Dave Kehr

A strangely mournful, lugubrious film, staggering under a sense of exhaustion that manages to stifle many of its own best laughs. [10 May 1991, p.C]

Nightwatch is more stylish and well-plotted than your typical slasher film, but it doesn't quite stand out in a world where the horrific has become routine. [17 Apr 1998]

Fascinated by the technology of movies as much as by the technology of space—it presents film as a fabulous, exciting plaything, reviving Orson Welles's observation that a movie set is "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had."

Huston simply films the plot of Malcolm Lowry's modern-day gothic novel, turning a fevered interior vision into a cold, distant, exterior one—a documentary on the death of a drunk. As the tortured consul, Albert Finney has moments of technical brilliance, but Huston's direction gives him no inner life. The most impressive artistic contribution is that of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, whose painfully sharp images suggest something of what the novel is about.

Memories of Me, directed by ex-Fonz Henry Winkler, is a "Long Day's Journey into Schmaltz," in which an already overripe father-son conflict is further sugared by large doses of show-biz sentimentality. [07 Oct 1988, p.A]

Disappointingly shallow and not terribly funny romantic comedy.

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.

For much of its length the picture is brilliantly successful-light, surprising and, because it asks the audience to participate in its creation, unusually engaging.

The film is slow-moving, overlong and never more ambitious than a TV feature, though younger kids will probably respond to O'Neal's amiability. [16 Aug 1997, p.24]

There are few marquees that could contain the title The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: the Metal Years, but Penelope Spheeris' documentary on the heavy metal bands of rock 'n' roll turns out to be much more graceful than its name. [05 Aug 1988, p.B]

Mr. Anderson's screenplay provides a steady series of inventive action situations, and the director, Alexander Witt, makes the most of them. His work is fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact.

If Blind Date is soft and simple at its core, it is certainly the sharpest, funniest film Edwards has made since Victor/Victoria. After the sogginess of his last few features, all of his dazzling craft seems to have come back to him.

ROTLD II may be junk, but at least in the hands of director Ken Wiederhorn it's efficient, well-filmed junk. [18 Jan 1988, p.7C]

The film becomes far too explicit much too quickly, as if Friedkin, frustrated by his inability to build a genuine suspense, had decided to move to the main course as quickly as possible. [27 Apr 1990, p.B]

It's an open, closely observed and nicely detailed film that attains an authenticity beyond the standard social worker formulas. [5 June 1987, p.B]

The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good

Time has revealed its brilliance, as well as the apparent impossibility of its like ever being seen again.

An ungainly collection of one-liners and misdirected sight gags that hardly qualifies as a movie. But as a stand-up routine it's a scream.

A mildly engaging addition to that curious sub-genre of American independent filmmaking, the whimsical comedy of Long Island alienation.

Though My Girl seeks to stir large, devastating emotions, Zieff seems afraid to touch on anything too difficult or unpleasant, lest it alienate his audience. The results are curiously gutless and unmoving, as Zieff finds himself stuck with a sentimentality without substance, a poetry without pain.

A rough-edged, talking-heads documentary, directed with skill if not polish by Jennie Livingston, that has found a topic almost unbelievably rich in cultural paradoxes and interpretive possibilities. [09 Aug 1991, p.C]

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

The film acquires a pleasant, syncopated rhythm as it bounces from one unlikely event to another, and Seidelman manages some nice detailing in the minor characters. Arquette is consistently charming and inventive in a role that barely exists as written, and Madonna is given ample opportunity to strut her stuff.

The action and sentiments are familiar to the point of cliche, and there isn't much life in Gillian Armstrong's academic direction—she keeps pushing ideas over events, and meanings over emotions. But Judy Davis, as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman, grants the film much charm and passion.

Despite a monotonously fashionable mise-en-scene, Lyne generates some genuine erotic tension between his two stars; you believe in their obsessive relationship, even as most of the action and staging registers as ridiculous.

By imitating the gestures and outlines of a vanished cinema, Berri can only provide a cold simulation. The surface is smooth and refined; the insides aren't there. [23 Dec 1987, p.A]

Vulgarity, of course, has its honored place in comedy, but in She-Devil such moments merely seem grim and desperate - substitutes for the real laughs the film has failed to discover.

