Dave Kehr

The thematics are rather cloying, but the mood—profoundly relaxed, bemused—eventually conquers.

Remains a sadly earthbound thing, mired in a dismal realism that lies far from its natural environment.

A fascinating anomaly.

It's a beautifully proportioned, wonderfully complete movie.

Franklin J. Shaffner's deadpan adaptation of Ira Levin's silly story about Hitler clones. The plot is less suspenseful than the overacting contest between the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, who spend most of their screen time one-upping each other in affectations.

This turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film (1972), though there's no sign of the serenity and settledness that generally mark the end of a career. Frenzy, instead, continues to question and probe, and there is a streak of sheer anger in it that seems shockingly alive.

Alien Nation is a sluggish, forced and hopelessly derivative action thriller, sporadically redeemed by the wit of its stars and the velvety sheen of Greenberg's night photography.

Powell had made The Red Shoes five years earlier; here he was clearly hoping to expand the style of the final ballet segment into feature length. But without dramatic grounding Powell’s voluptuous visuals seem empty, and his manic inventiveness operates in a void.

Fans of the genre -- or "gore hounds" as they are known in fandom -- will find plenty to enjoy in Mr. West's enthusiastic approach to his work.

Using a fly-on-the-wall camera technique that suggests the cinéma vérité documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, Ms. Cammisa and Mr. Fruchtman vividly capture the dynamic of tenderness and rage that characterizes Sister Helen's relationship with the 21 men who live under her roof.

One of the queasier Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

A typically overproduced 1956 Fox film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, with Yul Brynner as the king and Deborah Kerr as the British schoolteacher who comes to Siam to educate Brynner's army of children. Too long at 133 minutes, but the score is swell.

A Boy and His Dog lacks the density of a Peckinpah film—in spite of some clever ideas and a few well-wrought images, it seems too schematic and its satire too blunt.

The filmmakers build an argument that is both intellectual and emotional, concentrating as much on the forensic evidence as on Ms. Rosario's passionate commitment to finding justice for her son.

The film is still an entertaining and invigorating thriller, with a structure and some curious sexual overtones that suggest Howard Hawks's "A Girl in Every Port."

It's a light, slight premise that seems more suited to a Saturday Night Live sketch than a full-length movie, but it plays pleasantly enough in its video incarnation, where modesty sometimes can be a virtue.

Inhabited by a genuine spirit of cruelty, both toward its characters and its audience.

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

Doesn't have many fresh ideas to contribute to the genre, though it is reasonably good-natured and delivers a handful of solid laughs.

Though the shocks are well conveyed, it's the sweetness that lingers, making this the first cute and cuddly entry in the genre.

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

A finely performed, breezily directed, very funny comedy. [17 July 1996, p.33]

Stone works some imaginative changes on the usual formulas of propagandistic fiction—Boyle is anything but the usual bland audience-identification figure, waiting around to be converted to the ideological position of the filmmakers—but as a director, he still didn't have the chops to bring off such an ambitious, multilayered project: the picture lunges into hysterical incoherence every few minutes, and Stone must resort to platitudinous simplifications to clear things up. It's lively, though, to say the very least.

As a filmmaker, Benjamin is capable of the occasional light, graceful touch, but the overall view eludes him; just as he was unable to bring out the sly blend of satire and psychological drama in Bo Goldman's script for Little Nikita, he's unable to find any harmony of tone in this scattered, cacophonous material. [09 Dec 1988, p.B]

A good-hearted comedy of clashing cultures. The film finds great fun in coaxing out and mocking a range of regional differences, from mutually impenetrable accents to radical variants in dress codes, but miraculously never descends to broad, dismissive caricatures.

William Friedkin's remake of the French thriller Wages of Fear represents an above-average effort by the director of The Exorcist—meaning it's marginally watchable. Friedkin senselessly complicates the simple story—four men drive a truckload of nitro through a South American jungle—with a lengthy exposition and some unfortunate existential overtones. The rhythms are all off—it's either too fast or too slow—but most of the set pieces are effective.

For De Niro, David Merrill represents a rare opportunity to play a leading man without tics or gimmicks, and it is a pleasure to set what a fine, transparent performer he can be after the high technique of Awakenings and GoodFellas.

Fully up to, as well as virtually indistinguishable from, its predecessors… The guarantee of Indiana Jones is that the pace never varies and the tone never changes; when you've had enough, you can feel free to leave. [24 May 1989, Tempo, p.1]