Dave Kehr

Ynpretentious and efficient, Curtis Hanson`s suspense drama The Hand That Rocks the Cradle suggests, after the monstrous ego trips of this past holiday season, that some sense of professionalism continues to reside in Hollywood.

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 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.

Mingling a frank trashiness with unexpected ambition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow emerges as one of the more commanding horror movies of recent months.

The time-shift plot may be a bit too complicated for a children's film, and the sheer amount of talk necessary to explain it may cause some restlessness. But when the film shifts into the action mode in its second half --the flying saucer returns to aid in David's rescue--it becomes quite bright and lively.

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.

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

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]

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

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.

One of the smartest and funniest films of the year, at least for those who care about its subject. Every regular filmgoer should. Through the story of a talented but naive film school graduate (Kevin Bacon`s Nick Chapman) who suddenly becomes the hottest property in Hollywood, Guest assembles a deadly accurate sociology of the contemporary film industry-and its accuracy makes The Big Picture both hilarious and terrifying.

A talky, plodding film that seems likely to bore children and adults in equal measure. [11 Dec 1992, p.B2]

Rosen goes out of his way to avoid Disney's stylized movements and character touches, but ends by making his characters all look, sound, and act alike—conditions hardly hospitable to dramatic involvement. The animation may be naturalistic, but the fallacy is as pathetic as ever.

Seems held back by vestiges of an old-fashioned format that Mr. Gatlif has long since outgrown.

The Fourth Protocol was a great in-flight read, and it will probably be a great in-flight movie, too-though in a theater it looks a little pale and overextended. [28 Aug 1987, p.FC]

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.

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

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.

The action is clotted and murky, and Coppola obviously hasn't bothered to clarify it for the members of his cast, who wander through the film with expressions of winsome, honest befuddlement.

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.

Director Robert Zemeckis displays such dazzling cinematic know-how that it's genuinely depressing when this film falls off into the usual self-ridicule.

Bogdanovich, a cold director drawn to sentimental material, doesn’t have the warmth to bring it off, and his wobbly control of tone keeps leading the physical comedy into pain and humiliation, the romance into prurience, and the wit into the realm of the sour and shrill.

For those in search of something different, Wendigo is a genuinely bone-chilling tale.

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.

Bob Fosse clearly believes he has tumbled across something of deep significance in the story of murdered Playmate Dorothy Stratten, but when push comes to shove, he has no idea what it is—and the film quickly degenerates into a hypocritically artsy interpretation of the standard slasher formula.

This eroticized vampire tale resulted from the last significant surge of creative energy at Britain's Hammer Films, which thereafter descended into abject self-parody.

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.

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.

The satire is finally too thin and familiar (and not just from The Player - most of the observations here have been staples of the Hollywood comedy since the early '30s) to support the movie's pervasive tone of sourness and disgust. [21 Aug 1992, p.J]

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.

This 1965 hit is the sort of film that reeks of emotional Muzak, the most elemental responses programmed right into the scenario. Every audience sniffle and tear has been taken into account.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is the happiest surprise of this summer so far, a children's film from Walt Disney Productions that effortlessly renews the best tradition of that studio's live-action features.

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

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

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

Figgis (Stormy Monday), here making his American debut, doesn't possess the tight control necessary to really charge up the material. The result is a stylish but oddly slack film, which still features a couple of fine performances (from Andy Garcia and Laurie Metcalf) and a few effectively perverse moments.

Nothing convinces, but the film is fitfully appealing.

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.

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

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.

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]

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

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.

Schroeder brings a decidedly un-Hollywood approach to the material, which is both the source of the film's greatest aesthetic strength (it is unusually attentive to questions of character and form) and most crippling commercial weakness. American audiences, used to nonstop action, will probably grow impatient with Schroeder's slow, nuanced approach.

Basically, the film is a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.

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. 

Cry-Baby doesn`t have a subject, but only a format-a rickety framework erected to suport a few broad gags and a few indifferently filmed production numbers.