Mr. Burger has a performer who can dart between stentorian self-assurance and cringing pathos, maintaining his character's ambiguity until the final sequence of this resourceful and ingenious entertainment.

Brooks' own timing as a director doesn't seem up to its usual snuff. Light-years stretch out between the set-up of a gag and its payoff, and for a director who has always depended on the quantity of his jokes rather than the quality, the gap is fatal. When a character is introduced as "Pizza the Hut," and then shown as a melting mass of mozzarella and tomato sauce, the result is to turn a fairly clever pun into something thuddingly obvious and vaguely nauseating. [24 Jun 1987, p.3]

This 1941 film, which Warren Beatty remade as Heaven Can Wait, is nothing special in itself—a fairly routine romantic comedy from the 40s, with Robert Montgomery having a hard time acting like a lowlife.

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

The film is one of Donen’s most formally perfect works—innovative, involving, and, in case there’s any doubt, finally optimistic.

A toothless, pointless remake of King Vidor's searing, epic melodrama of 1937. [2 Feb 1990, p.G2]

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is the happiest surprise of this summer so far, a children's film from Walt Disney Productions that effortlessly renews the best tradition of that studio's live-action features.

Strange and wonderful.

Much of the movie's charm, in fact, is derived from its sense of its own instant disposability. Raimi has created the cinematic equivalent of fast food-efficient, unassuming and seriously regressive. It may not be much good for you in the end, but consuming it is loads of fun. [19 Feb 1993, Friday, p.C]

Drab and unenticing.

All of the film`s female characters are shrill, manipulative and irrational-their only appeal is masochistic.

Peck's icy remove works for once—as a kid's idea of a parent, he's frighteningly effective.

The film dissolves into a series of diminishing anticlimaxes, ending on a note of portentous ambiguity. To the last, Mr. Levin maintains his uneasy balance of reportage and melodrama.

It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.

It's difficult to see, too, what exactly all of this has to do with the twilight of the '60s. With his frequent sentimental allusions to the end of an era, Robinson seems to be grasping for a profundity that his anecdotal reminiscences don't merit or really need. Marwood, the film implies, will leave this life behind and go on to great things, while Withnail will be mired in it forever, a forgotten Falstaff to Marwood's striding Prince Hal. Self- dramatization is one thing; self-Shakespearization is something else. [10 July 1987, p.C]

With all these safety features built in, this 1985 film is too well padded to qualify as genuinely radical wit, but in an even-toned, TV sort of way it's mildly amusing and inventive throughout.

It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]

Represents something new under the sun: sincere camp.

The script, by Budd Schulberg, is pat and badly proportioned, but the picture has a sharp, dirty appeal.

More impressive than entertaining.

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

The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.

Depardieu has so much life on screen, so much bounding energy and insistent physicality, that he almost brings it off.

Because the characters are so well established -- Ms. Perkins is particularly good as the shy, resentful Brigitte -- the film can have fun with its own premises without turning into an empty camp exercise.

The Last Boy Scout will win no year-end awards, but at least it delivers the goods-which is more that can be said for most of this year's holiday releases.

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

The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling.

Technically, "No Mercy" is a smooth, assured piece of work, with a sense of movement and color far superior to Pearce's previous outings. But it is in technique that American action movies have taken their last refuge. The commitment to character is gone, the effort to create credible, vivid situations has been forgotten. What remains is empty know-how, and it is difficult to see the difference between this kind of filmmaking and the impersonal style-for-hire that goes into a typical TV commercial.

Coolidge hasn't made a campy, condescending comedy, but a satiric romance, in which the background gags and caricatures contribute to a sense of significant conflicts and solid emotions. It's irresistible.

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.

A film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn. Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality.

Ynpretentious and efficient, Curtis Hanson`s suspense drama The Hand That Rocks the Cradle suggests, after the monstrous ego trips of this past holiday season, that some sense of professionalism continues to reside in Hollywood.

It remains a documentary at heart, full of astonishing glimpses of human resiliency that have nothing to do with artfulness and everything to do with patience, persistence and sympathy.

One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution.

