Dave Kehr

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.

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]

Tati hasn’t quite solved the structural problem he posed for himself, but if the film isn’t wholly satisfying, it’s still a very witty and suggestive work from the modern cinema’s only answer to Chaplin and Keaton.

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]

FernGully is surprisingly courageous in its politics and adventurous in its stylistic choices.

Even and assured, Colors may not descend to the sloppy, indulgent depths of ''Easy Rider'' and ''The Last Movie,'' but neither does it rise to the delirious, dangerous heights of those films. [15 Apr 1988]

A surprisingly well-made action movie with a definite directorial personality. [03 Sep 1986, p.7C]

There is enough intelligence and craftsmanship in the execution of Hoosiers to make it seem, if not exactly fresh, at least respectably entertaining. [27 Feb 1987, Friday, p.A]

For Keitel, this is the Scorsese film that Scorsese never gave him, in which he gets to elbow Robert De Niro away from center stage and take the best part for himself. He seizes the opportunity: Bad Lieutenant immediately becomes one of the defining roles of his career. [22 Jan 1993, Friday, p.C]

A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.

Made in 1937 by a relatively young and innocent Alfred Hitchcock, this British feature tends to be overshadowed by The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, but actually it’s only the uncharismatic casting that holds it back from being one of the most entertaining of Hitchcock’s English films.

Seen in the context of Roman Polanski's career it becomes something rich and strange, shaded into terror by the naturalistic absurdism that is the basis of Polanski's style.

Good, grungy fun.

Sex, lies, and videotape discovers a distinctive, laconic rhythm right from the start, thanks to Soderbergh's taste for holding his shots just a bit longer than conventional, slick editing technique would allow. [11 Aug 1989, Friday, p.A]

The picture is amazingly compact (70 minutes), and the swift pacing helps temper the goo. The film is no classic, but it's a good example of its type.

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]

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.

For all its overfamiliarity, this is a good play, easily Simon's best, and Matthau and Lemmon inhabit it with grace and style.

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

Edwards's attention to detail pays off; while this isn't his best film, it is far superior to most problem dramas of the early 60s.

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

The charm of the film (and it does have an effective degree) ultimately seems as synthetic as Jack's. Perhaps the real pickup artist of the title is Toback himself, hiding behind a winning smile as he attempts, for the first time in his career, to hustle the audience.

Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.

Blaze is a high-spirited, though slightly botched follow-up to Shelton's appealing Bull Durham of 1988, drawing on the same combination of enthusiastic heterosexuality and cozy male bonding. Politics here takes the place of baseball in the earlier film: another all-American team sport, with its veterans and rookies, official rules and unspoken scams, high idealism and casual corruption. [13 Dec 1989, p.1C]

Something large and abstract is stirring here, though the film's ultimate implications are chilling

Roundly condemned as a glorification of drug dealing, it's actually an acrid film noir on a classic theme—the hood who must make one last score before he quits the business.

It's a funny, frequently rousing film, with a warmly appealing acting partnership at its center-between basketball hustlers Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson.

This is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance.