Dave Kehr

It lacks a certain grace in execution, but this SF/romantic comedy-thriller, directed by Nicholas Meyer from his own novel, is clever and well calculated.

The final shoot-out remains a classic study in mise-en-scene, as Mann transforms a jagged landscape into a highly charged psychological battleground.

There's some solid talent here, but Gottlieb's overemphatic direction reduces them all to broad caricature--the kind of crazed mugging that isn't often seen outside the boundaries of Saturday morning kiddie shows. [13 Feb 1987, p.A]

Heightened emotion and nagging banal reality fight each other for screen space, doing final battle in a daringly ambiguous ending.

The miracle of Murnau’s mise-en-scene is to fill the simple plot and characters with complex, piercing emotions, all evoked visually through a dense style that embraces not only spectacular expressionism but a subtle and delicate naturalism.

A Grin Without a Cat is a work of extraordinary journalism, but it is also a work of deft and subtle poetry, visual (in the rhyming of gestures and shapes across images and sequences) as much as verbal.

Somehow Christie’s talent shines through this muck, and Laurence Harvey gets to do an entertaining George Sanders impression as the leader of the revels.

A serious disappointment, recommended only for inveterate Disney fans and very young people.

A sweet, well-intended picture, but like its title character, it is not quite good enough for the big leagues.

Chain Reaction never develops a sense of mounting energy. The action sequences are thinly conceived and too spread out by dramatic filler (mainly involving the crises of conscience of Morgan Freeman, as the project's enigmatic chief fund-raiser) to create much momentum. [2 Aug 1996, p.45]

A minor addition to the tiny genre of feminist science fiction films

Never backing off from big, emotional moments, but also fleshing out the necessary transitions between them, he has realized his finest movie. It's a renaissance for Mr. Schultz, who seems to be speaking with his own voice after all these years.

The main problem here is less a lack of competence than a lack of conviction. No one involved in the film believes for a second in the story that's being told, and so there is no real sense of danger, no suspense, and no warmth in the romantic interludes. Shanghai Surprise must have been meant to be a light-hearted romp, but even a romp requires a touch of substance. [31 Aug 1986, p.8]

Has the bad luck to come on the heels of Kathryn Bigelow's beautifully made and politically impassioned "K-19," making this submarine picture -- a relatively modest, low-budget affair -- seem skimpy by comparison.

No admirer of Mr. von Trier's work should miss this compelling rarity.

The script is funny and observant, full of shocks of recognition, but for all his progress as a writer, Allen's direction remains disconcertingly amateurish. Still, it remains perhaps the only film in which Allen has been able to successfully imagine a personality other than his own.

This 1981 film drips with a sense of anger and betrayal that seems wildly out of scale to its cause—the discovery (less than original) that musicals don't reproduce social reality. The point is made endlessly, though it's in the film's favor that it's made with seriousness, consideration, and a certain amount of imagination.

The film is generous and often gentle. With Bill Murray, very likable as a head counselor who gruffly plays Wallace Beery to an updated, angst-ridden Jackie Cooper (Chris Makepeace).

Mr. Gudmundsson has created a sleek, light and entertaining work, with a few contrasting pockets of darkness and mystery.

Looks like a Saturday morning cartoon (the characters all wear color-coded costumes) and unfortunately feels like one, too, with its thin characterizations, largely arbitrary action and feeble jokes.

With her shaved head and staring eyes, Aman actually looks as if she had been stripped entirely of her sexuality, like a Holocaust victim. What does seem certain is that a bootleg print of "Yentl" is still making its way through Iran's filmmaking underground, leaving a wide trail of influence behind it.

Villainy toward the infant class now comes from Jon Voight, descending to the depths of his 37-year-career.

Redford's inability to suggest any irony about himself finally sinks it—it's the only sanctimonious satire you'll ever see.

The film is best when it takes itself seriously, worst when it takes the easy way out into giggly camp--as it does, finally and fatally, when Lex Luthor enters the action; Gene Hackman plays the arch-villain like a hairdresser left over from a TV skit.

The effects are done with playfulness, zest, and some imagination (they range from a barker batting paddleballs in your face to a murderer leaping from the row in front of you), making this the most entertaining of the gimmick 3-Ds.

The movie assumes its multiculturalism with grace and humor, moving between its various worlds with a delighted eye for distinguishing features and a rich sense of character. [14 Feb 1992, p.B7]

As the temptingly pure and fragile Englishwoman, Grace Kelly was closer to Ford’s sympathy and understanding, but Gardner walks off with the movie and the man.

Photographed in murky yellows and browns by John Alonzo, this 1979 film is sluggish and vague, trivializing its subject in a wash of unearned sentimentality.

Coscarelli has captured the texture of a disjointed, half-remembered nightmare, full of figures and events that seem to have some symbolic value, but which have lost their precise meaning in the process of floating up from the subconscious.

An unfocused, overplotted, painfully derivative comic fantasy.

No matter how you look at it, "The Name of the Rose" is a film best summarized by lists. It's a collection of elements, some well chosen and some less so, that never comes together into a coherent whole. For everything the movie has--which is, by and large, the best that money can buy--it doesn't have a director, someone who can take all the pieces and put them together into a vision. [24 Oct 1986, p.AC]

Mann understands that mood is more important than plausibility in a thriller, and you could cut the mood here with a knife.

There is little of the gratuitous hysteria that usually mars Lumet's work, and David Himmelstein's busy script (no less than four campaigns are covered, when one or two would do) keeps things moving, though at the price of losing track of a couple of significant subplots.