Though it's well directed, written and performed, Rain Main still slips irreversibly into the so-what category. [16 Dec 1988]

A confused and confusing mixture of genres and tones, John Landis' horror comedy Innocent Blood is consistent only in its unpleasantness. [25 Sept 1992, p.B2]

Few directors are capable of this kind of structural experimentation so late in their careers, and Hitchcock deserves much credit for his audacity.

A bland, half-finished film that seems to have been conceived as off-peak cable fodder.

The film exudes complacency and self-congratulation; it is a very cowardly, craven piece of ersatz art.

As a film, "Consenting Adults" has little to distinguish itself from the other entries in the genre, apart from an entertainingly hammy performance from Spacey and the clever production design of Carol Spier, with its emphasis on bold color effects (the interior of the Otis house is painted an infernal red) and complicated architectural spaces. But this, of course, is the kind of filmmaking that defines success by its adherence to the norm, not in dangerous departures from it. [16 Oct 1992, p.C]

With its emphasis on global positioning devices, Jet Skis and computer-designed surfboards, Mr. Boston's film is very much concerned with the stuff and very little with the spirit of professional surfing as practiced today.

A curiosity of the first order.

In Night on Earth, Jarmusch is painting with colors he has never used before. The transformation is thrilling.

Some scenes are banal and offensively simpleminded. But patience, ultimately, is rewarded with a welter of detail and some mighty fine camerawork.

If Zeffirelli's Hamlet does resemble an actual movie at several points, it's thanks almost entirely to the inventive and atmospheric lighting of veteran cinematographer David Watkin, whose somber, gray-green palette gives the film a dignity and substance it would otherwise lack. [18 Jan 1991]

A brilliant comeback by a filmmaker, George Armitage, who never should have been away.

Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.

Its Paris opening in 1939 was a disaster: the film was withdrawn, recut, and eventually banned by the occupying forces for its “demoralizing” effects. It was not shown again in its complete form until 1965, when it became clear that here, perhaps, was the greatest film ever made.

Makes compelling viewing. But it is viewing of an eerily familiar kind, almost as if the real-life lawyers in the film had patterned themselves on television archetypes.

The cast packs enough sexual ambiguity to satisfy the most rabid Williams fan (not to mention a screenplay by Gore Vidal), but Mankiewicz leaves much of the innuendo unexplored—thankfully, perhaps.

The large number of video jokes in Amazon Women suggests a product principally designed with the home screen in mind, and perhaps it will look sharper there. [18 Sept 1987, p.E]

The action is clotted and murky, and Coppola obviously hasn't bothered to clarify it for the members of his cast, who wander through the film with expressions of winsome, honest befuddlement.

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

The elliptical narrative centers on the unspoken erotic attraction between Sakamoto and Bowie, and Oshima appears to be treating ideas of elegantly transmogrified, purified emotions, yet the context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima.

Depending on your choice, the film is either an unpleasantly masochistic fantasy or an unpleasantly sadistic one.

Penny Marshall, the sitcom actress ("Laverne and Shirley") turned filmmaker ("Big," "Awakenings"), manages to make even such elementary material seem labored and phony. The film, which was shot in and around Chicago last summer, is a major disappointment.

The director, Peter Berg ("Very Bad Things"), keeps the predictable story line on course without developing a truly compelling momentum in the action sequences or finding anything fresh in the interaction of the stock characters.

Highly original and filmed with perfect assurance, River of Grass is one of the finest independent films of recent years.

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.

Directed by the Finnish-born Renny Harlin, it's a deft, fluid piece that rushes from one surrealist epiphany to the next, and along the way displays a craft and imagination far above the norms for the genre.

One hundred forty-nine minutes of pure, unadulterated culture.

The most delicate and nuanced of film noirs, graced with a reflective lyricism that almost lifts it out of the genre.

Mr. Allen's work is compromised by an apparent inability to match his shots in a spatially coherent fashion. It's never easy to tell who is chasing whom and in which direction, a needless confusion that dampens many of the thrills and scuttles quite a few gags.

A casually assembled Burt Reynolds vehicle, sloppy and loose in an amiable way.

