Dave Kehr

Unaccountably, it works.

Consistently offbeat and entertaining; at such moments, it is also quite moving.

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

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is anything but light, though it very nearly is unbearable.

You feel for the first time that Scorsese is trying to distance himself from his characters—that he finds them grotesque. The uncenteredness of the film is irritating, though it's irritating in an ambitious, risk-taking way. You'd better see for yourself.

Deep down inside, a very good film.

Way too flabby at 168 minutes, but once this 1963 feature gets going it's good, solid stuff, directed with an unusual lack of rhetoric by John Sturges.

A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film.

It remains a documentary at heart, full of astonishing glimpses of human resiliency that have nothing to do with artfulness and everything to do with patience, persistence and sympathy.

It has wit, originality, color, warmth and formal intelligence. It tempers its escapist dash with a touch of darkness, and for all of its playfulness, never departs from a fundamental seriousness.... Something Wild is superbly unpredictable. [7 Nov 1986]

Polished, well-structured film.

The mise-en-scene tends toward a painterly abstraction, as Hitchcock employs powerful masses, blank colors, and studiously unreal, spatially distorted settings. Theme and technique meet on the highest level of film art.

One of the funniest awful movies ever made.

Ludicrous and inept, this low-budget 1985 splatter film directed by former Chicagoan Stuart Gordon tries to compensate for its complete failure to establish even a sliver of credibility by inflating the usual quotient of giggly camp humor and squishy gore effects...It's this kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.

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

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.

Fine work carved from minimal materials.

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.

Miller's work has been compared to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, but where the Leone films are about amorality, the Mad Max movies are purely and simply amoral—some of the most determinedly formalist filmmaking this side of Michael Snow.

A film of fragile and esoteric pleasures, The Man in the Moon is not a movie that can be recommended to the general public and should probably even be protected from it. But for those who can respond to its tiny formal beauties, it is something to treasure. [04 Oct 1991, p.C]

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.

Walsh may not have been directly responsible for the structure (the second half is a remake of an earlier Warners melodrama, Bordertown), but his personal response to the material puts it across.

Robert Aldrich dissects the underlying ideas with just enough craft and thoughtfulness to make the implications of this gritty 1966 war drama unsettling in not entirely constructive ways.

Hitchcock liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with Rear Window.

Dull it is not, but Wong's trademark sense of romantic melancholy fails to jell amid all the excess, and the film turns frankly silly once the mute starts imagining himself in love with a can of sardines. [21 Jan 1998, Pg.37]

In "Crossing Delancey," veteran independent filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver returns to the Jewish milieu of her early hit "Hester Street." This time, however, she turns ethnic drama into romantic comedy. [16 Sep 1988, p.A]

Successfully avoids the grandiose mythmaking that has been the bane of the baseball movie from ''Pride of the Yankees'' to ''The Natural.'' Rather than a vapid national epic, it is a warm, droll, deftly cracked romantic comedy. [15 June 1988]

The definitive road movie (1958), the well from which all the genre’s subsequent blessings flow.