Despite a few flashes of talent in the 40s, Edward Dmytryk had descended to hack status by the time he filmed this 1954 version of Herman Wouk's novel, and his ham-fisted direction does little to alleviate the obviousness of the drama and the thinness of the characterizations.

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

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.

Sidney Lumet's wired-up, hysterical direction overwhelms the minor pleasures of Ira Levin's play.

A film that chugs along as listlessly as the ship itself, discovering moments of value in a sea of ennui.

Dismal Stanley Kramer morality play about a middle-class couple facing the prospect of their daughter's marriage to a black man (Sidney Poitier). A disaster on all counts.

Jaws is looking a bit long in the tooth these days. As the venerable series (b. 1975) sets off on its fourth paddle around the pool, Jaws the Revenge is definitely dragging its tail fins. Give a poor fish a break.

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]

This 1950 Hitchcock film came between Under Capricorn and Strangers on a Train, and if it isn’t the equal of those two sterling achievements, it’s still an intriguing experiment.

As a screenplay Tequila Sunrise is a very impressive piece of work. But as a movie, it's knotty and confused. [2 Dec 1988, p.B]

Professionalism is both Nothing in Common's greatest strength and its greatest limitation. It's a very finely crafted piece, a product of hard work and careful consideration, yet nothing breaks through the craft--there's no personal drive to it.

Hogan is an appealing performer, and Kozlowski has a brisk charm as his love interest. Indeed, the film functions far better as romantic comedy than it does as social satire, building an entertaining sexual suspense as an unacknowledged attraction builds between the two leads.

There's little doubt that Jacob's Ladder is a failure-it's a messy, unsatisfying and often overreaching film-yet it fails in interesting, ambitious ways. It's a must-see disaster. [2 Nov 1990, p.C]

Prelude to a Kiss is an exquisite film that will long stand on its own. [10 Jul 1992, p.C]

By and large this is an admirably sober, responsible piece of work, one that covers much of the same ground as Dances With Wolves but with far less self-importance and New Age babbling. Kleiser's use of the Alaskan landscapes is stirring without dipping into postcard prettiness, and the animal action (which includes a guest appearance by Bart of The Bear) is smooth and expressive.

What the film resembles more than anything else is one of the miniature human-interest profiles that the networks have taken to inserting between the events in their Olympic coverage.

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.

Graham Greene's impeccably plotted spy story serves Preminger's personal aims with a minimum of modification, as the film develops themes of loneliness, debilitation, and obsessive security—all centered on the tragic survival of moral feeling in a world drained by reason.

The enigma not only remains, but, cloaked in Schrader`s mysticism, seems more impenetrable than ever.

Desperately, depressingly in thrall to the Farrelly formula.

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

Kaufman wants to be bold in his depiction of lovemaking, but he keeps copping out, cutting away from the deed to such time-worn metaphors as booming bongo drums, pots that boil over on stove tops and African dancers gyrating wildly. Were Kaufman's frankness ever to equal the "passion and honesty" he praises in Miller's work, the film would merit at least an NC-21, if not 41. [05 Oct 1990, p.I]

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]

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

Hysteria, however skillfully maintained, should never be mistaken for art-a caution that applies equally to Stone and his subject. [01 Mar 1991]

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

Paul Newman in his first ascendancy, as the favorite antihero of the Kennedy era. Martin Ritt directed, putting a little too much dust in the dust bowl for my taste.

Hal Ashby's 1972 cult film may be simpleminded, but it's fairly inoffensive, at least until Ashby lingers over the concentration-camp serial number tattooed on Gordon's arm. Some things are beyond the reach of whimsy.

This 1958 feature is thin stuff, seriously intended but not involving.

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.

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.

Though the gags make great use of embarrassment, they stop short of actively humiliating the characters, a gesture that these days counts as something fine and noble. [10 March 1989, p.E]

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

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 usual Spielberg rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood and the beauty of dreams seems wholly factitious in this crass context, which even includes a commercial--in the form of a rock video--for the tie-in merchandise.