A study of junkie culture from the inside (not a fashionable point of view these days), Drugstore Cowboy is funny, depressive and strangely noble, often all at once. [27 Oct 1989]

Over the Top is pretty much like all of the other successful Stallone films, which probably means that it will be a success, too. In fact, it`s considerably better than the ragged, recycled Rocky IV, though it lacks the wild excesses that made Rambo and Cobra campily entertaining.

The messages blend seamlessly into the fantasy and comedy in what is surely one of the best films for older children in quite some time.

Instantly forgettable film.

A gripping and pungent film noir, in which the hard facts and sharp emotions of a police thriller are softened by a subtle drift toward dreaminess and moody abstraction. [19 Apr 1991, p.C]

The film is madly, compulsively overcontrolled, from its funereal pacing to its pristine red, white and blue color scheme; those moments when it loses its dignity are irresistibly comic, and in this grim context, infinitely precious.[16 Mar 1990, p.B]

It's bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying. Studio pressure apparently forced Murch to back off from the full fury of his conception, but this is still strong stuff.

The movie`s underlying message seems to be that racial harmony can best be achieved by allowing white boys to beat the stuffing out of minority kids- that`s what really earns their love and respect. There must be a better way.

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

Almost an hour of self-indulgent psychedelics, it's nearly impossible to watch.

Even when informed by Douglas' characteristic intensity, Spartacus has no real identity apart from "the common man"; at his side, the beautiful Jean Simmons is never anything more than Spartacus' chick - the proof that he's a manly man, as opposed to those mincing Roman aristocrats. Whatever Trumbo's progressive leanings, he was not past equating homosexuality with unspeakable evil and perversion.

Predictably impersonal and uninspired.

Emerges as an engaging if occasionally hokey inspirational melodrama about the importance of community in the face of life's disappointments.

Wind is a vigorous and colorful piece of filmmaking that never quite shakes free of an embarrassingly trite, formulaic screenplay. [11 Sep 1992, p.H]

Assorted ladies, a few quick lines, and one good chase, making for a mediocre entry in the series.

Mr. Kelemer captures the sad textures of the Rogala brothers' lives with an appropriate balance of sympathy and detachment.

Selleck's persona can seem coherent and mildly pleasant in the airless, miniature world of series television, but when he walks into the larger, more physical world of movies he melts away. There's too great a disparity between his bulk and his whining delivery, and he carries himself awkwardly on screen, as if he knew he was taking up too much space. [3 Feb 1989, p.A]

An ungainly blend of Monty Python, The Goldbergs, and My Favorite Spy.

Smooth and smoky, The Fabulous Baker Boys is an impressive debut for Kloves; he's a filmmaker who will be heard from. [13 Oct 1989, p.A]

Even the walls seem to be sweating something viscous and unpleasant.

George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.

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.

Brian De Palma has always been a derivative filmmaker, pilfering indiscriminately from Alfred Hitchcock (Sisters), John Ford (The Untouchables) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blowout). But his failed new thriller Raising Cain makes him seem a startlingly incompetent one as well. [07 Aug 1992, p.14]

This 1945 picture is much more felicitous than Christmas Holiday, the bizarre film noir that followed, though not nearly as memorable.

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]

For what it is, it ain't bad, though it serves mainly as an illustration of the ancient quandary of revisionist moviemakers: if all you do is systematically invert cliches, you simply end up creating new ones.

At once highly naturalistic and dreamily abstract, playing out its mythic themes through vibrantly detailed characterizations (and remarkable performances by the entire cast). The Return announces the arrival of a major new talent.

It's almost too rich in ideas for its own good: The sense of concentration and proportion isn't there. But it remains an astonishing, magnetic, devastating piece of work. [23 Sept 1988]

The crosscutting between the two plot lines is so feeble and intrusive that it destroys whatever faint narrative momentum the film possesses.

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.

The director, Henry Hathaway, is another old veteran, and the cinematographer is the great Lucien Ballard, but somehow it comes off like a TV celebrity roast.

Winkler's New York is a crowded, bustling place, with construction work on practically ever street corner, yet it has none of the lurid, hothouse atmosphere of a Martin Scorsese film. The cinematography, by the invaluable Tak Fujimoto, is airy and cool, graced by floating camera movements that follow the characters without dogging or confining them. [23 Oct 1992, p.ACN]

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.

