Dave Kehr

The film doesn't transcend its genre, but it's an honorable achievement within it.

The film is finally impersonal, almost anonymous; it's a chilly, lumbering project that carries little of the mark of lived experience. [25 Dec 1992]

If the setup, with its theme of two radically different brothers drawn to the same woman, recalls Moonstruck, the follow-through of The January Man has none of the earlier film's pleasing symmetry or emotional force. Sarandon seems to get lost in the shuffle (in a way that suggests some last-minute trimming of her role), and the picture eventually trails off into a tangle of unresolved plot threads. [13 Jan 1989, p.K]

A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous.

Too campy to work as straight drama and too violent and sordid to function as comedy, Vulgar is, truly and thankfully, a one-of-a-kind work.

The screenplay tends to constrain rather than liberate Hitchcock's thematic thrust, but there is much of technical value in his geometric survey of the scene and the elaborate strategies employed to transfer audience sympathy among the four main characters.

Not entirely a pale shadow, but definitely fading. [12 Jan 2012, p.36]

Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film inaugurated his majestic late period: it’s here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters.

This was the last Disney animated feature that Uncle Walt lived to see through personally; it can't be a coincidence that it's also the last Disney animated feature of real depth and emotional authenticity.

His first confrontation with Berenger allows Poitier to display the overwhelming, nearly palpable moral force that was his great strength as a performer, but the balance of the film makes very little use of his special skills. [12 Feb 1988, p.A]

A mildly diverting, mostly forgettable variation on themes the writer-director has treated with more depth and vigor on several past occasions. It's a tentative, tiny film, every bit as inconspicuous as its recessive, occasionally invisible heroine. [25 Dec 1990, p.10C]

All of Cronenberg’s personal obsessions—the distortion of the body, the grotesquerie of sex—are on display, though the treatment is a bit sophomoric. A curiosity item for hard-core Cronenberg fans.

Sidney Kingsley's Broadway hit, modeled a little too clearly on Greek tragedy, becomes a solid film d'art under William Wyler's supple, impersonal direction.

The film (and Garson’s stiff-backed, Academy Award-winning performance in particular) has dated very badly; it’s difficult now to see the qualities that wartime audiences found so assuring.

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

It's much to Schumacher's credit that Flatliners, for all of its crazy excess, does not turn into camp.

Warren Beatty's shapely 1981 epic, based on the life of radical journalist John Reed, is a stunningly successful application of a novelistic aesthetic—a film that makes full and thoughtful use of its three-and-a-half-hour length to develop characters, ideas, and motifs with a depth seldom seen in movies.

The film is uncharacteristically rigid and pious for Hitchcock; it feels more like a work of duty than conviction.

The film is full of ingenious details and effective character sketches (Thomas has a mother who would give Woody Allen the willies) that go a long way toward covering up its conventionalities.

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

In The Sandlot's nostalgia for simpler times, a single-sex world seems to be a key component.

Less interested in politics than in profitably flattering the suspicions and resentments of its intended teenage audience.

With most of the action confined to the body of the plane (though there is a brief stopover at a Louisiana airfield), the screenplay poses some significant challenges in staging, none of which Hooks seems to recognize or accept. [06 Nov 1992, p.B]

It's astounding to see Arthur Penn's name attached to this piece of cheese.

Jonathan Demme's debut film is campy, choppy, and generally immature, though his bonding themes are fitfully discernible amid the cartoonish action.

Johnny Handsome does indeed put Hill back in the ballpark, close enough to his best work to make its imperfections seem that much more maddening. [29 Sep 1989, p.A]

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

Jessica Lange brings so much energy and personal involvement to her portrayal of Frances Farmer that you can't help but feel sorry for her; nothing else in the film remotely matches her talent and dedication, and she seems alone—and even slightly absurd—in her feverish creativity.