Dave Kehr

Entertaining, lightly mocking documentary.

For much of its length, the film is a surprisingly serious plea for the rights of the mentally ill and the legitimacy of the insanity defense. When the need to make a commercial shocker finally asserts itself, the film shifts gears with unseemly, damaging haste. Though far from a worthy successor to the original the film clearly could have been much worse.

Ms. Gardos is not a particularly flavorful filmmaker, but she is an honest one.

Director Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman) clearly doesn't trust the American audience's ability to handle mixed, emotionally complex tones (and by all the available evidence he's right not to), yet by segregating the feelings he wants to express he makes them seem artificial and programmatic. But the performances do have a redeeming vividness.

Each time Sheen threatens to take the film to another level, director Noton throws in a pratfall or a car chase to knock it down. Three for the Road" is a film that must struggle to be stupid; unfortunately, it succeeds. [15 Apr 1987, p.5]

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

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]

One of the great breakthroughs—the Ulysses of the cinema—and a powerful, moving experience in its own right.

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.

The most visually inventive film of the 60s is also one of the funniest.

The most elegant title for a sequel in film history belongs, happily, to one of the most elegant sequels.

Levinson's dialogue feels fresh and improvised, yet it hits its mark every time, and the performances he gets are complex and original (particularly from Mickey Rourke, who plays a lothario with a late-blooming conscience) - enough so that Levinson's occasional forced "cinematic" effects cause barely a ripple in the smooth, naturalistic surface.

This big-budget bubble-gum musical is appalling but compulsively watchable; it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980, complete with roller discos, dreamy boys, fashion shows, and fantasy father figures. Director Robert Greenwald has a lot of ideas, all of them bad: his style could be described as rapid misfire.

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

None of it is very convincing, thanks to Tuggle's shaky storytelling: on the one hand, he sets up his plot twists with such elephantine emphasis that the payoffs are invariably anticlimactic; on the other, he relies constantly and shamelessly on the most outre coincidence. Still, the action scenes do have a certain punch and vigor, and there are a few fresh, offbeat views of the City of Angels. Part of the point of the project seems to be to prove that Hall can “act” (as if his comic roles were something else), and he does move honorably if not remarkably through a mumbling Method performance.

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 gripping and original piece of work, itself sure to be remembered as one of the finest films of the year.

In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute. [17 Nov 1989, p.A]

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 dialogue is sharp and justly famous, though writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz has trouble putting it into the mouths of his actors: nothing sounds remotely natural, and the film is pervaded by the out-of-sync sense of staircase wit—this is a movie about what people wished they'd said. The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.

A John Hughes-ish teen drama unaccountably complicated by politics and method acting.

Only director Apted`s admirably low-key, matter-of-fact approach to the material keeps it from becoming unbearably artificial.

A handsome, ambitious film that fails to satisfy—perhaps because the director, Ivan Passer, insists on an ambiguity on the plot level that muddies and dilutes the thematic thrust.

Far more ambivalent and ambiguous film than Mr. Spielberg's. Both North and South are portrayed as brutal, abusive regimes that use their citizens as so much cannon fodder.

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.

Shot in astonishingly elaborate long takes, this is the kind of film that finds the most brilliant poetry in the slightest movement of the camera—a paradigm of cinematic expression.