Dave Kehr

Mario Van Peebles, of course, inhabits a very different world from that of his father: a world that his father, in some small way, helped to create. It is his awareness of this paradox, of the progressive import of his father's film and of the repressive import of his father's personality, that informs this modest but interesting work.

Though the film isn't as psychologically penetrating as some of Disney's later work, it retains the Freudian ferocity of the Grimm brothers fairy tale, as well as a fair measure of the scatological humor of the Disney shorts. David Hand was the supervising director, but Uncle Walt passed on every frame.

The Living End is not a movie even vaguely interested in attracting a wide public. It's a movie meant to please its own niche audience, and at that it seems likely to succeed.

Nolte does his standard lovable-lug routine with his usual ease and assurance, though a more daring producer might have allowed Madsen, stranded again in a second-banana role, to step up to the lead. This crafty, insinuating actor has been ready for his closeup for a while now. Can't somebody make him a star? [26 Apr 1996, p.47]

Child's Play would probably be sickening if it weren't so relentlessly stupid.

There's a lot of allegorical baggage on board, but the film's virtues lie in its relative simplicity.

Glen's willingness to give the action sequences a certain weight and seriousness produces some genuinely exciting moments, yet his work is everywhere undermined by the flatness of the characterizations and the uncertain architecture of the plot. Still, Maud Adams makes a nice impression and Roger Moore has shed some of his smarminess.

The sentiments expressed are really no more noble or refined than those of a Chuck Norris picture, though Joano's style tries to stamp art all over the sequence. It sure isn't that, but it isn't good action either. [14 Sep 1990, p.B]

One of the shining glories of the American musical, this 1952 feature was fabricated (by screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green) around a collection of old songs written by producer Arthur Freed and brought to bright, brash, and exuberant life by directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The setting is Hollywood's troubled transition to sound, and there is just enough self-reflexive content (on the eternal battle between illusion and reality in the movies) to structure the film's superb selection of numbers.

As silly as it sounds, but strangely dull.

As played by the smooth-faced, cheerful Lou Diamond Phillips, there seems to be something almost supernatural about the young man of La Bamba. He's a chosen one, and his rise to the top will be swift and smooth. If only he could shake those nightmares about a crashing plane . . . . [24 July 1987, p.A]

Impeccably liberal in its time, the film has not aged gracefully, although Dorothy Dandridge's performance in the lead remains a testimony to a black cinema that might have been.

This is filmmaking meant to engage the heart-and other visceral organs-more than the mind; its effects are simple, broad and directly put.

The film's real subject is the unacknowledged intensity of the father-daughter bond and the difficulty of separation, though Shyer, true to his name, shies away from the more painful implications of the material. [20 Dec 1991, p.B]

The movie is as flat and plain as a television program, and most of the supporting characters (including Louise Fletcher as a kindly schoolmarm) seem equally two-dimensional, as if they had wandered in from the set of "The Andy Griffith Show."

This 1983 feature was Carpenter's best film since Halloween but still couldn't recapture the perfect balance of visceral shock and narrative integrity that defined his first success.

Works because it's able to draw so many side issues into its central conflict, spreading its concerns culture-wide. [11 Dec 1992]

A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film.

Drawing purely on his technical skills, Reynolds is finally able to get some momentum going in the picture's final half-hour, when a defeated Robin musters the remains of his band and makes a last-ditch attempt on the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle. It seems to be enough to erase memories of the movie's painfully slow start and send the audience out reasonably happy and stimulated. But Robin Hood does not seem to be the defining blockbuster this summer still needs.

The camera work is so self-conscious and so intrusive that it consistently overrides our interest in the characters and their individual dramas.

It has a few good laughs in it thanks to Murphy, but mainly depends for its appeal on an uncomfortable manipulation of racial stereotypes. [04 Dec 1992]

At 70 minutes, Cupid's Mistake is short, but then, so is our time on this planet.

The film is full of carefully balanced moral proclamations, to the point where it begins to resemble an episode of "Nightline." [15 Jan 1988, p.B]

Universal's classic from 1931, directed by Tod Browning. The opening scenes, set in Dracula's castle, are magnificent—grave, stately, and severe. But the film becomes unbearably static once the action moves to England, and much of the morbid sexual tension is dissipated.

The mise-en-scene tends toward a painterly abstraction, as Hitchcock employs powerful masses, blank colors, and studiously unreal, spatially distorted settings. Theme and technique meet on the highest level of film art.

Awakenings is a film that unquestionably succeeds on its own terms, though those terms are deeply suspect. It is a canny piece of false art, one that consistently swaps meaning for superficial effect. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]

Richard Marquand's dull, literal direction takes all the edge off this variant on the “Will he kiss her or kill her?” formula.

The crazy color schemes and visual effects once made this a popular head picture, though you'd have to be stoned to tolerate the score, which includes The Candy Man.