Dave Kehr

Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease. This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.

A programmer that once upon a time would have played on the bottom half of double bills, Anacondas has no pretensions and gets its little job done effectively, providing some small-scale laughs and chills for the late summer season.

Directed by Ron Howard and produced by George Lucas, the film seems to mark the final paroxysm of a genre-the big-budget fantasy-adventure-that dominated American filmmaking for a decade but has recently been weakened by changing tastes, altered economics and sheer exhaustion. It's less a movie than a collection of morbid symptoms: a labored, arrhythmic narrative; a pathetic dependency on recycled themes and borrowed images; a sour, self-mocking humor that suggests the end is near. [20 May 1988, p.2]

Though Ernest barely exists apart from his trademark catch phrase (Kno- whut-I-mean?) and his propensity for waggling his nose in wide-angle lenses, Varney's energetic mugging is good for a few mild laughs.

A New York movie with a California soul—superficially gritty but soft in the center, in a silly est sort of way.

Medicine Man is a sympathetic project that gets done in by an excessively aggressive screenplay - one that keeps manufacturing artificial conflicts and false climaxes where some more relaxed character work would have gracefully done the trick. [07 Feb 1992, p.3]

Regrettably, director Jeff Kanew has no use for touches like these. His film is broad, flat and superficial. The first half is devoted to quick, sketch-like scenes in which Douglas and Lancaster encounter various bizarre phenomena of '80s life (punks, frozen yogurt, aerobic exercise) and look surprised. The second half wanders into the standard "go for it" territory, as the two stars decide to take another crack at the train they failed to rob 30 years ago. [3 Oct 1986, p.D]

Plodding, literal and completely lacking in the erotic tension that seems to be essential to the genre. Not much passes between Matt Dillon and Sean Young that could be defined as frisson - there is no ambiguity, no risk, no charge. [26 Apr 1991, p.C2]

With style to spare, Hype Williams' gangsta rap epic Belly applies a wide range of MTV techniques slow motion, strobe effects, seemingly more fish-eye shots than there are fish in the sea to tell a confusing, fundamentally undramatic story about two holdup men from Queens (played by rappers DMX and Nas) who graduate to dealing a new kind of superpowered heroin. [06 Nov 1998, p.56]

Focusing on one family in a small northern California town that seems to have survived an initial attack, Littman quickly loses interest in the logic of the concept (the naturalistic presentation of an unnatural event) and begins pushing the sentimental pornography of death.

It is billed as a "restored version," though the sound is still fuzzy and the image only occasionally rises to the level of murk.

Much like the "new age" music of its Philip Glass score, "Powaqqatsi" occupies an uncomfortable space somewhere between the aggressively avant-garde and the lullingly banal. [13 May 1988, p.J]

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]

Steven Soderbergh's Kafka is a surprisingly cold, gray and flavorless follow-up to "sex, lies and videotape." [7 Feb. 1992]

Hal Ashby's 1972 cult film may be simpleminded, but it's fairly inoffensive, at least until Ashby lingers over the concentration-camp serial number tattooed on Gordon's arm. Some things are beyond the reach of whimsy.

Despite a few high-spirited sequences, School Daze succumbs to preachiness and choppiness. It's a movie with too much to say and not enough style to say it with. [12 Feb 1988, p.0]

Part Oscar bid, part vanity project and all pretty silly. Only Nick Nolte, as Tom Wingo, the psychologically blocked Southern high school teacher who is Conroy's protagonist, transcends the circumstances to deliver a performance of skill and commanding sympathy.

Ultimately feels like a clinical study without wider resonance.

Doesn't add much to the coming-out genre, as it has been established in countless Sundance competition films and made-for-television movies.

The direction occasionally rises to the level of marginal competence, but for most of the film it is hard to tell who is chasing who or why.

Figgis (Stormy Monday), here making his American debut, doesn't possess the tight control necessary to really charge up the material. The result is a stylish but oddly slack film, which still features a couple of fine performances (from Andy Garcia and Laurie Metcalf) and a few effectively perverse moments.

George Sidney directed, a long way from the slam-bang vulgarity of his most entertaining work.

An attempt to blend the war epic and the caper film that doesn't quite come off.

The film handles difficult issues of wartime morality, with clear parallels to the American experience in Vietnam, but Beresford's direction is so placid, distanced, and methodical that the film never admits any doubt or debate; it tends to seal up the issues rather than liberate them.

There's still enough hardcore Williams-when he's sitting by himself in his studio-to make Good Morning, Vietnam worthwhile, but the alarm bells are sounding. Heres another comic who wants to play Hamlet.

This aggressively "sincere" movie is without a single authentically lived moment a sense exaggerated by Brian Tufano's overcomposed cinematography, which imitates the glossy hollowness of fashion photographs. [24Oct1997 Pg 51]

The satire is finally too thin and familiar (and not just from The Player - most of the observations here have been staples of the Hollywood comedy since the early '30s) to support the movie's pervasive tone of sourness and disgust. [21 Aug 1992, p.J]

Between the Predators' dripping their glow-in-the-dark green blood and the Aliens' getting their rubber cement mucous all over everything, this is certainly a very sticky movie, though not, ultimately, a very frightening or commanding one.

Boys N the Hood wants to be “The Learning Tree'' and “Super Fly'' at once, an ambition that doesn't seem quite honest. [12 July 1991]

The lead performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.

Playing a pair of antagonistic one-term Presidents thrown together in a flimsy chase plot, Jack Lemmon and James Garner trade insults that aren't exactly in Lincoln's league.

Finds a few chuckles.

It's to Belushi's credit that, under such severely strained circumstances, he manages to come off as both likable and plausible - qualities that the venal Mr. Destiny otherwise lacks. [12 Oct 1990, p.B]

What is genuinely chilling about Final Analysis lies not in the foolish plotting but in the completely callous attitude of the director and writer, who are interested in their characters only as compositional elements or, at best, game pieces to be pushed around a board. It`s a cold, distant work of no compassion and, finally, no importance.

Robert Bolt's boring historical drama functions best as an anthology of British acting styles, circa 1966.

Chain Reaction never develops a sense of mounting energy. The action sequences are thinly conceived and too spread out by dramatic filler (mainly involving the crises of conscience of Morgan Freeman, as the project's enigmatic chief fund-raiser) to create much momentum. [2 Aug 1996, p.45]

A minor addition to the tiny genre of feminist science fiction films

The main problem here is less a lack of competence than a lack of conviction. No one involved in the film believes for a second in the story that's being told, and so there is no real sense of danger, no suspense, and no warmth in the romantic interludes. Shanghai Surprise must have been meant to be a light-hearted romp, but even a romp requires a touch of substance. [31 Aug 1986, p.8]

With her shaved head and staring eyes, Aman actually looks as if she had been stripped entirely of her sexuality, like a Holocaust victim. What does seem certain is that a bootleg print of "Yentl" is still making its way through Iran's filmmaking underground, leaving a wide trail of influence behind it.

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]

The animation is imaginatively conceived, but stiffly executed. A Fantasia designed for heads, the film does no more justice to the music than Disney's artists did. But Disney had the excuse of innocence, whereas this shrewdly conceived commercial project does not.

Given the current political climate, it's hard to see how any film about Christopher Columbus could make everybody happy, and indeed, Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise seems unlikely to leave too many ticket buyers smiling.

Brighton Beah, curiously, still doesn`t work on film, perhaps because movies have no use for stagecraft, no matter how brilliant it may be. Once there`s no practical reason to keep the action restricted to a single set --movies, of course, can go anywhere--Simon`s strategic skills come to seem superfluous, if not an actual liability.

Though the idea of the therapy appears to be the demystification of sex, the filming, with its voyeuristic detachment and curious prudishness (no genitals are shown), serves only to perpetuate the familiar fetishistic mechanisms.

What sinks this one is the utter lack of the childhood insight and sympathy that really give the Disney films their staying power.

A character comedy requires some notion of respect and integrity. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels has none. [14 Dec 1988, p.1]

This 1958 feature is thin stuff, seriously intended but not involving.

The film is actually fairly well made, with a brisk tempo pace, a professional look and enough competently staged action.

The film gets in trouble, as most contemporary comedies do, when it runs out of disassociated gags and casts about desperately for a story to tell; here, the lonely guy premise is dropped completely for a series of more-or-less conventional romantic misunderstandings centered on a dull Judith Ivey.

The film unfolds as a tired, thoroughly conventional police procedural that might as well be titled "CSI: Roma."

Despite Leigh's and Lang's perfectly decent performances, the film never gathers a shred of credibility - perhaps on purpose, for that is what transforms its bleak vision into cruel comedy, making it possible to laugh comfortably at the characters. [11 May 1990, p.C]

The gags in A Fine Mess aren't particularly inspired (there's a lot of eye-gouging and groin-kicking), but Edwards' stylistic assurance often has enabled him to do a lot more with a lot less. He's off his game in this one --lingering a fraction of a second too long over gags that don't deserve it, cutting up the action into two or three shots when a single image would have expressed the idea more clearly--and the results are pretty grim. [8 Aug 1986, p.AC]

In a misguided attempt to break up the monotonous flow of talking heads, the filmmakers have inserted oddly chosen clips from newsreels and public-domain features, meant to illustrate abstract concepts (like eavesdropping or government) while generating some low-level laughs.

Though the costumes are beautifully designed, the chateau locations carefully chosen and the dialogue full of curling locutions, something cloddish and naive still comes through in Frears' direction, and not only because he can seldom get his shots to match. [13 Jan 1989, Friday, p.A]

Makavejev's ripping political/scatological wit isn't much in evidence, and the long middle section—involving Roberts's efforts to close down independent bottler Bill Kerr—is soggy and too familiar, but the film lives in a hundred different eccentric details and niceties of execution.

Cry-Baby doesn`t have a subject, but only a format-a rickety framework erected to suport a few broad gags and a few indifferently filmed production numbers.

Allen`s over-reliance on narration to create his emotional effects reminds us that his art is primarily, if not exclusively, a verbal one. He has never engaged the visual side of movies, never grasped film`s capacity to express emotions and ideas in images. Allen is a teller, not a shower.

Unfortunately, Harold Becker's direction seems deliberately designed to pull the material toward the bland and conventional—toward easy payoffs and Rocky-style inspirational melodrama.

Ralph Bakshi gathered retired animators from all over the world to work on his 1972 film, misleadingly billed as the first feature-length cartoon for adults. The results, inevitably, were disappointing; Bakshi just didn't have the money to make it right.

No classic, but neither is it a joke.

The movie has no sense of temptation and no real taste for revolt-it's a good little film that knows its place. Van Peebles' direction has a by-the-numbers competence but no discernible personality.

What's missing most conspicuously from Great Balls of Fire is an interest in the historical and cultural context that made Lewis' career possible - that moment when a dying rural tradition intersected with a booming urban economy to create a whole new kind of music and with it, a whole new America. McBride treats the '50s as a joke - a montage of "Leave It to Beaver" complacency and H-bomb panic. The truth is more complex than that, and a better story. [30 June 1989, p.A]

A loose but often amusing collection of gags.

Though there is an artist's instinct behind Cadillac Man-an instinct that does surface here and there, with a particularly piercing line of dialogue or powerful gesture-it`s quickly blotted out by the Williams formula.

As the envious, destructive best friends of the central couple, Jim Belushi and (especially) Elizabeth Perkins have the actor's know-how to fill in the gaps, but as the lovers, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are hopelessly pallid.

The real love story here may be between Todd the exhibitionist and Mr. Verow the voyeur, peeping in on his character's activities. They look to have a long and happy future together.

Alive represents one of Hollywood's increasingly rare attempts to create a religious drama, but that novelty aside, the film is stiff, overlong and frequently risible. [15 Jan 1993, p.F]

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

Billy Wilder's 1954 version of the Samuel Taylor staple was a perfect vehicle for Audrey Hepburn, though the cut is too tight for her costars, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. [Review of re-release]

However poorly the material has aged, Cimino has not come close to tapping its potential. [05 Oct 1990, p.D]

Forgettable nostalgia trip from 1974, shot in 16-millimeter by the enterprising Stephen Verona and Martin Davidson. Somehow, this little exploitationer ended up launching the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler, Perry King, and Susan Blakely.

Perkins tries to imitate Hitchcock's visual style, but most of the film is made without concern for style of any kind, unless it's the bludgeoning nonstyle of Friday the 13th.

Like the massive shipboard set that is its centerpiece, the film is huge and impressive - though, again like the captain's imposing vessel, it stubbornly and disappointingly remains at anchor. Hook never sets sail.

A River Runs Through It emerges as hopelessly middle-brow-the kind of diluted, prettified art traditionally associated with PBS and the Academy Awards. [09 Oct 1992]

The Mission is "The Killing Fields" without Dith Pran, a movie that simply asks the audience to share its moral smugness. It wants us to feel good about feeling bad. [14 Nov 1986, p.AC]

Entirely too well-behaved.

Like its main character, the movie hits the road with no final destination in mind, and the manic inventiveness that sustains the early passages becomes strained and weird by the end.

In Bright Lights, Big City, director James Bridges ("The Paper Chase," "Urban Cowboy") has made just about the best film imaginable from Jay McInerney's best-selling but fundamentally undramatic novel. Mustering the considerable technical skills at his disposal, Bridges-who took over the project well into shooting when the first director was fired-has turned in a smooth, polished commercial film that at least has the virtue of effectively showcasing Michael J. Fox for his fans. There just isn't much else in the material for Bridges to work with.[1 Apr 1988, p.A]

Slightly bloated Bond, with too much technology and a climactic slaughter that's a little too mindless to be much fun. Still, Adolfo Celi—with his “heat and cold, applied scientifically”—makes a most memorable villain.

Mitchell Leisen, the director, hadn't yet developed the light touch with actors he would display memorably later in the decade, though some of his trademark pictorial effects are in evidence.

The crude technique of director Sean Cunningham borrows whatever sophistication it has from Halloween's precise and elegant point-of-view shots of the killer, though Cunningham often cheats by using the ploy inconsistently. For all its shoddiness, the film manages, just barely, to achieve its ignoble goals--it delivers what it promises.

Canadian-made unpleasantness (1975) about a psychopath stalking a college town. Bob Clark's direction is enthusiastic but sloppy-a presaging of his later Porky's. [02 Dec 2010, p.52]

It's a western, of sorts, and for the first half it's a lot of fun. But then things fall apart, and the film becomes fatally episodic.

David Lean's studied, plodding, overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in E.M. Forster's haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India.

It is an intriguing subject, though so far all that Morris has brought to it is a combination of the morbid and the cruel; he needs to develop some sympathy, too. [16 Sept 1988]

Though overexplicit and underdeveloped, Clive Barker`s Hellraiser is a horror film with enough personality and ambition to rise slightly above the run of the genre.

Dull and lifeless.

There is something disturbing in the way the film elevates cynicism and detachment into heroic attitudes.

Perhaps the series is simply getting cynical and tired.

The cast is uniformly high spirited and attractive, and Ms. Beyer's direction, apart from a few over-weighted Wellesian camera angles, is functional.

An ambitious screenplay (by Andrew Klavan) is done in by wavering direction (by Jan Egleson) in A Shock to the System, an independent feature that is still worth seeing for its well-chosen cast of medium-priced performers, including Michael Caine, Elizabeth McGovern, Peter Riegert, Swoosie Kurtz and Will Patton. [23 Mar 1990, p.H]

A sober, focused piece that asks Americans to take another look at what is going on in their own backyard.

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.