This is fundamentally a recruiting film whose intent is to interest other African-Americans in exploring their spiritual traditions. It displays no real curiosity about its subject except to insist that it is the true path to enlightenment. Mr. Harris's stylistic gifts are quite evident; his reportorial instincts are a bit more muffled.

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

Somehow Christie’s talent shines through this muck, and Laurence Harvey gets to do an entertaining George Sanders impression as the leader of the revels.

Despite Leigh's and Lang's perfectly decent performances, the film never gathers a shred of credibility - perhaps on purpose, for that is what transforms its bleak vision into cruel comedy, making it possible to laugh comfortably at the characters. [11 May 1990, p.C]

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

Surly, incoherent, and provocatively mysterious.

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

Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.

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.

If the movie has a weakness, it's an over-reliance on Bond-style car chases and mass action scenes, which take away from the much richer and more original character comedy. But Mankiewicz's basic instincts seem admirable. He knows that a movie begins with people, and that`s a very good start.

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

Works because it's able to draw so many side issues into its central conflict, spreading its concerns culture-wide. [11 Dec 1992]

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

There is some exquisite Technicolor photography by Leon Shamroy, but director Henry King never moves the action beyond respectful superficiality.

Benjamin's direction consists largely of giving Richard Benjamin inflections to most of the line readings; for the rest, he blandly shoots the screenplay, leaving large gaps in the narration unfilled and significant contradictions in the characters unexplained.

The Abyss is at its best during such moments of reverie-when the abstract metaphors and the unique physicality of the deep sea setting come together to produce powerful, unvoiced meanings. The film does have its beckoning depths; what it needs is a more polished surface. [9 Aug 1989, Tempo, p.1]

Major League is a movie that knows what it's up to. It skims along agreeable surfaces, expertly balancing its comedy with melodrama and fulfilling expectations right on schedule. As a movie, it`s a superior industrial product.

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

Though the episodes are monumentally predictable, there's something in the dedication of the cast that maintains a minimal interest. [11 Mar 1988, p.L]

Kindergarten Cop never feels mercenary in the manner of, say, "Look Who's Talking Too" or "Three Men and a Little Lady." It is, instead, an extremely amiable, good-hearted film, unashamed of its desire to please and quite entertaining for it. [21 Dec 1990, p.B]

The director, Ted Kotcheff, does a good job with the violence and suspense, working well with the wide-screen format, and he seems fully aware of the dark, subversive implications of the material, even if the screenplay doesn't allow him to resolve them successfully.

Photographed in murky yellows and browns by John Alonzo, this 1979 film is sluggish and vague, trivializing its subject in a wash of unearned sentimentality.

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.

A moment or two between Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley recall the verbal skills of Levinson's Diner; the rest of the film is bloatedly “visual”: blinding backlighting, grandiose slow motion, overstudied montage.

A well above average sketch film from 1977, highlighted by a lengthy, hilariously deadpan kung fu parody, A Fistful of Yen.

Believe it or not, The Manhattan Project, a thriller about a high school boy who builds an atomic bomb, is a solid, credible action film. It also contains, during this summer of violent films, a welcome pacifistic message.

Winkler's New York is a crowded, bustling place, with construction work on practically ever street corner, yet it has none of the lurid, hothouse atmosphere of a Martin Scorsese film. The cinematography, by the invaluable Tak Fujimoto, is airy and cool, graced by floating camera movements that follow the characters without dogging or confining them. [23 Oct 1992, p.ACN]

Taylor Hackford directed, with occasional sharp, manic bursts, but the film is sluggish and sloppy overall, burdened with a dismally redundant plot line.

Godawful allegorical western from the height of the cold war (1958), with lanky Yankee Gregory Peck caught between two superpower ranchers who are fighting it out over water rights. Directed by William Wyler in that glassy, studied way of his that gives craftsmanship a bad name.