Most impressive, and the only segment that dares to criticize the terrorists directly, is Mr. Imamura's contribution, the last part of the film.

Comic book stuff, helped out by the presence of Rae Dawn Chong as an airline stewardess whose sarcastic commentary adds some comic counterpoint to the deliberately overscaled action.

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 marred by Spielberg's usual carelessness with narrative points, the film alternates sweetness and sarcasm with enough rhetorical sophistication to be fairly irresistible.

Handsome, well-executed film that nonetheless feels a bit long at 111 minutes. Those who are already anime fans will certainly find it stimulating; but this may not be the one to convert the uninitiated.

Cary Medoway uses backlighting and spatially distorting lenses to give the film the hyped-up look of a rock video, but his handling of actors is so inept that he must rely on the rock score to make the most basic emotional points.

A terrifically entertaining comedy-thriller, perfectly crafted by Stanley Donen from an ingenious screenplay by Peter Stone.

It's an intimate psychological story laced with references to Hollywood movies.

Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn’t survive on television; it should be seen in a theater or not at all.

Veers between the light naturalism of American television and the pulsing melodrama of Bollywood entertainment.

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.

It's not his most satisfying, full-bodied work, though it does provide many of the Woo pleasures. [18 Jun 1993]

The quintessential American love story --the one between the spoiled heiress and the spontaneous, fun-loving guy from the wrong side of the tracks--has seldom been more elegantly and entertainingly told.

It's a particularly great pleasure to encounter Quick Change, a wonderfully loose and graceful character comedy. [13 Jul 990, p.C]

Ford's admirers have rightly tended to play this down in favor of his later and more personal westerns, but there's much to admire here in Gregg Toland's sun-beaten photography and Henry Fonda's meticulous performance as Steinbeck's dashboard saint, Tom Joad.

A cleverly written thriller in which he and Jim Belushi portray corrupt police detectives whose actions unleash an unpredictable chain of sometimes dire, sometimes hilarious events. [8 Oct 1997, p.32]

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.

It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films, but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.

A grisly extravaganza with an acute moral intelligence. The graphic special effects (which sometimes suggest a shotgun Jackson Pollock) are less upsetting than Romero's way of drawing the audience into the violence.

Mr. Cattaneo restricts himself to the smiling blandness that has become the stock in trade of British comedies made for export, turning in a film that is forced, familiar and thoroughly condescending.

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.

It was the most assured film Coppola had made in a decade, full of casual wit and visual invention. And even though the split narrative doesn't quite cohere, Coppola wins an amazingly high proportion of his risky bets, including a finale that takes off into total abstraction.

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

The film is more strange than good, yet its self-conscious treatment of the politics of beauty seems eerily prescient.

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.

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]

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

Its luxuriant, nearly three-hour running time allows lots of room for spectacular musical numbers and dramatic climaxes that are extended to the breaking point and beyond.

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]

This was one of De Palma's early efforts, and its excesses can be chalked up to youthful enthusiasm—the ideas seem appealingly audacious even when they misfire, which is more often than not.

A movie about a pair of garbagemen that falls into the general category of refuse. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

Marked for Death is, even by the xenophobic standards of the recent action genre, uncommonly racist and misogynistic.

Friedkin isn't nearly in enough control of his material for the film to qualify as an artwork, yet it's one of his few films with a real emotional current.

It`s patently impossible to maintain the realism required for suspense in such a strained and silly context, though that doesn`t stop Ritchie from trying.

The second film version (1964) of Ernest Hemingway's short story, directed by Don Siegel with far more energy than Robert Siodmak could muster for his overrated 1946 effort.

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]

Even as the SF cliches fall fast and heavy, this is great to look at, thanks to the sumptuous MGM sets and the fine animation and matte work by Walt Disney Studios.

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

Sylvester Stallone's follow-up to his runaway success of 1976 is a little more threadbare in spots than the original, but it still has some conviction and spunk.

Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

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.

Each of these stories is terribly sad and terribly moving in its own right. Yet the film that Mr. Corcuera has spun around them only increases the viewer's sense of helplessness and passivity. No solutions are suggested, no actions are proposed, no reflection is invited. The misery of these people becomes just another voyeuristic spectacle, to be consumed and forgotten.

