Dave Kehr

The film excels as a visual exercise, as a study in adolescent psychology, and even as astute political analysis (it's the dragon who holds the fiefdom together).

Patton's personality--conveyed with pointed theatrical flair by George C. Scott--is registered in rich tones of grandeur and megalomania, genius and petty sadism.

Clint Eastwood wisely chose a strong, simple thriller for his first film as a director (1971), and the project is remarkable in its self-effacing dedication to getting the craft right—to laying out the story, building the rhythm, putting the camera in the right place, and establishing small characters with a degree of conviction.

The film is long (142 minutes), claustrophobic, and intense, yet it works with elegance and rigor, like a philosophical problem stated and solved.

It's a highly professional piece of Hollywood sentimentalism.

Here is a rich tale of our times, very well told with an appropriate minimum of means.

Efficient and absorbing...In spite of Kaufman's frequent faults of taste and judgment, the film flies on the strength of its collective performances—which range from the merely excellent (Scott Glenn) to the sublime (Ed Harris).

Under Minnelli’s direction it becomes a fascinating study of a man destroyed by the 50s success ethic, left broke, alone, and slightly insane in the end.

This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing.

If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.

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 has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.

John Badham, a last-minute replacement on the project, impresses with his Spielberg-inflected direction of the young actors and his efficient management of competing plot levels. But much of the credit should go to Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, and Walon Green, whose screenplay deftly links the boy's sexual and moral maturation with a similar development on the part of the computer, thus accomplishing the thematic goal of “humanizing” technology that all the video-game movies—and video games themselves—have been striving for.

It's a good character for Dangerfield, one that veers him away from the “I don't get no respect” pathos that comes too easily to him, and enough attention is paid to the minimal plot to integrate Dangerfield's classically constructed one-liners into something like a dramatic situation. This is what they mean by “a good vehicle.”

This thriller draws its effectiveness less from the intelligence of the direction (by Terence Young) than from the unbridled sadism of the concept: Audrey Hepburn is a blind woman in unknowing possession of a doll stuffed with pure heroin. Alone in her New York apartment, she's terrorized by a gang of thugs that includes slobbering psycho Alan Arkin and smooth-talking Richard Crenna.

In these risk-averse times, it is a pleasure to see a film that fails by attempting too much. Frustrating and demanding as it may be, La Commune (Paris, 1871) is essential viewing for anyone interested in taking an exploratory step outside the Hollywood norms.

Very well edited by Laura C. Murray and set to an effective score by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, People Say I'm Crazy is a small film but an extremely affecting one.

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

It's easy to drift away from the story and become absorbed in Minnelli's impossibly delicate textures, but there is a little something here for everybody.

The extraordinary child actress Ana Torrent (Cria) made her debut here at the age of five. Much in the film is derivative, but Erice excels in precise evocations of childhood feelings.

It isn't easy when you're up against the likes of Reed, writer Graham Greene, and producer David O. Selznick, but Welles still manages to dominate this 1949 film, both as an actor and as a stylistic influence. What's missing is the Welles content.

A photographer for magazines like Vanity Fair and GQ, as well as a veteran director of commercials, Mr. Jones brings a trained eye to this, his first documentary. The low gray skies of Chicago prove once again to be a boon to photography, and the city has seldom looked better than it does here, in its chilly, minimalist beauty.

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.

Like his father, Mr. Brown has the magical ability to take his public on a two-hour vacation. It's the next best thing to being there, and you don't need to worry about sand in your beer.

Ultimately this is a film of rare and pleasing smoothness—Hollywood as it was meant to be.

Not first-rank Scorsese, but still impressive.

It's 88 minutes of solid, inventive music, filmed in a straightforward manner that neither deifies the performers nor encourages an illusory intimacy, but presents the musicians simply as people doing their job and enjoying it.

Rather than a feminist martyr, her film presents an artist with a rich body of work, one who still fascinates and continues to cast a wide influence.