The movie has no sense of temptation and no real taste for revolt-it's a good little film that knows its place. Van Peebles' direction has a by-the-numbers competence but no discernible personality.

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

I can't remember another film that took so little care with the details of ambience: the cruddy sets and flat, underworked sound track drain any sense of life from the project, to the point where it looks like the cheapest kind of TV—canned theater.

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

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]

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.

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.

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.

There is no place for depth or nuance in this slickly engineered complacency machine, which roars along at a single tone and pace, neatly dispelling every troubling intimation with a Mary Tyler Moore one-liner and solving all its conflicts with tricks of rhetoric.

The film has less to do with politics, women's or otherwise, than with a very conventional notion of the redemptive power of mother love. Which would be all right if director Hal Ashby had managed to mount it effectively—he hasn't though, and the results are dramatically incoherent.

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.

There's something delicious in the way Kaplan, who has been working carefully and naturalistically, suddenly gives in to the excess the screenplay has been inviting all along--the shudder of pleasure that comes with a loss of control. Making a movie isn't only a question of doing everything right, but also of knowing when to make a meaningful misstep. [17 Apr 1987, p.A]

Hot Shots! is very sharp and very funny, and if it doesn't have the aggressive, anarchic edge of "Airplane!" (attitude seems to be the specialty of David Zucker, who has just released "The Naked Gun 2 1/2 "), it is consistently, almost exhaustingly hilarious.

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

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

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

Well-meaning rot from 1963.

Tired, poorly paced Bond from 1967, with Sean Connery displaying his discontent. Donald Pleasence's Blofeld has a memorably creepy softness, but that's about it.

Shot in astonishingly elaborate long takes, this is the kind of film that finds the most brilliant poetry in the slightest movement of the camera—a paradigm of cinematic expression.

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.

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

Engaging entertainment, but far from Minnelli’s peak.

A mildly amusing Japanese appropriation of 1950's American detective movies.

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.

Reducing one of the most compelling cultural icons of the century to a comic book character, this $22 million project makes a passable kiddie show, and not much else.

Working from a forgotten Victorian thriller by Bram Stoker ("Dracula"), director Ken Russell has fashioned his most watchable film in a long while, largely by staying out of the way of the material.

Hughes invokes the classical unities of time, place, and plot symmetry, yet he trashes his careful structure every time he needs a gag - destroying the integrity of his characters, shattering the plausibility of his situations.

Biloxi Blues also wants to be a confessional, coming-of-age memoir, but again, it works better around the edges than it does in its central conception.

Crass but imponderable, bizarrely mixing glowingly back-lit sentimentality with stomach-churning violence and juvenile sex jokes.

It remains an engaging, energetic film. [22 Jan 1987, p.9B]

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.

It's quite funny at times, and the expert direction is never less than vigorous, though in retrospect it seems to have marked the end of Meyer's most appealing period—his comic spirit was more expansive before he learned the word camp.

It's all very zany. Occasionally it is even madcap. You would almost be tempted to smile at times, albeit weakly, if it weren't for Mr. Miike's habit of pounding home every joke with exaggerated reaction shots.

George Sidney directed, a long way from the slam-bang vulgarity of his most entertaining work.

Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) was brought in to salvage the runaway production (with the cost adjusted for inflation, it may still qualify for the title of Most Expensive Movie Ever Made); though his name stands alone on the credits, a lot of other hands contributed to the general muddle.

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.

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.

In its brash, enthusiastic tackiness, From Beyond is a show that would do any carnival proud. [27 Oct 1986, p.5C]

Richard Marquand's dull, literal direction takes all the edge off this variant on the “Will he kiss her or kill her?” formula.

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.

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

The film is generous and often gentle. With Bill Murray, very likable as a head counselor who gruffly plays Wallace Beery to an updated, angst-ridden Jackie Cooper (Chris Makepeace).

It's a perfectly competent film, but the title quantity is the one thing this dry and earnest movie hasn't got.

