

She`s Having a Baby wants to be everyone`s story, but its hollowness makes it no one`s.

For a film meant to define a lighter and fresher image for Stallone, Oscar doesn't quite get the job done. [26 Apr 1991, p.B]

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

Fitfully entertaining molehill of a movie.

Keeps building to apocalyptic climaxes that never materialize. (Review of Original Release)

As a movie, Cry Freedom is little more than an uninspired remake of Attenborough's earlier success. Once again, against a background of exquisitely lit, lushly produced human suffering, a charismatic political figure is changed into a divine hero.

The stories are pretty good folk, though a little too coyly calculated. But the plantation stuff is beneath contempt. Better save this for nostalgia only—kids won't be missing anything if they never encounter this relic.

Moderately pretentious, though very well filmed, this was the sort of thing teenage boys throve on in the dark ages Before Spielberg.

Jewison's lack of interest in developing anything other than his rather debatable ideological point relegates the film to the realm of moderately competent TV drama.

Joffe is much more interested in issues than people, and the personal exchanges in his new film are almost completely unilluminating and uninvolving - they take the form of speeches, and they're blunt, histrionic and passionless. [20 Oct 1989, p.A]

If nothing else, Space Station 3-D is a film that agoraphobics and claustrophobics can agree on. Members of both groups should stay home.

A lot to look at, little to contemplate, and nothing to hum.

Greenaway's regard is certainly unblinking, though it's hard to see where the seriousness and compassion come in. The thematic oppositions are primitive and are not fleshed out by the characters, who remain flat and puppetlike. [6 Apr 1990, p.G2]

The film is fairly tolerable as these things go: Wilder takes time off from the steamrolling plot for improvised bits with some actor buddies (including Charles Grodin and Joseph Bologna), and the project as a whole is a lot less mawkish than we've come to expect from Wilder's directorial efforts. Still, it ain't exactly state of the art.

It's more sophisticated than the usual run of Disney product, but it lacks the inventiveness that could endow it with genuine charm.

Director Peter Weir struggles to create an atmosphere of mystical languor, dissolving his actors in blinding sunlight and filling his sound track with the faintly ominous rustles of nature. But the deenergized drama leads only to anticlimax, as Weir suggests much more than he shows and invites the audience to fill in the meanings.

It isn't hard to take, but Harry and the Hendersons seems a bit familiar.

It doesn't come off, despite a dazzling color design and imaginative sets, perhaps because Demy's extremely rarefied talent for fantasy needs to be anchored by a touch of the real.

Graham Greene's screenplay is centered on the pivotal moment when a child first discovers sin, but the boy's perspective is neglected in favor of facile suspense structures and a thuddingly conventional whodunit finale.

Gary Nelson's direction is very bad, the writing is weak, and the acting campy at best—but Peter Ellenshaw's production design strikes the right balance of vastness and seductive detail.

Director Tobe Hooper seriously overplays his hand, losing the shape of this 1985 film in a barrage of overblown special effects and screaming Dolby stereo.

A strangely mournful, lugubrious film, staggering under a sense of exhaustion that manages to stifle many of its own best laughs. [10 May 1991, p.C]

Huston simply films the plot of Malcolm Lowry's modern-day gothic novel, turning a fevered interior vision into a cold, distant, exterior one—a documentary on the death of a drunk. As the tortured consul, Albert Finney has moments of technical brilliance, but Huston's direction gives him no inner life. The most impressive artistic contribution is that of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, whose painfully sharp images suggest something of what the novel is about.

Memories of Me, directed by ex-Fonz Henry Winkler, is a "Long Day's Journey into Schmaltz," in which an already overripe father-son conflict is further sugared by large doses of show-biz sentimentality. [07 Oct 1988, p.A]

ROTLD II may be junk, but at least in the hands of director Ken Wiederhorn it's efficient, well-filmed junk. [18 Jan 1988, p.7C]

The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good

A mildly engaging addition to that curious sub-genre of American independent filmmaking, the whimsical comedy of Long Island alienation.

Though My Girl seeks to stir large, devastating emotions, Zieff seems afraid to touch on anything too difficult or unpleasant, lest it alienate his audience. The results are curiously gutless and unmoving, as Zieff finds himself stuck with a sentimentality without substance, a poetry without pain.

Despite a monotonously fashionable mise-en-scene, Lyne generates some genuine erotic tension between his two stars; you believe in their obsessive relationship, even as most of the action and staging registers as ridiculous.

