Dave Kehr

A dark, brutal, exhilaratingly violent film, blending comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun.

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

As LaMotta, Robert De Niro gives a blank, soulless performance; there's so little of depth or urgency coming from him that he's impossible to despise, or forgive, in any but the most superficial way.

The blend of slapstick and pathos is seamless, although the cynicism of the final scene is still surprising. Chaplin’s later films are quirkier and more personal, but this is quintessential Charlie, and unmissable.

An exhilarating update of "Flash Gordon," very much in the same half-jokey, half-earnest mood, but backed by special effects that, for once, really work and are intelligently integrated with the story.

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.

With Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton, in hog heaven as Long John Silver.

Raoul Walsh’s heroes had a knack for going too far, but none went further than James Cagney in this roaring 1949 gangster piece.

Martin Scorsese transforms a debilitating convention of 80s comedy--absurd underreaction to increasingly bizarre and threatening situations--into a rich, wincingly funny metaphysical farce. A lonely computer programmer is lured from the workday security of midtown Manhattan to an expressionistic late-night SoHo by the vague promise of casual sex with a mysterious blond.

A dubious proposition, but in Sturges’s hands a charming one, filled out by his unparalleled sense of eccentric character.

Made for pennies in Pittsburgh. Its premise—the unburied dead arise and eat the living—is a powerful combination of the fantastic and the dumbly literal. Over its short, furious course, the picture violates so many strong taboos—cannibalism, incest, necrophilia—that it leaves audiences giddy and hysterical.

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.

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.

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]

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]

Ernest Schoedsack's sequel to his monster hit of 1933, rushed out the same year. The slapdash production shows in a wavering tone and a paucity of special effects. With Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack; the animation, what there is of it, is by the legendary Willis O'Brien.

Dean's alienation is perfectly expressed through Ray's vertiginous mise-en-scene: the suburban LA setting becomes a land of decaying Formica and gothic split-levels. An unmissable film, made with a delirious compassion.

It's very funny, and at times exhilaratingly so. But when real life tragedy is used as a basis for movie comedy, some consideration of responsibility has to enter the equation.

Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen.

Beineix stays too close to the themes and emotions of the formula cult film—a morbid romanticism, a lingering cuteness—for this 1981 picture to take off into art, but any film with this much stylistic assurance is impossible to fully resist.

There's a lot of allegorical baggage on board, but the film's virtues lie in its relative simplicity.

The film in fact consists of a series of dull speeches spun on simple themes; Bergman barely tries to make the material function dramatically.

It may not be a transcendent masterpiece of the Disney canon, but The Little Mermaid is still very heartening: It suggests the Disney magic isn't lost after all.

It's a highly professional piece of Hollywood sentimentalism.

Perhaps Strangers on a Train still hasn't yielded all its secrets.

No matter how you look at it, "The Name of the Rose" is a film best summarized by lists. It's a collection of elements, some well chosen and some less so, that never comes together into a coherent whole. For everything the movie has--which is, by and large, the best that money can buy--it doesn't have a director, someone who can take all the pieces and put them together into a vision. [24 Oct 1986, p.AC]

Graham Greene's screenplay is centered on the pivotal moment when a child first discovers sin, but the boy's perspective is neglected in favor of facile suspense structures and a thuddingly conventional whodunit finale.

Clayton lacks the Jamesian temper, and his film is finally more indecisive than ambiguous. Too much Freud and too little thought.