Nimoy directs the comedy in a loose, relaxed, almost sketch-like manner, but when the film moves into its multiple-cliffhanger climax, he's still able to generate some genuine dash and tension. The only drawback is that the Enterprise gang is starting to look a little long in the tooth for such strenuous action.

One of the few remaining Hollywood filmmakers who can function at this level of pure cinema, Hill delivers here with a renewed force and assurance. After a string of tired films (including the exhausted "Another 48 HRS."), Hill seems revitalized. [25 Dec 1992, p.C]

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

Boomerang, a sleek, confident and very funny urban comedy that may not entirely overcome Murphy's more discomfiting tendencies, but at least manages to put them to good use. [01 Jul 1992]

Burton's direction rises to a Wagnerian hysteria (an impression backed by Danny Elfman`s roaring orchestral score) as the two mortal enemies fight it out on the brink of a zillion-foot drop. Burton achieves a genuine majesty at that moment-though he would need one or two more like it to make Batman a genuinely memorable film.

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.

Renegades steams along very nicely, with more than enough momentum to compensate for the callowness of its stars. [05 Jun 1989, p.3C]

Through its first two-thirds it is as perfect a myth of adolescence as any of the Disney films, documenting the childlike, nameless heroine's initiation into the adult mysteries of sex, death, and identity, and the impossibility of reconciling these forces with family strictures.

If Godard's use of sound is as inventive as it was in his Dolby "Detective" of 1985, that's reason alone to check it out. [08 Apr 1988, p.B]

It's a well written, well staged and well acted piece, though there is something musty in its aesthetic - that of the huge, bellowing method performance, plastered over a flimsy, one-set world. [02 Oct 1992, p.A]

Barron concentrates on keeping the action moving at a brisk clip, drawing on his music video experience to serve up an entertaining series of odd camera angles, gratuitous camera movements and complicated lighting schemes. The results are lively and funny enough to keep adults enthralled as well as kids.

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

Has everything but a personality. [15 July 1988, Friday, p.A]

It's a movie of a thousand pleasures - of glinting insights and sly twists. [19 Aug 1988]

A fascinating anomaly.

A finely performed, breezily directed, very funny comedy. [17 July 1996, p.33]

A good-hearted comedy of clashing cultures. The film finds great fun in coaxing out and mocking a range of regional differences, from mutually impenetrable accents to radical variants in dress codes, but miraculously never descends to broad, dismissive caricatures.

For De Niro, David Merrill represents a rare opportunity to play a leading man without tics or gimmicks, and it is a pleasure to set what a fine, transparent performer he can be after the high technique of Awakenings and GoodFellas.

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]

As played by the smooth-faced, cheerful Lou Diamond Phillips, there seems to be something almost supernatural about the young man of La Bamba. He's a chosen one, and his rise to the top will be swift and smooth. If only he could shake those nightmares about a crashing plane . . . . [24 July 1987, p.A]

This is filmmaking meant to engage the heart-and other visceral organs-more than the mind; its effects are simple, broad and directly put.

The film's real subject is the unacknowledged intensity of the father-daughter bond and the difficulty of separation, though Shyer, true to his name, shies away from the more painful implications of the material. [20 Dec 1991, p.B]

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

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

From his long experience in television, [Reiner] has learned how to create characters with just enough depth to hold together but not so much that they become too individualized, too stubbornly complex. [12 July 1989, Tempo, p.1]

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]

A handsome, entertaining though emotionally thin animated feature.

South Central treats its violent, often melodramatic storyline with a spareness and deliberation that lends the material an unexpected, quiet power. [18 Sep 1992, p.F]

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]

Issues are raised and dismissed with dizzying, dismaying speed.

It's a good film, sturdily and somberly made, but it never catches fire.

This special effects extravaganza from 1966 has proved surprisingly enduring, despite a technical quality crude by contemporary standards.

In a movie theater, at least, there are other people to hear you laugh, and the film of MST3K already seems a more communal, less onanistic experience.