Though undoubtedly a vanity project -- the music clearances alone must have cost much more than the film could ever hope to gross -- it functions pleasantly enough as an exercise in free association.

The Walt Disney animators returned to top form with this beautifully crafted and wonderfully expressive cartoon feature, the first major work to come out of the Disney studios in a decade. There are limitations to Disney's naturalistic style, but for every failure of imagination there is a triumph of craftsmanship.

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

Despite the sophistication of the source material, this 1984 film isn't particularly successful: Petersen insists on forcing the superficial moral lessons, and the half hour removed from the film by its American distributors leaves it with a harsh, choppy rhythm.

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]

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

Glen's style...goes for the measured and elegant over the flashy and excessive.

As the perfect crystallization of 50s ideology the film would be fascinating enough, but the special effects in this 1953 George Pal production also achieve a kind of dark, burnished apocalyptic beauty.

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]

Sunny, pleasant, squeaky-clean family film in which nothing surprising happens, and that is the point. Ms. Wood has a poise and wistfulness beyond her years, and she seems likely to follow the path of the child star Diane Lane into more nuanced adult roles.

This 1958 film by Yasujiro Ozu (his first in color) is gentle, spare, and ultimately elusive, in a quietly satisfying way. [07 May 2009, p.28]

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.

Brian De Palma has gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of his 1984 thriller represents the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he's ever done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences.

A brilliantly crafted work and a remarkably moving experience.

The director, Hal Ashby, has affected a restrained, understated style to match the subtlety and precision of Sellers's performance. No one seems to know what to do with the allegorical undertone of Jerzy Kosinski's script, but as a whole this 1979 film maintains a fine level of wit, sophistication, and insight.

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.

Has the undiscriminating temperament of a fan, blithely placing Mr. Coppola's magnificently made "Godfather" on the same plane as Mr. Hopper's slapped-together, and today all but unwatchable, "Easy Rider."

The film never transcends the racist, sexist, neofascist implications of its base material, but it works entertainingly within them, and even manages a bit of auto-analysis in John Candy's ironic, adolescent narration of the "Den" episode. Better than it had to be, for which some honor is due.

One of the loveliest of Nick Ray's movies: this 1952 feature begins as a harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism reminiscent of Frank Borzage.

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]

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

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.

Parents may not approve of this dark, violent 1981 children's film, which is what makes it such a good one. The film is resolutely, passionately antiadult, yet much of the humor has an adult sophistication and edge to it; this is one kids' movie that doesn't condescend.

The violence of Class of 1999 is so extreme, so redundant and so meaningless that Lester ends by nullifying his own message - it seems that brutality in the name of law and order is wrong, but that brutality in the name of entertainment is just fine. [11 May 1990, p.E]

The film is an impressive technical achievement: the full-figure animation is dimensional and elegant, the perspectives imaginative, and the color design superb. But without the (old) Disney genius for emotional structure and character design, the results are rather flat—the film concentrates on Disney horror and trauma without the relief of Disney charm.

I wanted to like it more than I did, but it'll do.

Everyone concedes that this 1941 Hitchcock film is a failure, yet it displays so much artistic seriousness that I find its failure utterly mysterious—especially since the often criticized ending (imposed on Hitchcock by the studio) makes perfect sense to me.

Garris, filming mainly in a bobbing and weaving, hand-held camera style, keeps the scenes pared down to their functional essentials, wisely substituting speed for nuance. Sleepwalkers gets the job done. [13 Apr 1992, p.5C]

Ultimately feels like a clinical study without wider resonance.

Mingling a frank trashiness with unexpected ambition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow emerges as one of the more commanding horror movies of recent months.

You get the plot, all right, but that's all you get - no body, no texture, no rhythm, no shading.

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

Typical Nilsson mix of the audacious and the cringe-inducing.

Amos & Andrew, written and directed by E. Max Frye, relates the intersection of these two different destinies, in a style that ranges from roaring farce to biting satire. [05 Mar 1993, p.C2]

Broadcast News is the crispest, classiest entertainment; it has what Hollywood has been missing. [16 Dec 1987, p.8]

Only adds to the sense that Mr. Konchalovsky has lost his artistic moorings. He has certainly lost his common sense.