As a director, Bogdanovich seems caught in much the same predicament as that of his characters, a victim of his own history. [28 Sep 1990, p.B]

Too sympathetic to really dislike, but too benign to leave an impression. [05 Jan 1990, p.G7]

Proof that you can buy an Academy Award, with David Niven, Cantinflas, and 44 stars in cameo roles spending a lot of Michael Todd’s money as they tour the world in Jules Verne’s balloon.

Mr. Gilbert wants a movie with both a golden glow and a corrosive center, something he has not quite achieved here.

There is some exquisite Technicolor photography by Leon Shamroy, but director Henry King never moves the action beyond respectful superficiality.

Akira remains the work of a cartoonist, rather than a born animator: Too much of the movie is played out in the static frames of a comic strip, and when movement is used it isn't to define character (as in Disney) or establish a rhythm (as in the Warner cartoons) but simply for its physical impact. Pounding away, it becomes monotonous. [30 Mar 1990, p.D]

Billy's burning, self-destructive energy is about all Young Guns has going for it-the suicidal kicks James Dean found in chickie races are here transposed to six-gun shoot-outs, filmed in a slow-motion process that strives vainly to evoke Sam Peckinpah. [12 Aug 1988, p.H]

Class Action occupies itself with long passages of family melodrama, most of it as familiar as the courtroom drama but far less entertaining. [15 Mar 1991]

The film's didactic passages cancel out its dramatic integrity, and the results are strangely neutral and unmoving.

On the one hand, the action stuff is surprisingly imaginative and well filmed; on the other, the characters are the usual bunch of self-parodic dodoes that the post-Spielberg action cinema has accustomed us to, so it's impossible to believe in the situations anyway.

It's meant to be open, heartwarming and real, but beneath its often attractively performed surface, the clichés are grinding as heavily as in any ''Rambo'' picture [21 Oct 1988]

The direction is lively and often overinventive, as was frequently the case during the early, experimental phase of his career.

Working in broad, often melodramatic strokes, Mr. Allouache paints a deeply pessimistic portrait of his native country.

Ms. Kampmeier never brings her themes into tight focus. At one moment, the film is a detailed but familiar attack on smothering small towns and oppressive family structures; at another, it's a fable of feminist empowerment with an oddly fervent religious background.

No one member of the ensemble cast stands out, though one member stands effectively outside it - cult director Sam Raimi, of the "Evil Dead" series, doing a hilariously deadpan Jerry Lewis imitation as Stick, the camp's addled handyman. Just what Raimi is doing in the film is a mystery explained only by the press notes: turns out that Binder and Raimi are old Tamakwa campmates. [23 Apr 1993, p.C2]

Jetsons: The Movie is a throwaway; with a little effort, it might have been something else. [6 July 1990, p.C]

The silliness still outweighs the steaminess. [1 May 1990, p.2]

Robert Wise’s direction is no more accomplished here than in The Sound of Music or any of his later big-budget projects, but Boris Karloff in the title role is surprisingly subtle—at times.

Miriam Hopkins, of the original cast, is around to lend a sense of continuity to the remake, but Wyler still seems unable to confront the material. This is Mature, Adult drama, and hence something of a bore.

Might have been better off as a documentary, with less of Mr. Eyre's uninspired dramatics and more of his sense of observation and outrage.

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

Too soft, too indistinct and too deliberately unambitious to rouse strong feelings one way or the other. It occupies two hours of your time, then melts without a trace. [21 Nov 1990, p.C1]

Apted's tedious, literal-minded approach doesn't come close to solving the problems of a knotty, best-seller plot—the characters are reduced to telling each other what happened. Some action-movie slam-bang would have been more satisfying, if ultimately no more coherent.

You can see what an impact sound must have had in 1927, because it certainly wasn't the movie that made this production a phenomenon...It's ragged and dull until the magical moment when Jolson turns to the camera to announce, “You ain't heard nothin' yet”—a line so loaded with unconscious irony that it still raises a few goose bumps.

Despite a strong cast, an exceptional performance by Tom Hanks and several strong moments, Punchline never makes the transition from concept to movie. Directed and written by David Seltzer ("Lucas"), it's a film that must strain mightily to cast its promising but vague subject-stand-up comedy- into dramatic terms, and it dips more than once into soapy contrivance. [30 Sept 1988, p.A]

Ms. Moreau, still an imperious presence at age 75, makes no effort to look or sound like Duras -- this is one sacred monster stepping in for another.

It's a perfectly competent film, but the title quantity is the one thing this dry and earnest movie hasn't got.

As a director, Mr. Ratliff wisely rejects the temptation to make fun of his subjects, most of whom seem to believe sincerely that they are doing the work of God.

It's all very zany. Occasionally it is even madcap. You would almost be tempted to smile at times, albeit weakly, if it weren't for Mr. Miike's habit of pounding home every joke with exaggerated reaction shots.

The picture has its moments of chilling insight, though essentially it is one more quaint early-70s stab at an American art cinema that never materialized.

If the film's diffidence is its greatest charm, it is also, in the end, its greatest limitation-it's a movie that seems afraid to declare itself, to make the big move that might propel it from the pleasant to the memorable. [03 Aug 1990]

The new film does little but repeat the gags and situations of the first movie, with a slight change of venue. [20 Nov 1992, p.A]

Kaufman wants to be bold in his depiction of lovemaking, but he keeps copping out, cutting away from the deed to such time-worn metaphors as booming bongo drums, pots that boil over on stove tops and African dancers gyrating wildly. Were Kaufman's frankness ever to equal the "passion and honesty" he praises in Miller's work, the film would merit at least an NC-21, if not 41. [05 Oct 1990, p.I]

Requires a bit more energy and originality to set it apart from the run of the indie pack.

