Dave Kehr

It's a dim, thoroughly synthetic film, so far removed from its source--much less from any original creative impulse--that it barely seems to exist. [30 Jan 1987, p.A]

It is Field's bursting, big-eyed American-ness - a commodity she has carefully banked since her days as TV's "Gidget" - that generates the film's lurid fascination. [11 Jan 1991, p.K]

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.

Despite the triteness of the theme (Dern is in charge of maintaining the last remnants of the earth's vegetation), the film is enjoyable for its intimacy, seriousness, and intelligent character work, virtues not perpetuated by the subsequent new wave.

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.

Highly irritating at first, Mr. Koury's passive technique eventually begins to yield some interesting results.

Perhaps the most perfect of the great Disney animated features-the most expressively animated, the least pretentious, the best balanced between horror and joy, adventure and comedy.

For all of his personal familiarity with the material, Mr. Provenzano has turned out a movie that largely owes its tone and style to other movies.

There is no denying the force of Mr. Brisseau's bizarre imagination and the personal conviction he brings to it.

The film has genuine wit, an appealing sense of grandeur, and very little of the overt "philosophizing" that marred much of Huston's previous work. His eye for the strong, clear lines of landscape had never been sharper, and Oswald Morris's photography has a fine sun-saturated brilliance.

It's not, however, a particularly pleasant surprise. Directed by 25-year-old Marc Rocco (son of actor Alex Rocco, who appears in the film), Dream a Little Dream places the usual plot inanities of the genre in the context of a wildly ambitious, baroque-surrealist style. The effect is a little as if the late Russian mystic Andrei Tarkovsky had directed "Police Academy VI." [9 March 1989, p.6]

The film doesn't move to a satisfactory conclusion as much as it fizzles out in a series of protracted anti-climaxes. [15 Dec 1989, p.A]

The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.

The murder-mystery board game becomes a frantic, unfunny spoof (1985) under the direction of British TV writer Jonathan Lynn. The script recycles Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with six guests invited by a mysterious host to spend the night in a creepy mansion, but instead of parodying the material Lynn simply surrounds it with extraneous pratfalls and wisecracks.

Armed and Dangerous is an extremely violent, often mean-spirited comedy in which most of the gags depend on the absurdly excessive use of force. Jokes like these are designed to appeal to adolescent power fantasies, and while kids may love them, adults are likely to be bored by their repetitiousness and senselessness.

Emerges as just one more formulaic action film as the title character bounces around the globe in a deadly treasure hunt.

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.

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.

It's no masterpiece, but compared to the toothless comedies of its era, its attack on American mythology seems almost worthy of Preston Sturges.

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

Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop is a stylish piece of work that leaves a sour aftertaste. [17 Jul 1987]

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]

The film is sober, serious-minded and paced like a funeral march.

The most densely allegorical of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpieces (1954), moving from psychology to morality to formal concerns and finally to the theological. It is also Hitchcock's most innovative film in terms of narrative technique, discarding a linear story line in favor of thematically related incidents, linked only by the powerful sense of real time created by the lighting effects and the revolutionary ambient sound track.

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]

Good-natured, mildly appealing video feature.