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.

Apted's tedious, literal-minded approach doesn't come close to solving the problems of a knotty, best-seller plot—the characters are reduced to telling each other what happened. Some action-movie slam-bang would have been more satisfying, if ultimately no more coherent.

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

Mr. Gilbert wants a movie with both a golden glow and a corrosive center, something he has not quite achieved here.

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.

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]

At her best—and even in a hand-me-down project like Point Break—Bigelow is a uniquely talented, uniquely powerful filmmaker. Where the male action directors are still playing with toys-with dolls and models and matte shots-Bigelow has tapped into something primal and strong. She is a sensualist of genius in this most sensual of mediums.

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.

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd star as two white boys who love nuns, blacks, and the blues. But for all of the dramatic focus on poverty, the subject of John Landis's mise-en-scene is money—making it, spending it, blowing it away. The humor is predicated on underplaying in overscaled situations, which is sporadically funny in a Keaton-esque way but soon sputters out through sheer, uninspired repetition.

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 camera work is so self-conscious and so intrusive that it consistently overrides our interest in the characters and their individual dramas.

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]

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

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."

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.

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

In The Living Daylights, Dalton establishes his claim to the role; in the films that will follow, he'll have the chance to dig deeper.

As soft and tentative as her dramatic surroundings may be, Tomei remains an amazingly clear and vivid presence; she has the star's ability to establish her own reality at the center of something hopelessly false. She'll be remembered; Untamed Heart almost certainly won't be. [12 Feb 1993, p.B]

Much of the movie's charm, in fact, is derived from its sense of its own instant disposability. Raimi has created the cinematic equivalent of fast food-efficient, unassuming and seriously regressive. It may not be much good for you in the end, but consuming it is loads of fun. [19 Feb 1993, Friday, p.C]

The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford.

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.

It's meant to be open, heartwarming and real, but beneath its often attractively performed surface, the clichés are grinding as heavily as in any ''Rambo'' picture [21 Oct 1988]

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

You get the plot, all right, but that's all you get - no body, no texture, no rhythm, no shading.

Fully up to, as well as virtually indistinguishable from, its predecessors… The guarantee of Indiana Jones is that the pace never varies and the tone never changes; when you've had enough, you can feel free to leave. [24 May 1989, Tempo, p.1]

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.

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

The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances.

Grant seems stymied in this claustrophobic, essentially misogynistic material, and director Irving Reis isn’t the man to pull him out.

Even Neil Simon fans (and they do exist, believe it or not) will probably be bummed out by this stunningly unfunny 1976 parody of detective films.

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

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]

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.

No classic, but neither is it a joke.

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).

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

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.

Makavejev's ripping political/scatological wit isn't much in evidence, and the long middle section—involving Roberts's efforts to close down independent bottler Bill Kerr—is soggy and too familiar, but the film lives in a hundred different eccentric details and niceties of execution.

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.

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

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

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.

One of the queasier Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

This weightless melodrama exhibits the kind of condescending “fairness” (nobody's right, nobody's wrong—these things just happen, that's all) that is often taken for artistic maturity, but just as frequently reflects a reluctance to engage the material on a deep emotional level.

Pretty silly. The Hot Spot certainly is, and it's occasionally quite entertaining for it, though the picture never really achieves a dimension beyond that of a Playboy Party Joke. [26 Oct 1990, Friday, p.I]

Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience--a kind of Kenneth Anger version of "Star Wars." (Review of Original Release)

Class Action occupies itself with long passages of family melodrama, most of it as familiar as the courtroom drama but far less entertaining. [15 Mar 1991]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Child's Play would probably be sickening if it weren't so relentlessly stupid.

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

Crimes of the Heart feels random, vague and sluggish. The incidents don't build upon one another, but merely collapse into an undifferentiated heap. [12 Dec 1986, p.A]

The best visual design in the world doesn't mean a thing unless there's someone around with a rudimentary sense of story. Jeff Bridges, playing the human hero sucked into the machine, has to carry the film's entire burden of charm and appeal; he seems to have freaked out under the strain, turning in some surpassingly weird, alienating work.