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

Robin Hardy's 1973 cult horror film passed through several distributors, several versions, and several bankruptcies, picking up a powerful reputation along the way.

The loose, graceful script is by Preston Sturges (one of his last before he turned to directing), and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films. Mitchell Leisen, the director, serves the material very well with his slightly distanced, glowing style.

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.

The story, from a book by Daniel Mannix, was Disney's best material in a decade or two, the stuff of rending family melodrama on the order of Dumbo or Lady and the Tramp. Unfortunately, the execution is only adequate: the character work relies too much on celebrity voices (as was Disney's habit in the dark 60s) and the whole film has a sketchy, underpopulated feel that hardly represents Disney at the studio's baroque best.

A little windy and rhetorical for my taste, but still one of John Huston’s best efforts (1948), a melodrama of ethics that soundly represses the Maxwell Anderson play it was based on (the ending is actually a lift from To Have and Have Not).

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.

Postcards From the Edge is alive only when it's being as mean and vicious as its little heart can be, which is more than often enough. [12 Sep 1990, p.1]

Robert Stevenson directed, and it's one of Disney's more watchable live-action efforts.

It’s overlong, talky, and sometimes stolid, but these are all familiar Mankiewicz failings. He shines in his deft verbal wit and novelistic propensity for detail, backlit by a highly personal blend of romance and cynicism. An imperfect film, but its excesses are as suggestive as its subtleties.

A shapely film, considered and concise. And if its rhetorical slickness eventually covers up its emotional core, that slickness has a pleasure all its own. [21 August 1987]

With its modest, no-nonsense approach, Hamburger Hill seems, curiously, more like the first film in a cycle than a late entry. After the baroque extravagance of the Vietnam films that have come before it, the movie runs a good chance of being overlooked. But it's an intelligent, craftsmanlike job, with a power of its own; it merits recognition. [28 Aug 1987, p.AC]

Legions of Brando impersonators have turned his performance in this seminal 1954 motorcycle movie into self-parody, but it’s still a sleazy good time.

Though the broad outlines of the plot are the same - a disparate group of human survivors takes desperate refuge in a Pennsylvania farmhouse while waves of flesh-eating zombies roll up from the surrounding countryside - the characters have been deepened and the thematic emphasis shifted. [19 Oct 1990, p.C]

A very good movie (1946), and by far the best Raymond Chandler adaptation, but it isn’t one of Howard Hawks’s most refined efforts—it lacks his clarity of line, his balance, his sense of a free spirit at play within a carefully set structure.

The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.

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.

Miller's finely crafted, highly moving new film, seems meant as a new beginning, grounded in an entirely different kind of material and told in an entirely different manner than anything Miller has attempted before.

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.

The artificial plotting is all Christie’s, but the film eventually becomes Wilder’s—thanks to a trick ending that dovetails nicely with a characteristic revelation of compassion behind cruelty. His theatrical mise-en-scene—his proscenium framing—serves the material well, as does Charles Laughton’s bombastic portrayal of the defense attorney.

Deep Cover is a rousing entertainment but also a cunningly subversive piece of work, one that burrows from within genre conventions to defeat expectations and undermine smug certainties. It`s a movie that gets under your skin in a way that no amount of speech-making can.

Children will not quibble over the fine points, and The Aristocats remains a first-rate entertainment for little ones. Compared to Saturday- morning television, the animation seems truly magical, although even in very young minds it probably will not linger with the same weight as "Snow White" or "Pinocchio." [13 Apr 1987, p.C3]

Unaccountably, it works.

Sammy and Rosie is a writer's film, with all the pluses and minuses that go with that status. The language is marvelously clear and the structure exquisitely wrought; on the other hand, the film lacks the sense of discovery and spontaneity a more creative director might have brought to it.

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.

Much of the film`s charm resides in the fact that there is no reason for any of this to happen, except for the director`s sheer will that it be so.

No Way Out emerges, paradoxically, as a film that is better than it has to be and not as good as it ought to be, but there is skill here, as well as an admirable willingness to try something new.