If only director Nicholas Meyer had grasped the implications of his tale more fully and enthusiastically, this might have become a classic piece of cornball SF poetry, but as it stands the tepid acting and one-set claustrophobia take a heavy toll.

Cast against type as a sleazy psychopath in John Schlesinger's Pacific Heights, Michael Keaton seems to be having a very good time - a much better time, probably, than the ticket-buying public will have. [28 Sept 1990, p.C]

Though the episodes are monumentally predictable, there's something in the dedication of the cast that maintains a minimal interest. [11 Mar 1988, p.L]

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.

Weathers turns out to be a disappointingly weak lead whose low-key likability doesn't make up for his lack of anger and drive-crucial attributes for any action hero. And Baxley is surprisingly stingy with his action sequences.

Very little sense of the performers' humanity emerges from behind their stage roles, perhaps because Bogdanovich has directed the supposedly spontaneous dialogue to sound just as forced and theatrical as the scripted lines. [20 March 1992, p.2]

It's a baffling, unconvincing experience, though it has a few moments of mild charm.

Enjoyable and even exciting at the start, Dog Day Afternoon degenerates into frustration and tedium toward nightfall—an experience no less painful for the audience than for the actors.

Burt Reynolds showed signs of becoming a very personal filmmaker with this police thriller, his third outing as a director. It has the wistful faith in innocence and the extreme moral outrage of Gator coupled with the subversive infantilism of The End; what Reynolds lacks in technique (which is plenty) is nearly compensated for by the almost embarrassing intensity of his feelings. The context is extremely violent, which makes the intimate moments—between Reynolds and the girl and Reynolds and his buddies—stand out in agonizingly stark relief.

A decent piece of do-good cinema...Director Norman Jewison stages their confrontations for effectively flashy, immediate effects, though he unnecessarily neglects the action-movie underpinning.

Dawson, though, burrows into his role with all the zeal of a perennial second banana recognizing the opportunity of a lifetime. It's the one naturalistic performance in this cartoonish film, carrying with it the implicit authority of years of firsthand experience shaped, perhaps, by some late-night introspection. [13 Nov 1987, p.B]

Reducing one of the most compelling cultural icons of the century to a comic book character, this $22 million project makes a passable kiddie show, and not much else.

When a movie runs 134 minutes, it's best to keep something in reserve; Lumet does not, and Q&A expires long before it ends. [27 Apr 1990, p.C]

This Frankenfilm comes lumbering out of the laboratory of the Danish director Harald Zwart, any trace of personality surgically removed and replaced by a fully road-tested cliché.

The acting is too eccentric and the narrative drive too weak to satisfy fans of the genre, but Herzog's admirers will find much in the film's animistic landscapes and clusters of visionary imagery.

As much as the film may try to peddle warmth and solidarity, it remains disturbingly cold and impersonal, limited by the formulaic writing of Bob Tzudiker and Noni White and stymied by Ortega's apparent distance from his cast. [10 Apr 1992]

At the time, its way of wringing thrills from genre conventions at the same time it mocked them seemed imaginative and original; but in the light of Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), and The Fury (1978), it seems more like a dead end—the mark of a superficial stylist unable to take anything seriously, including his own work.

The enigma not only remains, but, cloaked in Schrader`s mysticism, seems more impenetrable than ever.

This is fundamentally a recruiting film whose intent is to interest other African-Americans in exploring their spiritual traditions. It displays no real curiosity about its subject except to insist that it is the true path to enlightenment. Mr. Harris's stylistic gifts are quite evident; his reportorial instincts are a bit more muffled.

By no means a bad film, just a disappointingly bland and superficial one.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a strange concoction - a bad taste comedy with a big, beating heart. [12 May 1989, p.B]

Foster and McGillis never quite make the transition from ideological mouthpieces to fully developed dramatic figures. [14 Oct 1988, p.C]

Hysteria, however skillfully maintained, should never be mistaken for art-a caution that applies equally to Stone and his subject. [01 Mar 1991]

In the end, about all Arachnophobia has going for it is the irrational fear the title refers to: a pre-existing fear Marshall does little more than exploit. It doesn't take a lot of skill to make people jump when you shove a spider at them. Nor does it really seem fair.

The film shows very little of the nar-rative assurance that has character-ized Jordan's previous work. [21 Nov 1988, p.2C]

This film, which tries to use chaos creatively-by shaping it and sculpting it-finally seems little more than a well-filmed mess. [4 Dec 1987, p.B]

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.

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.

As written by Randy Feldman and produced by the Batman team of Jon Peters and Peter Guber, Tango & Cash clearly wasn't meant to be interesting. It was meant to be Lethal Weapon-that is, a high-tech, ultra- violent, brain-dead buddy cop movie. In Konchalovsky's hands, however, Tango & Cash is more than interesting. It is, in fact, really weird.

The Fourth Protocol was a great in-flight read, and it will probably be a great in-flight movie, too-though in a theater it looks a little pale and overextended. [28 Aug 1987, p.FC]

Mr. Freundlich's naturalistic sensibility gets in the way of the film's broad fantasy elements, turning what might have been a stylized romp like Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" into something a little too real for comfort.

