Dave Kehr

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.

An awesomely, stiflingly professional piece of work, with a fleet, superficial visual style, perfectly placed climaxes, and a screenplay (by Douglas Day Stewart) that doesn't waste a single character or situation - everything is functional, and nothing but functional.

The film is one of Donen’s most formally perfect works—innovative, involving, and, in case there’s any doubt, finally optimistic.

Taking off from the format of a typical teenage sex comedy, Brickman deepens the characters and tightens the situations, filming them in a dark, dreamlike style full of sinuous camera movements and surrealistic insinuations. Brickman found a tone I hadn't encountered previously - one of haunting, lyrical satire.

Corman's filmmaking runs on unchanneled energy and apocalyptic emotions; his is an art without craft.

This 1970 feature was the directorial debut of Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home, Being There), and for a first effort it isn't that bad.

Like any good work of popular culture, Rob Reiner's film of Stephen King's best-selling book Misery functions on more than one level.

A Cry in the Dark has been conceived as a director's film-a movie that works through imagery and narrative rhythm, through visual and aural resonance. But when Streep enters a movie (and it isn't something she can help by now) it immediately becomes an actor's film, a movie about performance-her accent, her gestures, her walk. Meryl Streep upstages Ayers Rock. [11 Nov 1988, p.A]

Ryder is particularly impressive in her destructive passion. [27 Nov 1996, p.39]

A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.

It looks like a potboiler: only a few of Peckinpah's themes are present, and they're mostly left undeveloped. But Peckinpah can still stage a fight scene better than anyone, and the film establishes its own crazy rhythm as it runs off wildly through most of the southwest.

Not a great film, but a remarkable one, with Hitchcock at his most “innovative,” shooting through plate-glass floors and generally one-upping the expressionist cliches of the period.

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

Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks.

A good summer movie, directed with great verve and imagination and filled with innovative, eye-popping effects. Cameron never relinquishes his grip on the audience, smoothly segueing from action sequence to action sequence and topping himself each time. [3 July 1991, Tempo, p.1]

It's a wholly passive performance, and one that touches not at all on Pryor's special gifts. This man desperately needs a new agent.

A strange and funny film, smart, complex and difficult to shake.

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]

The screenplay tends to constrain rather than liberate Hitchcock's thematic thrust, but there is much of technical value in his geometric survey of the scene and the elaborate strategies employed to transfer audience sympathy among the four main characters.

Droll, pungent, and superbly told, Peggy Sue Got Married is more than a return to form for Francis Coppola. It's a film that reveals a new depth, a new sensitivity and a new sureness of technique for the 47-year-old director, a film that marks Coppola's entry into a rich, mature period.

Though much of Naked Lunch is flip, hip and hilariously funny, it never wanders far from a profoundly melancholic undertone - Cronenberg's unshakable sense of loneliness, isolation and anxiety. [10 Jan 1992]

Mario Van Peebles, of course, inhabits a very different world from that of his father: a world that his father, in some small way, helped to create. It is his awareness of this paradox, of the progressive import of his father's film and of the repressive import of his father's personality, that informs this modest but interesting work.

A very minor contribution to the great corpus of Iranian cinema that has emerged in the last 20 years.

Wilder's strategy is to play a bubbly romantic comedy in a mise-en-scene of destruction and despair. As usual, it's more clever than meaningful, but this 1948 film is one of his most satisfactory in wit and pace.

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

Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

It may be questionable history (though the film is anything but jingoistic), but it is superb filmmaking, personal and vigorous.

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.