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.

The Rookie is a generally enjoyable variation on some extremely familiar themes, filled out with the most spectacular action sequences Eastwood has ever filmed and a good dose of the dyspeptic humor that is becoming the hallmark of his late career as an actor. [07 Dec 1990, p.C]

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]

Sanitized it may well be, but agonizing nonetheless—it's a domestic squabble that somehow touches history.

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.

Given the complexity of attitudes and the ambiguous take on the family represented in such Spielberg films as “E.T.'' and “Poltergeist,'' the bland affirmations of Jurassic Park seem platitudinous and insincere. He's forcing it here, and it shows. [11 June 1993, Friday, p.A]

The polish and unpretentiousness of The Hidden are enough to suggest Don Siegel's original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and there are few compliments in horror films higher than that. [30 Oct 1987, p.41C]

It still had some juice a few years ago, when it was Hector Babenco's "Pixote," but "Salaam Bombay!" is a disturbingly professional, self-assured piece of work. [28 Oct 1988, p.A]

The film leaves a sense of entrapment and despair. Its characters are caught in a shrinking world that leaves no room for notions as grand as "good" and "evil," but only a sordid, creeping malignancy that levels everything in its path. [24 Apr 1987, p.AC]

Sidney Kingsley's Broadway hit, modeled a little too clearly on Greek tragedy, becomes a solid film d'art under William Wyler's supple, impersonal direction.

It's much to Schumacher's credit that Flatliners, for all of its crazy excess, does not turn into camp.

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]

There is something new here, and very fresh.

Hitchcock was still marking out his territory at this point, and the film is heavy and vague around the edges. But it remains a crucial insight into the development of one of the cinema’s greatest artists, and so, essential viewing.

George Cukor carefully avoids the obvious effects in telling this story of a husband (Charles Boyer) attempting to drive his wife (Ingrid Bergman) insane; instead, this 1944 film is one of the few psychological thrillers that is genuinely psychological, depending on subtle clues—a gesture, an intonation—to thought and character.

Although the film in no way measures up to the features made under Disney's personal supervision, it does contain some far more imaginative and adept animation than the last several post-Walt titles.

A smart, spectacular and rousing piece of work, one that strains against but can't quite escape the natural limitations imposed by a sequel. [4 July 1990, p.C1]

There is a great deal of value in Branagh's version, not least in his own lead performance as a soft, indefinite Henry who defines himself over the course of the play. [15 Dec 1989]

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.

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]

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

Siegel avoids the cliches of the butterflies-and-brotherhood school (cf All Quiet on the Western Front), opting instead for a study of the brutalizing power of sanctioned violence.

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.

Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it.

Jules Dassin wasn't a bad director before he went to Europe and caught a bad case of Art (He Who Must Die), and this 1947 prison picture, done in the gritty late-40s documentary style, is one of his best efforts.

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]

The picture hurtles along, smoothly if not plausibly, and saves some surprises for the last reel. The Predator, it seems, represents that part of the human spirit that responds with pleasure when violence breaks out, whether it is in Central America, the inner city, or the suburban multiplex playing Predator 2. [21 Nov 1990, p.3C]

For all of Schrader's capacity for spectacular self-laceration and spiritual agony, Light Sleeper finds him able for the first time to express a certain peacefulness, and the effect is delicate and discreet.

Though it never quite transcends its status as a simple concert film, Prince's Sign o' the Times gives far greater range to his talent than his widely successful movie debut, the 1984 Purple Rain. [20 Nov 1987, p.A]

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.