Proof positive of just how mediocre 70s mediocrity could be—any quasicompetent Hollywood hack of the 40s could have gone to town with this story, but under Yates's direction it merely lurches along, from one predictable danger to another.

Surly, incoherent, and provocatively mysterious.

Where the "Friday the 13th" movies demand nothing less than virginal purity as a condition of living through the last reel, Deepstar Six, which seems intended for a slightly older crowd, is willing to settle for a firm commitment to monogamy. [13 Jan 1989, p.O]

Trust seems ultimately a matter of touches-some cute, some surprising, some even fairly expressive, but none more than superficial. [16 Aug 1991]

The film has less to do with politics, women's or otherwise, than with a very conventional notion of the redemptive power of mother love. Which would be all right if director Hal Ashby had managed to mount it effectively—he hasn't though, and the results are dramatically incoherent.

Armstrong is usually a strong and original director of actors (her 1979 "My Brilliant Career" launched the inimitable Judy Davis). But here, her taste seems to have deserted her. [31Dec1997 Pg.30]

Cokliss's direction strains for a stylishness it doesn't achieve, yet his fundamentally straightforward style brings out the abstract design of the plot. Is this the first cubist thriller?

A comedy with a curious tone of depressive whimsy. It manages, somehow, to be both aggressively cute and oppressively sordid. [11 Dec 1987, p.G]

Crimes of the Heart feels random, vague and sluggish. The incidents don't build upon one another, but merely collapse into an undifferentiated heap. [12 Dec 1986, p.A]

A very minor contribution to the great corpus of Iranian cinema that has emerged in the last 20 years.

What the film resembles more than anything else is one of the miniature human-interest profiles that the networks have taken to inserting between the events in their Olympic coverage.

Alan Pakula's pedestrian 1976 recap of Watergate is a study in missed opportunities.

Director Robert Zemeckis displays such dazzling cinematic know-how that it's genuinely depressing when this film falls off into the usual self-ridicule.

Unfortunately, Frank Perry's unbelievably ham-handed direction obscures most of what is craftsmanly and pleasant in Isaacs's work, pushing the material toward a smug, sloppy, heavily early-70s satire on the horrors of suburban life. A very mixed bag, but those who've missed a storytelling sense in American movies might want to have a look.

Imagine "Twins" with the Danny DeVito part played by a dog, or "Lethal Weapon" with the mastiff standing in for Mel Gibson. [28 July 1989, p.A]

Paul Newman in his first ascendancy, as the favorite antihero of the Kennedy era. Martin Ritt directed, putting a little too much dust in the dust bowl for my taste.

Generally low-key and likable, thanks mainly to a talented cast.

Out of five directors—John Huston, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, and Val Guest—only McGrath manages to connect with this brontosaurian James Bond parody.

Spencer Tracy does his cuddly curmudgeon turn as Clarence Darrow; it's a lazy, vague performance, but its wit provides the only crack of light in the film's somber, gray overcast.

Dugan can`t find a tone that allows him to preserve the shock of the gags while minimalizing their physical painfulness.

Despite the rich associations, the film finally makes little more of its central figure, a hideously deformed young man, than an object of pity.

Some of the nonstop commotion of Bangkok Dangerous is funny and inventive -- but much more of it is simply irritating and obfuscating.

Though the slow, obvious "Two If By Sea" probably won't do much to advance Bullock's standing as America's current sweetheart, it shouldn't do irreparable damage to it, either. [13 Jan 1996, p.21]

Well-meaning and hopelessly bland, You'll Get Over It, instantly drops into the tone of didactic realism that rules most television fiction, drawing easy moral lessons from a scrubbed-up simulacrum of everyday, middle-class life.

Following Bollywood's tradition of excessive generosity, Mr. Gupta tosses in too much of just about everything, resulting in a two-and-a-half-hour film that may exhaust some viewers.

Reynolds turns the emphasis from the action scenes to the depressed emotional state of his strangely disengaged protagonist, and the result is a film haunted by an unstated, largely undramatized sense of melancholy, very personal but almost completely inarticulate.

One of the queasier Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

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

Tossed by successive waves of floridity and biliousness, Food of Love finally washes up on the shores of camp.

Nolte does his standard lovable-lug routine with his usual ease and assurance, though a more daring producer might have allowed Madsen, stranded again in a second-banana role, to step up to the lead. This crafty, insinuating actor has been ready for his closeup for a while now. Can't somebody make him a star? [26 Apr 1996, p.47]

The camera work is so self-conscious and so intrusive that it consistently overrides our interest in the characters and their individual dramas.

Loaded down with rhetorical devices -- writer and director, Marco Amenta, drowns it in a flood of sentimental effusions.

An overdose of morbid sentimentality.

Once again, violence (more than 30 on-screen deaths) makes a poor substitute for suspense, while sloppy, rear projection work drains most of the excitement from the climax.

Stanley Kramer issues the final warning to Mankind, in a tiresome, talky 1959 film set in the shrunken aftermath of World War III.

Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) was brought in to salvage the runaway production (with the cost adjusted for inflation, it may still qualify for the title of Most Expensive Movie Ever Made); though his name stands alone on the credits, a lot of other hands contributed to the general muddle.