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

Nick and Nora investigate a jazz-club killing in this final entry (1947) in the series, which gets by—just barely—on the charm of stars William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Craven has proven himself a talented director of horror films on several occasions, from Last House on the Left to A Nightmare on Elm Street. But this time he's chosen a project that plays not at all to his abilities, which lie with the creation of isolated, disturbing images rather than with the careful sustaining of suspense through story-telling. [13 Oct 1986, p.5C]

Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 noir fable is highly derivative in its overall conception, but it finds some freshness in its details. All in all, this evokes the spirit of James M. Cain more effectively than the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice did.

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.

A numbing combination of sloppy writing, vulgar art direction, high school acting, and bungled special effects—in short, par for the course for venerable hack Michael Anderson.

In trying to reproduce the griot's tone, Mr. Kouyaté rejects psychological nuance and dramatic shading: this is a tale that advances quickly and boldly, peopled by deliberately one-dimensional characters.

Wilder's strategy is to play a bubbly romantic comedy in a mise-en-scene of destruction and despair. As usual, it's more clever than meaningful, but this 1948 film is one of his most satisfactory in wit and pace.

It seems a small miracle that The Manchurian Candidate is able to maintain its mad balancing act as long as it does. That the film slips near the end is a sign of how very hard it is. [11 Mar 1988, p.A]

If Licence to Kill has one of Bond`s best heavies, it also has one of his best heroines in Carey Lowell, a strapping brunet who plays an ex-Army pilot reluctantly enrolled on Bond`s side. Lowell`s line readings may be only adequate, but she moves with the grace and vigor an action movie needs.

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

Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric.

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

Called upon to do little more than imitate the mannerisms of their French predecessors, Nolte and Short seem hemmed in and desperately uncomfortable. [27 Jan 1989, p.A]

An enjoyable, noisy romp.

The film strains mightily to be flashy and hip but finishes more in the realm of the merely distasteful.

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.

Orson Welles's 1946 film reproduces his personal themes of self-scrutiny and self-destruction only in outline, though it is an inventive, highly enjoyable thriller.

Here is one performer (Testud) whose features -- small sad eyes, sharp nose, wide rueful smile -- can sustain a feature by themselves.

The material is nothing but a mass of programmed emotions and bumptious rabble rousing, but that isn't enough for Clark—he's got to make it even dumber by filling it with gross caricatures, incoherent action, and Irish music. And what this man does to actors, I wouldn't do to cockroaches.

Norman Jewison's literal-mindedness actually helps squeeze some of the goo from the material.

Probably should have stayed on a shelf back in Paris.

A genuine charmer by George Roy Hill, a director best known for such ersatz charmers as Butch Cassidy and The Sting. His crowd-pleasing instincts have been subsumed by a bracing technical assurance here; the contrivances are still there, but they're presented with a smooth and rare professionalism.

As usual, blood flows freely and gratuitously, but you could do worse.

Jarmusch's eye for blighted landscape (he films in a grainy black and white) is hilariously sharp, and he sends his performers on their zomboid rounds with a keen sense of rhythm and interplay.

Valmont is a superb piece of craftsmanship, impeccable in every detail from lighting to costuming, but as a work of art it remains tentative and blurred. [17 Nov 1989]

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.

Better than it might have been, given the limitations of this kind of brand-name filmmaking. Hodges doesn't shirk his duties, and though the film lapses too often into easy facetiousness, much of it feels surprisingly substantial. The action moves smoothly and logically, finding a rhythm that engages your attention despite the patent lack of inspiration and genuine commitment.

Ken Kwapis' Dunston Checks In contains not a single surprising moment. But it is well crafted enough to squeak by. Kids should get a few laughs from it. Accompanying adults will be only moderately bored. [12 Jan 1996, p.33]

What gives it the Cronenberg feel, in spite of the complete absence of his standard themes, is his manner of filming the dragsters: they become, like the horrible growths that usually dominate his movies, the physical projection of the characters' hostile energies, weapons they use to act out the psychological conflicts that torture them off the track.