It's an admirable attempt, though a less than completely successful one. The film's disappointments lie not so much in Almodovar's controlled, respectful direction as in the strange gaps and displacements of his screenplay, which never seems to supply the scenes we most want to see. [20 Dec 1991]

A satire is only as good as its subject, and in the very funny I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Keenen Ivory Wayans has found a rich and relatively untapped one. The wit and openness of I'm Gonna Git You Sucka has more to contribute to race relations than the smug piety of "Mississippi Burning." As a positive image, a good, shared laugh is hard to beat. [14 Dec 1988, p.1]

Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing presents a pleasant, simplified, heavily emphatic version of a classic text. [21 May 1993, p.C]

Besson is an accomplished technician, and his choice of shots-with an emphasis on bizarre, low angles, darting camera movements and large, abstract color fields-is consistently entertaining if not particularly expressive. [3 Apr 1991, Tempo, p.3]

More action oriented than the other Dietrich-Sternberg films, this 1932 production is nevertheless one of the most elegantly styled.

With its sense of what can be accomplished on a small budget, The Craft suggests the classic B-horrors of the '40s particularly The Cat People and The Seventh Victim.

Glory has a genuine moral basis, and it makes all the difference in the world. [12 Jan 1990, p.A]

John Huston's 1972 restatement of his theme of perpetual loss is intelligently understated, though the recessive camera compositions put an unnecessary distance between the viewer and the characters.

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]

It's highly inventive, self-conscious camp, made in 1965, well before the genre wore itself out in superciliousness.

But if Brooks doesn't get the sting of reality he's looking for in Life Stinks, he does succeed with the film's fantasy elements-most memorably, a dance sequence set to Cole Porter's Easy to Love and performed by Warren and Brooks in a colorful used-clothing warehouse.

Russ Meyer's 1968 skin-flick is a hilarious, stylistically adroit compendium of middle-American preoccupations: breasts, fishing, anticommunism.

The gaudy Freudianism of this 1945 Hitchcock film, backed by a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí and an overexcited score by Miklós Rósza, can make it hard to take, but beneath the facile trappings there is an intriguing Hitchcockian study of role reversal, with doctors and patients, men and women, mothers and sons inverting their assigned relationships with compelling, subversive results.

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.

Where Nabokov was witty, Kubrick is sometimes merely snide, but fine performances (particularly from Peter Sellers, as the ominous Clare Quilty) cover most of the rough spots.

After Dark, My Sweet does capture Thompson's characteristic mood - a sort of lurid fatality, where moral questions have long since dropped out and there isn't much use struggling - but it doesn't have much of his distinctive, disruptive texture. The film is much too smooth for that, much too professional and much too carefully executed. [24 Aug 1990, p.H]

Though the characters played by Martin and Hawn - a lonely architect and the confidence woman who moves into his country home, claiming to be his wife after a one-night stand - don't have much inside them but sawdust, their surface reactions are entertaining and engaging enough to make Housesitter a winning romantic comedy. [12 June 1992, p.C]

A shrewd and powerful mix of commercial ingredients and ideological intent.

The late '40s world Coppola has put together for Tucker is an extremely stylized one: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography has the bright, hard, almost lacquered look of old Technicolor; Dean Tavoularis' sets, built with slanting floors and surfaces, create an imaginary, compacted space in which actors and objects seem to be thrusting out toward the camera; and the transitions between scenes, based on visual rhymes and elaborate wipes, effectively remove the movie from the orderly flow of normal film time. [12 Aug 1988]

Evil Dead 2 is, pardon the expression, consistently lively--a ghoulish splatter comedy that uses wildly excessive gore to provoke the kind of shock that lies between a laugh and a scream. [10 Apr 1987, Friday, p.M]

The funniest thing about this 1971 Ken Russell camp epic is probably the juxtaposition of its first-class production values (a good cast, great set design, marvelous photography) with Russell's no-class sexual fantasies—it's like a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos.

For much of its length the picture is brilliantly successful-light, surprising and, because it asks the audience to participate in its creation, unusually engaging.

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]

If Blind Date is soft and simple at its core, it is certainly the sharpest, funniest film Edwards has made since Victor/Victoria. After the sogginess of his last few features, all of his dazzling craft seems to have come back to him.

It's an open, closely observed and nicely detailed film that attains an authenticity beyond the standard social worker formulas. [5 June 1987, p.B]

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.