Holland's direction is functional, as befits the kind of cable fodder Thinner is destined to be.

(Miike's) work is fun to look at but emotionally unengaging, perhaps because he can't summon enough belief in his pulp-fiction characters to make them come alive.

Mr. Chandrasekhar's direction is casual to the point of carelessness, but he does give the movie a friendly, convivial atmosphere that contradicts and sometimes overcomes its frequently cruel humor. In short, this is another film that looks as if it was more fun to make than it is to sit through.

It’s amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, so of course it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1936.

A sweet, sincere labor of love that just isn't very good.

In the end, Lisa's revolt seems as predictably programmatic, and as widely abstracted from observable human behavior, as the movie that contains her.

With its implausible coincidences, inelegant plot twists and minimally characterized characters, The Trip doesn't have much going for it apart from its basic sincerity and decency, which are evident.

Well-meaning rot from 1963.

As a movie, Controlled Chaos is often bumpy, naïve and erratically acted.

The film feels authentic only during the scenes between Valentín and his selfish, angry father.

Brian De Palma demonstrates the drawbacks of a film-school education by overexploiting every cornball trick of style in the book: slow motion, split screen long takes, and soft focus abound, all to no real point...He's an overachiever—which might not make for good movies, but at least he's seldom dull.

In both Twist and "Idaho," the act of placing a larger-than-life literary figure in a constrained, narrowly naturalistic environment merely strips the characters of their scale and interest.

Mr. Davis has a lot of ideas, but when it comes to dramatizing them, he is unable to give them an engaging form.

American audiences will probably find it familiar and insufficiently cathartic.

Sidney Lumet's wired-up, hysterical direction overwhelms the minor pleasures of Ira Levin's play.

Director Ronald Neame brings his impersonal British craftsmanship to this 1979 feature, so it isn't a complete bust, but it's a long way from the apocalyptic satisfactions of his Poseidon Adventure.

Guy Hamilton's direction lacks enthusiasm and pace, while even the art direction—long the Bond films' real secret weapon—seems to have fallen to a shrunken budget. Not much fun.

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd star as two white boys who love nuns, blacks, and the blues. But for all of the dramatic focus on poverty, the subject of John Landis's mise-en-scene is money—making it, spending it, blowing it away. The humor is predicated on underplaying in overscaled situations, which is sporadically funny in a Keaton-esque way but soon sputters out through sheer, uninspired repetition.

Overlong, stiff, and about as suspenseful as a detergent commercial, The Bad Seed has one small asset, Patty McCormack as the child, but that's about it.

Plympton fails to develop compelling personalities for any of his characters.

Mr. Szklarski doesn't seem to have a strong point of view on his material. Too often, the film drifts into a kind of passive voyeurism, offering the unhappy spectacle of these wasted lives without perspective and without hope.

Slack and unconvincing throughout with the exception of Ringwald, who remains natural and appealing as the thin world of the film collapses around her.

Sarah Jessica Parker makes an unflatteringly tense appearances as a nurse who knows more than she's telling, and David Morse dredges up his hulking soulfulness as a maverick FBI agent. But no one involved in "Extreme Measures" is displaying a commitment beyond showing up for work. [27 Sept 1996, p.42]

A few of the one-liners are snappy and clever, but the project sinks under an overelaborated superciliousness.

The dual-track plot, with constant cutting between mother and daughter, seems less an attempt to establish meaningful parallels between the two stories than the nervous twitches of a compulsive channel changer.

What's lacking is the sense of structure that might have made Van Wilder more than a meandering succession of random gags.

Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks.

The plot line quickly becomes incomprehensible, and the movie, directed in sleek music-video style by Michael Bay, comes to suggest a very long night on Fox-TV. [7 April 1995, p.56]

Peter Weir's attempt to make a "Casablanca" for the 80s - a romance set against a background of exoticism and intrigue - suffers from hazy plotting and a constant, pretentious mystification.

This 1944 Hepburn-Tracy pairing is so undistinguished that it's nearly dropped out of the history books.

Roger Moore is a pastry chef's idea of James Bond; but Christopher Lee as the archetype of the evil antagonist makes this 007 outing just about bearable.

It's a slick, empty spectacle, with antipathetic stars and a director with no basic sympathy for the myths he's treating.

Unfortunately the clips themselves are so battered, grainy and sordid that they are more depressing than inspiring.

The results suggest a slightly more ribald version of "Josie and the Pussycats."

Will probably keep its core audience of suburban teenagers mildly entertained for the course of its 93 minutes. Urban grumps, however, may be distracted by Mr. Stokes's annoyingly overedited execution of the dance sequences.

Surprisingly dry and dispassionate.

Comes to seem less a movie than a memory of movies -- or, at worst, a commercial Frankenstein's monster, sewn together to fill a perceived gap in the market.

As it stands, "Spirit" provides neither the profound human touch of the great Disney animation of the past, nor the dazzling, high-tech fun of present-day digital cartooning.

Little remains in this true-life story of a nuclear worker's mysterious death other than some prefab antinuke, profeminist rhetoric - soft-pedaled, thankfully, but still strong enough to testify to the basic smugness of the project.

Rosen goes out of his way to avoid Disney's stylized movements and character touches, but ends by making his characters all look, sound, and act alike—conditions hardly hospitable to dramatic involvement. The animation may be naturalistic, but the fallacy is as pathetic as ever.