Has a great deal going for it. [16 October 1998, p. 57]

Perkins tries to imitate Hitchcock's visual style, but most of the film is made without concern for style of any kind, unless it's the bludgeoning nonstyle of Friday the 13th.

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 is enough of an act of optimism just to raise the specter of heroic nobility, something that Virgil Bliss accomplishes with subtlety and poignancy.

This tiny film is heartfelt, well made and worthy of attention.

There are few marquees that could contain the title The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: the Metal Years, but Penelope Spheeris' documentary on the heavy metal bands of rock 'n' roll turns out to be much more graceful than its name. [05 Aug 1988, p.B]

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).

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.

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

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

It is billed as a "restored version," though the sound is still fuzzy and the image only occasionally rises to the level of murk.

If Licence to Kill has one of Bond`s best heavies, it also has one of his best heroines in Carey Lowell, a strapping brunet who plays an ex-Army pilot reluctantly enrolled on Bond`s side. Lowell`s line readings may be only adequate, but she moves with the grace and vigor an action movie needs.

Burt Reynolds showed signs of becoming a very personal filmmaker with this police thriller, his third outing as a director. It has the wistful faith in innocence and the extreme moral outrage of Gator coupled with the subversive infantilism of The End; what Reynolds lacks in technique (which is plenty) is nearly compensated for by the almost embarrassing intensity of his feelings. The context is extremely violent, which makes the intimate moments—between Reynolds and the girl and Reynolds and his buddies—stand out in agonizingly stark relief.

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

But where Dante's cynicism ultimately carried the day over Spielberg's piousness in Gremlins, Explorers remains a hopelessly schizophrenic film, obscenely eager to compromise its own originality.

There is hardly any point in discussing the direction of a picture like this, in which almost every shot has been predetermined by the requirements of the special effects, yet director Richard Marquand fluffs the two or three real opportunities he has, rendering the long-delayed character climaxes with a chilly indifference.

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.

Though we are largely spared Leonard Nimoy's stentorian presence as a performer, we must endure his miscalculations as a director: the dialogue scenes are often hilariously turgid; the action scenes—when Nimoy can be bothered to descend from his podium and film them—are zanily maladroit.

Fine work carved from minimal materials.

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

Carpenter's direction is slow, dark, and stately; he seems to be aiming for an enveloping, novelistic kind of effect, but all he gets is heaviness.

As shrewd and accomplished as the movie is, there's still something uncomfortably manipulative about it... It doesn't explore its primal theme as much as it exploits it, tapping into the automatic, nearly universal power of guilt and regret. [21 Apr 1989, Friday, p.A]

What's left is a curiously disconnected illustration of American racism, which nevertheless fails to realize the power and irony inherent in its pop-Marxist analysis.

An enjoyable, noisy romp.

Much like the "new age" music of its Philip Glass score, "Powaqqatsi" occupies an uncomfortable space somewhere between the aggressively avant-garde and the lullingly banal. [13 May 1988, p.J]

In some ways this 1978 Cheech and Chong effort, their first feature, is the perfect doper movie—no one's straight enough to remember the punch lines. Director Lou Adler (the record producer) finds a few chuckles, but mostly it's amateur night.

Well, it really is a stinker, a compendium of The Deer Hunter's weaknesses (of plotting, narration, dialogue, and character) with few of its lyrical strengths.

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

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

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]

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.

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.

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

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

A serious disappointment, recommended only for inveterate Disney fans and very young people.

What sinks this one is the utter lack of the childhood insight and sympathy that really give the Disney films their staying power.

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.

Once again, violence (more than 30 on-screen deaths) makes a poor substitute for suspense, while sloppy, rear projection work drains most of the excitement from the climax.