By imitating the gestures and outlines of a vanished cinema, Berri can only provide a cold simulation. The surface is smooth and refined; the insides aren't there. [23 Dec 1987, p.A]

Vulgarity, of course, has its honored place in comedy, but in She-Devil such moments merely seem grim and desperate - substitutes for the real laughs the film has failed to discover.

This 1941 film, which Warren Beatty remade as Heaven Can Wait, is nothing special in itself—a fairly routine romantic comedy from the 40s, with Robert Montgomery having a hard time acting like a lowlife.

A toothless, pointless remake of King Vidor's searing, epic melodrama of 1937. [2 Feb 1990, p.G2]

All of the film`s female characters are shrill, manipulative and irrational-their only appeal is masochistic.

It's difficult to see, too, what exactly all of this has to do with the twilight of the '60s. With his frequent sentimental allusions to the end of an era, Robinson seems to be grasping for a profundity that his anecdotal reminiscences don't merit or really need. Marwood, the film implies, will leave this life behind and go on to great things, while Withnail will be mired in it forever, a forgotten Falstaff to Marwood's striding Prince Hal. Self- dramatization is one thing; self-Shakespearization is something else. [10 July 1987, p.C]

Represents something new under the sun: sincere camp.

Depardieu has so much life on screen, so much bounding energy and insistent physicality, that he almost brings it off.

Technically, "No Mercy" is a smooth, assured piece of work, with a sense of movement and color far superior to Pearce's previous outings. But it is in technique that American action movies have taken their last refuge. The commitment to character is gone, the effort to create credible, vivid situations has been forgotten. What remains is empty know-how, and it is difficult to see the difference between this kind of filmmaking and the impersonal style-for-hire that goes into a typical TV commercial.

As a film, "Consenting Adults" has little to distinguish itself from the other entries in the genre, apart from an entertainingly hammy performance from Spacey and the clever production design of Carol Spier, with its emphasis on bold color effects (the interior of the Otis house is painted an infernal red) and complicated architectural spaces. But this, of course, is the kind of filmmaking that defines success by its adherence to the norm, not in dangerous departures from it. [16 Oct 1992, p.C]

With its emphasis on global positioning devices, Jet Skis and computer-designed surfboards, Mr. Boston's film is very much concerned with the stuff and very little with the spirit of professional surfing as practiced today.

A curiosity of the first order.

If Zeffirelli's Hamlet does resemble an actual movie at several points, it's thanks almost entirely to the inventive and atmospheric lighting of veteran cinematographer David Watkin, whose somber, gray-green palette gives the film a dignity and substance it would otherwise lack. [18 Jan 1991]

Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.

Makes compelling viewing. But it is viewing of an eerily familiar kind, almost as if the real-life lawyers in the film had patterned themselves on television archetypes.

The cast packs enough sexual ambiguity to satisfy the most rabid Williams fan (not to mention a screenplay by Gore Vidal), but Mankiewicz leaves much of the innuendo unexplored—thankfully, perhaps.

The large number of video jokes in Amazon Women suggests a product principally designed with the home screen in mind, and perhaps it will look sharper there. [18 Sept 1987, p.E]

The elliptical narrative centers on the unspoken erotic attraction between Sakamoto and Bowie, and Oshima appears to be treating ideas of elegantly transmogrified, purified emotions, yet the context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima.

Penny Marshall, the sitcom actress ("Laverne and Shirley") turned filmmaker ("Big," "Awakenings"), manages to make even such elementary material seem labored and phony. The film, which was shot in and around Chicago last summer, is a major disappointment.

The director, Peter Berg ("Very Bad Things"), keeps the predictable story line on course without developing a truly compelling momentum in the action sequences or finding anything fresh in the interaction of the stock characters.

One hundred forty-nine minutes of pure, unadulterated culture.

Over the Top is pretty much like all of the other successful Stallone films, which probably means that it will be a success, too. In fact, it`s considerably better than the ragged, recycled Rocky IV, though it lacks the wild excesses that made Rambo and Cobra campily entertaining.

Almost an hour of self-indulgent psychedelics, it's nearly impossible to watch.

Assorted ladies, a few quick lines, and one good chase, making for a mediocre entry in the series.

An ungainly blend of Monty Python, The Goldbergs, and My Favorite Spy.

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

This 1945 picture is much more felicitous than Christmas Holiday, the bizarre film noir that followed, though not nearly as memorable.

Medicine Man is a sympathetic project that gets done in by an excessively aggressive screenplay - one that keeps manufacturing artificial conflicts and false climaxes where some more relaxed character work would have gracefully done the trick. [07 Feb 1992, p.3]