A terminally mild attempt to revive the populist political comedy pioneered by Frank Capra in the 1930's.

More mannered than stylish, more would-be tragic than comic, the film is all surface and comes up fatally short on warmth, humor, and insight.

Classy and lifeless - a prettily photographed, heavily directed antiwar film.

The film looks austere and serious, rather as if it had been shot inside a Frigidaire, and the oppressiveness of the images tends to strangle laughter, even at the most absurd excesses of Alvin Sargent's script.

The film is as synthetic as a rubber rose, but it is all but indistinguishable from the organically grown, bred-in-Britain article.

In short, here is a VH1 "Behind the Music" special that has something a little more special behind it: music that didn't sell many records but helped change a nation.

Steven Spielberg's mechanical thriller is guaranteed to make you scream on schedule (John Williams's score even has the audience reactions programmed into the melodies), particularly if your tolerance for weak motivation and other minor inconsistencies is high.

It isn't good, but it's certainly mythic.

Just follows the numbers, plodding from one unimaginative set piece to the next. Even the tony cast of villains—Christopher Walken, Patrick Bauchau, and Grace Jones—can't add any flavor to the grindingly predictable proceedings.

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

As a believer preaching to an audience of believers, he (Nalin) feels no need to offer proofs or anything even approaching a rational argument.

The film heaves and sputters from one indifferently rendered number to the next.

The acting, showy and instinctual, is most of the movie; the visual style is too forced and chicly distended to let the drama acquire much natural life of its own. It's a film that expresses a great deal of disgust toward homosexuals, while placing a sympathetic homosexual relationship at its core.

Bogdanovich, a cold director drawn to sentimental material, doesn’t have the warmth to bring it off, and his wobbly control of tone keeps leading the physical comedy into pain and humiliation, the romance into prurience, and the wit into the realm of the sour and shrill.

Too fuzzy-headed to rise above the pack.

There is surprisingly little emotional amplitude in the film.

In some ways this 1978 Cheech and Chong effort, their first feature, is the perfect doper movie—no one's straight enough to remember the punch lines. Director Lou Adler (the record producer) finds a few chuckles, but mostly it's amateur night.

Too predictable to leave much of an impression.

The film is full of artists who seem to be straddling the line between compromise and conviction. There is much straddling in A House on a Hill, and not enough engagement.

A nonstop underscore of Latin pop, as well as several arbitrarily interpolated dream sequences and animated passages don't do nearly enough to make up for the film's unfocused frenzy and lack of genuine comic invention.

It's hard to believe that anything this academic and artificial was once considered great filmmaking, but you can look it up.

What this autopopathism means in terms of American culture is a subject I neither understand nor wish to.

There's nothing but sheer manipulativeness holding this picture together.

A film of ingredients, rather than ideas realized and integrated: it panders on different, disjunctive levels.

Basically, the film is a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.

It's his sense that he is superior to the series (which he certainly is) that introduces a fatal strain of campiness and condescension. And without absolute conviction, no action film can survive: if there's no belief, there's no danger.

Grant seems stymied in this claustrophobic, essentially misogynistic material, and director Irving Reis isn’t the man to pull him out.

This weightless melodrama exhibits the kind of condescending “fairness” (nobody's right, nobody's wrong—these things just happen, that's all) that is often taken for artistic maturity, but just as frequently reflects a reluctance to engage the material on a deep emotional level.

Huston does a reverse take on the material, underplaying the grotesque situation until it turns into a parody on the problems of the average working couple, but the pacing is so lugubrious that the laughs never materialize.

It's as a documentary that Downtown 81 is most successful, particularly at those moments when the somewhat unfocused filmmaking allows us to look past the foreground characters and catch glimpses of a vanished cityscape.

This is really less fun than the more baroque Meyer outings, such as Up!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens—perhaps because too much routine violence and nastiness keeps getting in the way.

Like most of Mr. Ferrara's films, The Blackout takes place in a trance state -- events are fuzzy, line readings even fuzzier. There are mysterious ellipses in the plotline and lots of droning electric guitar work on the soundtrack.

Benjamin's direction consists largely of giving Richard Benjamin inflections to most of the line readings; for the rest, he blandly shoots the screenplay, leaving large gaps in the narration unfilled and significant contradictions in the characters unexplained.

Feels fabricated, studio-bound and claustrophobic, which doesn't add to the ripped-from-the-headlines authenticity this genre has always depended on.

A film that chugs along as listlessly as the ship itself, discovering moments of value in a sea of ennui.

Mainly it's marking time: the characters take a definite backseat to the special effects, and much of the action seems gratuitous, leading nowhere.

There is no place for depth or nuance in this slickly engineered complacency machine, which roars along at a single tone and pace, neatly dispelling every troubling intimation with a Mary Tyler Moore one-liner and solving all its conflicts with tricks of rhetoric.

This 1970 animated feature is dull, careless, and all too typical of the Disney studio's slapdash output.

Bob Fosse clearly believes he has tumbled across something of deep significance in the story of murdered Playmate Dorothy Stratten, but when push comes to shove, he has no idea what it is—and the film quickly degenerates into a hypocritically artsy interpretation of the standard slasher formula.

Seems held back by vestiges of an old-fashioned format that Mr. Gatlif has long since outgrown.