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 Last Boy Scout will win no year-end awards, but at least it delivers the goods-which is more that can be said for most of this year's holiday releases.

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.

One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution.

Though it's well directed, written and performed, Rain Main still slips irreversibly into the so-what category. [16 Dec 1988]

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.

Even when informed by Douglas' characteristic intensity, Spartacus has no real identity apart from "the common man"; at his side, the beautiful Jean Simmons is never anything more than Spartacus' chick - the proof that he's a manly man, as opposed to those mincing Roman aristocrats. Whatever Trumbo's progressive leanings, he was not past equating homosexuality with unspeakable evil and perversion.

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]

Smooth and smoky, The Fabulous Baker Boys is an impressive debut for Kloves; he's a filmmaker who will be heard from. [13 Oct 1989, p.A]

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]

It's an intimate psychological story laced with references to Hollywood movies.

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

A cleverly written thriller in which he and Jim Belushi portray corrupt police detectives whose actions unleash an unpredictable chain of sometimes dire, sometimes hilarious events. [8 Oct 1997, p.32]

It was the most assured film Coppola had made in a decade, full of casual wit and visual invention. And even though the split narrative doesn't quite cohere, Coppola wins an amazingly high proportion of his risky bets, including a finale that takes off into total abstraction.

The second film version (1964) of Ernest Hemingway's short story, directed by Don Siegel with far more energy than Robert Siodmak could muster for his overrated 1946 effort.

This 1958 film by Yasujiro Ozu (his first in color) is gentle, spare, and ultimately elusive, in a quietly satisfying way. [07 May 2009, p.28]

The director, Hal Ashby, has affected a restrained, understated style to match the subtlety and precision of Sellers's performance. No one seems to know what to do with the allegorical undertone of Jerzy Kosinski's script, but as a whole this 1979 film maintains a fine level of wit, sophistication, and insight.

Garris, filming mainly in a bobbing and weaving, hand-held camera style, keeps the scenes pared down to their functional essentials, wisely substituting speed for nuance. Sleepwalkers gets the job done. [13 Apr 1992, p.5C]

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.

Amos & Andrew, written and directed by E. Max Frye, relates the intersection of these two different destinies, in a style that ranges from roaring farce to biting satire. [05 Mar 1993, p.C2]

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.

Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric.

Norman Jewison's literal-mindedness actually helps squeeze some of the goo from the material.

Valmont is a superb piece of craftsmanship, impeccable in every detail from lighting to costuming, but as a work of art it remains tentative and blurred. [17 Nov 1989]

The sinister mise-en-scene is compromised only by a few overripe lines from screenwriter Steve Shagan, and Reynolds reveals himself as an actor of depth and complexity.

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]

Bob Hoskins gives a growly, charismatic performance as the kingpin brought low by phantom forces over the course of an Easter weekend, and there’s a political theme that asserts itself with nicely rising force.

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.

Contains some gaspingly funny moments. [29 July 1988, Friday, p.A]

Director Claire Denis has attempted a meditative mood piece on the intertwined themes of colonialism and forbidden love. It's difficult, in fact, to tell which is the metaphor for which. But while the movie's tone is impeccably muted, and though its horizontally composed images are striking, and its dramatic rhythms are subtle and sure, there is something gnawingly simplistic in the conception. [12 May 1989, p.A]

It lacks a certain grace in execution, but this SF/romantic comedy-thriller, directed by Nicholas Meyer from his own novel, is clever and well calculated.

The final shoot-out remains a classic study in mise-en-scene, as Mann transforms a jagged landscape into a highly charged psychological battleground.

The movie assumes its multiculturalism with grace and humor, moving between its various worlds with a delighted eye for distinguishing features and a rich sense of character. [14 Feb 1992, p.B7]

Coscarelli has captured the texture of a disjointed, half-remembered nightmare, full of figures and events that seem to have some symbolic value, but which have lost their precise meaning in the process of floating up from the subconscious.

Mann understands that mood is more important than plausibility in a thriller, and you could cut the mood here with a knife.