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]

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.

Irons' Von Bulow is easily the most attractive and entertaining movie heavy since James Mason's villain in ''North by Northwest,'' a figure with whom he shares a taste for elegant homes and wry understatement. [17 Oct 1990]

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]

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

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.

The movie is never less than entertaining, but it fails to satisfy—it gives us too little of too much. Oddly, much of its pleasure is in the acting, which up to this point hadn't been Carpenter's strong suit: Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton offer excellent turns.

Slick and often funny, but the smugness of the satire and the stunted emotions are finally wearying.

Should soon join Mr. Greenaway's last few efforts in obscurity.

There are subtitles to reduce everything to simple English declarative sentences. This gives the viewer a decidedly unfair advantage over the characters: we can understand what they cannot and are invited to laugh at their mutual incomprehension.

It binds up introductory lessons in music appreciation, Freudian psychology, and fanciful history with a pulp thriller plot.

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 sinister mise-en-scene is compromised only by a few overripe lines from screenwriter Steve Shagan, and Reynolds reveals himself as an actor of depth and complexity.

It's as if Russ Meyer had made "Death Wish III" with an adenoidal cast, though it isn't that good.

Kindergarten Cop never feels mercenary in the manner of, say, "Look Who's Talking Too" or "Three Men and a Little Lady." It is, instead, an extremely amiable, good-hearted film, unashamed of its desire to please and quite entertaining for it. [21 Dec 1990, p.B]

The film never moves far from the conventions of Italian sex farces—that is, it’s a comedy of embarrassment and frustration—but the flip Marxism adds a little flavor.

Plays more like a catalog than a movie... a tedious, unimaginative affair.

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.

This 1970 feature was the directorial debut of Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home, Being There), and for a first effort it isn't that bad.

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.

What's left is a curiously disconnected illustration of American racism, which nevertheless fails to realize the power and irony inherent in its pop-Marxist analysis.

The surface plausibility is probably the contribution of Marlon Brando, whose performance has strength and detail enough to counterbalance Bertolucci's taste for pure psychological essence.

It is indeed the kind of movie - crude and anarchic, filled with shotgun satire and gross-out jokes - designed to drive parents crazy and fill adolescent hearts with joy. For unfastidious adults, too, it's a great time at the movies, maniacally and often breathtakingly funny. [15 Jun 1990, p.B]

It`s shoddy, lazy and numbingly stupid.

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]

But where Dante's cynicism ultimately carried the day over Spielberg's piousness in Gremlins, Explorers remains a hopelessly schizophrenic film, obscenely eager to compromise its own originality.

Bob Hoskins gives a growly, charismatic performance as the kingpin brought low by phantom forces over the course of an Easter weekend, and there’s a political theme that asserts itself with nicely rising force.

A spare, painterly and scrupulously unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants massed at the United States border.

Professionalism is both Nothing in Common's greatest strength and its greatest limitation. It's a very finely crafted piece, a product of hard work and careful consideration, yet nothing breaks through the craft--there's no personal drive to it.

Muddled on the issues, but it earned its Oscar as a dramatic, involving story, full of tough and appealing characters. (Review of Original Release)

Maquiling creates an unusual and intriguing tone somewhere between sharp, deadpan comedy and a soft, dreamy surrealism.

Contains some gaspingly funny moments. [29 July 1988, Friday, p.A]

Three short films drawn from the Milne tales by the Disney studio, yoked together to make a feature in 1977. Their charm is undeniable, though it mainly resides in the source material: the late 60s, when these were made, were Disney's darkest days for craft and commitment.

The picture isn't bad, really—it's just a little too soft and eager to please, like the family films (circus pictures and suchlike) that John Wayne made in the 60s to soften his image.

A critic-proof movie if there ever was one: it isn't all that good, but somehow it's great.

Director Claire Denis has attempted a meditative mood piece on the intertwined themes of colonialism and forbidden love. It's difficult, in fact, to tell which is the metaphor for which. But while the movie's tone is impeccably muted, and though its horizontally composed images are striking, and its dramatic rhythms are subtle and sure, there is something gnawingly simplistic in the conception. [12 May 1989, p.A]

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.