Dave Kehr

Should soon join Mr. Greenaway's last few efforts in obscurity.

The material is simple and irresistible, and Sydney Pollack stages it well (though without transcending the essential superficiality of his talent).

The musical sequences are good enough that they make you wish Ross had been willing to leave the surface realism behind and break out into the high stylization and exuberance of the genre's classic days. Despite the hesitations, it's miles above "Flashdance" in technique and intelligence.

Each of these stories is terribly sad and terribly moving in its own right. Yet the film that Mr. Corcuera has spun around them only increases the viewer's sense of helplessness and passivity. No solutions are suggested, no actions are proposed, no reflection is invited. The misery of these people becomes just another voyeuristic spectacle, to be consumed and forgotten.

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.

As the temptingly pure and fragile Englishwoman, Grace Kelly was closer to Ford’s sympathy and understanding, but Gardner walks off with the movie and the man.

The film is still an entertaining and invigorating thriller, with a structure and some curious sexual overtones that suggest Howard Hawks's "A Girl in Every Port."

The humor is relentlessly cruel, smug, and disconnected from any sense of how human beings might behave in similar situations. But though she's hardly able to dominate the project, director Martha Coolidge does manage to insert some of the sweetly eccentric characterization that distinguished her Valley Girl: one of the heroes, played by Gabe Jarret, is actually believable and sympathetic as a socially insecure adolescent, and a few of the minor figures are brought to life with deft, simple strokes. Though ultimately obnoxious, the film lingers in the mind for a few moments of genuine charm.

Without exaggerating their lovability or condescending to their foolishness, Mr. Siegel makes vivid, likable people out of his three protagonists as they affect one another and are affected in turn.

Ms. Slesin sums up the complicated feelings of Secret Lives with one well-chosen phrase: what these people are suffering from, she says, is the "trauma of gratitude." Her film is as complex and moving as that formulation.

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

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

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]

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

The screenplay (by Lewis John Carlino, of The Great Santini) collapses into musty moralizing in the second half, and director John Frankenheimer throws in the towel.

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.

It's a tired idea, and it produces an episodic, unstrung film. [6 March 1998, p.49]

One of Romero's most complex and challenging creations. The film shifts effortlessly between playfulness and outrage, between a distanced irony and an awful, immediate horror.

As he did in "The Cup," Mr. Norbu provides a lot of ingratiating comic moments. His Buddhism is the laughing, playful kind, and does not ask the Western audience - for whom the film is clearly intended - to deal with any uncomfortably complex religious issues.

The punky energy of the earlier films has given way to a self-conscious striving for significance, obscuring Miller's considerable kinetic talents in favor of a lumpy didacticism.

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]

The characters have a fullness and vitality rare in American films of that period, but Towne has so much trouble establishing information visually that the film emerges as choppy, confused, ill-proportioned.

There is something new here, and very fresh.