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]

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.

This 1927 silent feature won the first Academy Award for best picture, establishing a tradition of silliness that hasn’t been broken to this day, but there is some thrilling flying footage and impressively expensive spectacle.

Demme is satirical but never cruel, and sweet but never syrupy: this film marked the emergence of one of the most appealing directorial personalities of the New Hollywood.

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]

While liberally dosing the action with humor, Underwood is able to preserve an undertone of genuine menace and substantial suspense. His shooting style is clean and classical, distinguished by camera movements that emphasize the line of the action without becoming conspicuous in themselves.

A strong and subtle horror film.

There are moments of genuine charm and solid invention, but it's a film that doesn't believe enough in itself. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

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.

Using a style heavily indebted to music videos - lots of fast cutting, odd angles and gratuitous camera movements - Hopkins keeps the energy level up, though his manner is a bit too choppy to keep all of the diverse elements together. [11 Aug 1989, p.B]

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.

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.

An original and insinuating black comedy from Winnipeg, Canada, where something very strange seems to be going on. The pastiche is nearly perfect, played with an utter sincerity that makes it impossible to tell just where the jokes are coming from.

Altogether, an unusually honorable achievement in a form (the remake) where originality is a dirty word.

Blake Edwards's 1962 film is largely a formal study, a good excuse to explore some offbeat locations in San Francisco (including Candlestick Park at the climax). Nice work, but Edwards has done better.

The Coens have technique and they have taste; what they do not yet have is the ability to move beyond their handsome imagery to the human center of their material. [5 Oct 1990, Friday, p.C]

As long as Hughes is content to provide a simple, flexible format for Candy, Uncle Buck is very entertaining. Hughes seems to have relaxed his usual controlling, compulsively tidy style, taking full advantage of the improvisational talents of his star.

The looniest movie of the season and also one of the most engaging. [7 Nov 1988]

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

Stanley Donen's follow-up to Charade is not quite the tour de force the earlier film was, but even with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren standing in for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, it's a slick and satisfying entertainment.

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

A lively, well-made schlock thriller that will doubtlessly be forgotten in two weeks, but in the meantime should provide a few pleasant evenings for fans of the genre.

The integrity of his performance overcomes the formlessness of the narration, turning this loose study into something solid and affecting.

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]

It's one of the most consistently funny films in the “Road” series, though by this late point (1945) the manic unpredictability of the early films has settled slightly into formula.

Prince of Darkness is a real tour de force, and a welcome return.

Stylistically it’s one of Ozu’s purest, most elemental works: no camera movement, very little movement within the frames, and hardly any apparent narrative progression. Appreciating Ozu is a matter of temperament—for some, his films are unbearably dull; for others, they are works of a unique serenity and beauty.

Although Rafelson backs off a bit from the implications of his drama with a climax that substitutes surprise for suspense (and makes the film's serious plot problems rise abruptly to the surface), Black Widow remains a haunting artifact, a film that springs, rich and strange, from a personal night world. [6 Feb 1987, p.AC]

A fine, freewheeling musical.

If you can push past the flag-waving, this Warner Brothers effort from 1942 is a superior entry in a dubious genre, the musical biography. Michael Curtiz's direction is supple and intelligent, but what makes the movie is James Cagney's manic blur of a performance.

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]

In spite of its limitations as art, White Palace is never less than watchable, thanks largely to the resources of its two stars and the dense supporting cast Mandoki has assembled - a cast that includes fast, effective turns from Kathy Bates, Renee Taylor, Eileen Brennan, Jason Alexander and Steven Hill. Mandoki has come a long way from the almost comic mawkishness of his first )feature, "Gaby - A True Story," and though his sentimental streak is never exactly inconspicuous, he has learned to balance it with a well-timed wit. [19 Oct 1990, p.D2]

The sheer outrageousness of its attitude is enough to make Heathers a very welcome relief in a field dominated by sanctimonious and second-hand virtue. [31 March 1989]

Rudolph’s off-center characterizations and looping dramatic rhythms keep the tone complex and varied, and the film has a lovely choreographed quality that’s only slightly marred by some indifferent cinematography.