Wind is a vigorous and colorful piece of filmmaking that never quite shakes free of an embarrassingly trite, formulaic screenplay. [11 Sep 1992, p.H]

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.

The film's frequent longeurs, compulsive over-explicitness and unshakably morose hero seem like so many insistently ''literary'' qualities, ostentatiously laid over a cute, cartoonish vision that suggests not so much Anne Tyler as the affectionate quirkiness of ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show.'' [6 Jan 1989, Friday, 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]

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.

Ms. Moreau, still an imperious presence at age 75, makes no effort to look or sound like Duras -- this is one sacred monster stepping in for another.

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]

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).

Moving away from the gag-based comedy of his films with Chong, Marin has discovered a richer humor of character and circumstance, and although old habits surface long enough to permit unfortunate lapses in continuity and consistency, he proves surprisingly adept at his new mode. [24 Aug 1987, p.C5]

Might have been better off as a documentary, with less of Mr. Eyre's uninspired dramatics and more of his sense of observation and outrage.

The whole thing is rather forced and antiseptically cheerful.

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]

The film, directed by Nancy Savoca (True Love) from a screenplay by Bob Comfort, is one of those sensitive dramas that defines its sensitivity by how brutally it can hammer the audience into feeling pity for its characters. [04 Oct 1991, p.L]

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.

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.

A sober, focused piece that asks Americans to take another look at what is going on in their own backyard.

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.

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]

Directed with great skill and intelligence by Joseph Ruben, Return to Paradise, is a rare thing among today's movies a drama of conscience. [14 Aug1 998, Pg.51]

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

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]

Directed by the Finnish-born Renny Harlin, it's a deft, fluid piece that rushes from one surrealist epiphany to the next, and along the way displays a craft and imagination far above the norms for the genre.

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.

Not bad, but far from a classic.

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.

Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).

Though the idea of the therapy appears to be the demystification of sex, the filming, with its voyeuristic detachment and curious prudishness (no genitals are shown), serves only to perpetuate the familiar fetishistic mechanisms.

It's a particularly great pleasure to encounter Quick Change, a wonderfully loose and graceful character comedy. [13 Jul 990, p.C]

Sarah Jessica Parker makes an unflatteringly tense appearances as a nurse who knows more than she's telling, and David Morse dredges up his hulking soulfulness as a maverick FBI agent. But no one involved in "Extreme Measures" is displaying a commitment beyond showing up for work. [27 Sept 1996, p.42]

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.

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.

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

Though overexplicit and underdeveloped, Clive Barker`s Hellraiser is a horror film with enough personality and ambition to rise slightly above the run of the genre.

The world of Wall Street is that of a lush soap opera-"Dynasty" with a moral. It gets the barn burning, all right, but it has no impact. [11 Dec 1987, p.A]

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.

Insistently grotesque, relentlessly misanthropic and spectacularly tasteless, Death Becomes Her isn't a film designed to win the hearts of the mass moviegoing public. But it is diabolically inventive and very, very funny.

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.

A comedy with a curious tone of depressive whimsy. It manages, somehow, to be both aggressively cute and oppressively sordid. [11 Dec 1987, p.G]

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]

Slack and unconvincing throughout with the exception of Ringwald, who remains natural and appealing as the thin world of the film collapses around her.

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]

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.

Alive represents one of Hollywood's increasingly rare attempts to create a religious drama, but that novelty aside, the film is stiff, overlong and frequently risible. [15 Jan 1993, p.F]

The film's confused moral sense is summed up by the contrast between the Aiello and Spader characters. Though both are professional killers, Aiello is somehow coded as "good" because he takes time to make pasta, and Spader is "bad" because he plays mildly kinky games with his mistress (imposing South African model Charlize Theron). [27 Sept 1996, p.43]

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.

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.

A curiosity of the first order.

Guy Hamilton's direction lacks enthusiasm and pace, while even the art direction—long the Bond films' real secret weapon—seems to have fallen to a shrunken budget. Not much fun.

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.