It is a shock and a pleasure to see an American film that doesn't wallow in complacency, but instead suggests—however fleetingly—that disappointment is also a part of life. Curtis is particularly impressive in the strength and maturity she brings to a role written as pure fantasy.

LaLoggia clearly loves his chosen medium: He has a passion for filmmaking-for ferreting out unusual angles, for planning elaborate camera movements, for designing elaborate special effects-that sometimes leads him way over the top. Yet it's the extravagance of his gestures that gives Lady in White its character and imaginative force. [22 Apr 1988, p.A]

There are still some astonishingly tender moments, including looks exchanged between Swayze and Moore that seem magically divorced from this summer of exploding jets, severed limbs and homicidal children. [13 July 1990, Friday, p.D]

Consistency isn't the chief virtue of Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle, but at its best this ragged satire is bracingly, caustically funny. [27 Mar 1987, p.F-C]

"Dragon" has an appeal beyond the buffs. Beyond the particulars of biography, it's a timeless human story told with heart and verve.

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.

The picture is a rip-roaring melodrama, a tale of lust, murder and revenge, rendered in broad strokes and vibrant hues that make Hollywood Technicolor look almost timid. [12 Apr 1991, p.C]

There is no visible conviction in Penn's staging, but he does have a good time prowling through the cluttered decor (which comes complete with menacing stuffed animals and secret passageways), while coaxing some gaudily entertaining, highly theatrical ham-work from Rubes and McDowell. [06 Feb 1987, p.N]

Like a series pilot, Stand and Deliver has a strong character, a promising situation and not a lot of story-it seems to be setting things up for future episodes.

The surprising emotional amplitude of Stakeout, its generosity and conviction, proves that it's still possible to achieve something of value within the tight formulas of commercial filmmaking. It needn't all be "Cobra" and "Lethal Weapon"--not as long as directors like John Badham can find room to move. [5 Aug 1987, p.C3]

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]

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]

This film contains one of Hitchcock's most famous set pieces—an assassination in the rain—but otherwise remains a second-rate effort, as immensely enjoyable as it is.

The new film is a fast, funny, engagingly unpretentious 88 minutes that, moving between martial-arts dustups and random satirical jibes, achieves a more successful mix of action and humor than the first. There is plenty for adults here as well as children.

Director Robert Zemeckis confronts the oedipal heart of the time-travel genre with this zestfully tasteless 1985 tale.

A hesitant, conservative approach that yields great elegance and a rhythm that carries the viewer along. Yet the film is haunted by a sense of opportunities not taken, of an artist deliberately reining in his artistry. [9 Dec 1987, p.2]

Ousmane Sembene’s 1977 Senegalese film was attacked for daring to depict life in precolonial Africa as something less than paradisiacal.

This is fun but, compared with Kurosawa’s other 60s efforts, relatively slight.

The beauty of Mr. Naderi's filmmaking lies in his combination of acute social observation (with the subway population providing its habitual cross section of New York classes and cultures) and pure, almost mathematical formalism.

It's the best kind of homemade movie, created with skill, modesty and a pleasing awareness of what works in an ultra-low-budget format that tends to be performance and storytelling, rather than visual expressiveness and technical polish.

It is a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work, an original and distinctive expression by a gifted young Philadelphia-based filmmaker who here confirms the talent he displayed in his 2001 film, "A Chronicle of Corpses."

The material makes no demands on the talents of James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, but they enter gamely into the farcical tone set by director George Marshall.

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.

The thematics are rather cloying, but the mood—profoundly relaxed, bemused—eventually conquers.

Using a fly-on-the-wall camera technique that suggests the cinéma vérité documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, Ms. Cammisa and Mr. Fruchtman vividly capture the dynamic of tenderness and rage that characterizes Sister Helen's relationship with the 21 men who live under her roof.