The animation is imaginatively conceived, but stiffly executed. A Fantasia designed for heads, the film does no more justice to the music than Disney's artists did. But Disney had the excuse of innocence, whereas this shrewdly conceived commercial project does not.

A moment or two between Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley recall the verbal skills of Levinson's Diner; the rest of the film is bloatedly “visual”: blinding backlighting, grandiose slow motion, overstudied montage.

Successfully avoids the grandiose mythmaking that has been the bane of the baseball movie from ''Pride of the Yankees'' to ''The Natural.'' Rather than a vapid national epic, it is a warm, droll, deftly cracked romantic comedy. [15 June 1988]

Given the current political climate, it's hard to see how any film about Christopher Columbus could make everybody happy, and indeed, Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise seems unlikely to leave too many ticket buyers smiling.

Biloxi Blues also wants to be a confessional, coming-of-age memoir, but again, it works better around the edges than it does in its central conception.

Everyone seems sincere and bursting with energy, yet there is a strange lack of conviction: Forman has taken the honorable route by refusing to treat the material as easy nostalgia, but the confrontational sentiments no longer have the substance to survive his straightforward presentation.

The world of Wall Street is that of a lush soap opera-"Dynasty" with a moral. It gets the barn burning, all right, but it has no impact. [11 Dec 1987, p.A]

Brighton Beah, curiously, still doesn`t work on film, perhaps because movies have no use for stagecraft, no matter how brilliant it may be. Once there`s no practical reason to keep the action restricted to a single set --movies, of course, can go anywhere--Simon`s strategic skills come to seem superfluous, if not an actual liability.

A feel-good documentary.

Though the idea of the therapy appears to be the demystification of sex, the filming, with its voyeuristic detachment and curious prudishness (no genitals are shown), serves only to perpetuate the familiar fetishistic mechanisms.

CRUSHingly unfunny. [24 Dec 1997, p.34]

The one Welles film that deserves to be called lovely; there is also a rising tide of opinion that proclaims it his masterpiece.

For those looking for a vacation from the irony and the cruelty that have invaded so much of American popular culture, this scruffy little Indian film is a delightful getaway.

Tati hasn’t quite solved the structural problem he posed for himself, but if the film isn’t wholly satisfying, it’s still a very witty and suggestive work from the modern cinema’s only answer to Chaplin and Keaton.

What sinks this one is the utter lack of the childhood insight and sympathy that really give the Disney films their staying power.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

Paul Mazursky hasn’t only remade Jean Renoir’s sublime 1931 Boudu Saved From Drowning: he’s yuppified it, inverting virtually every meaning until the film becomes a celebration of the crassest kind of materialism.

Directed with great skill and intelligence by Joseph Ruben, Return to Paradise, is a rare thing among today's movies a drama of conscience. [14 Aug1 998, Pg.51]

Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour on an average journey, enlivened by the strange antics of a forgotten vaudeville team called the Wiere Brothers, who do acrobatic stunts and shout “You’re in the groove, Jackson!” on cue.

An action director, Hathaway isn’t quite at home with this claustrophobic, motel-bound story of adultery and murder, but he gives it his all, most famously in the Freudian rampage that climaxes the film.

A character comedy requires some notion of respect and integrity. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels has none. [14 Dec 1988, p.1]

A limp, cheaply made version of the Broadway. Director Randal Kleiser shows no real sense of how a musical is constructed: the songs are bunched together, the production numbers don't move, and the whole project shifts awkwardly between naturalism and stylization.

This 1958 feature is thin stuff, seriously intended but not involving.

Relentlessly bright and superficial, even when the subject turns to self-destruction.

William Friedkin's direction of this 1970 film adaptation (made the year before The French Connection) doesn't do much more than underline the flaws in the material: every scene is shaped to build to the same forced hysteria.

The film is actually fairly well made, with a brisk tempo pace, a professional look and enough competently staged action.

There's little doubt that Jacob's Ladder is a failure-it's a messy, unsatisfying and often overreaching film-yet it fails in interesting, ambitious ways. It's a must-see disaster. [2 Nov 1990, p.C]

Richard Attenborough's direction achieves that balance of impersonality and brisk pacing we've come to recognize as "professionalism," and he doesn't clog up the dancing with too many stylistic gimmicks.

FernGully is surprisingly courageous in its politics and adventurous in its stylistic choices.

The film gets in trouble, as most contemporary comedies do, when it runs out of disassociated gags and casts about desperately for a story to tell; here, the lonely guy premise is dropped completely for a series of more-or-less conventional romantic misunderstandings centered on a dull Judith Ivey.

Even and assured, Colors may not descend to the sloppy, indulgent depths of ''Easy Rider'' and ''The Last Movie,'' but neither does it rise to the delirious, dangerous heights of those films. [15 Apr 1988]

A surprisingly well-made action movie with a definite directorial personality. [03 Sep 1986, p.7C]

There is enough intelligence and craftsmanship in the execution of Hoosiers to make it seem, if not exactly fresh, at least respectably entertaining. [27 Feb 1987, Friday, p.A]

For Keitel, this is the Scorsese film that Scorsese never gave him, in which he gets to elbow Robert De Niro away from center stage and take the best part for himself. He seizes the opportunity: Bad Lieutenant immediately becomes one of the defining roles of his career. [22 Jan 1993, Friday, p.C]

A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.

Whimsical fluff (1967) that weighs in on the far side of 50 tons; it's so clumsy and pounding that taking a child to it might be grounds for a visit from family services.

The film unfolds as a tired, thoroughly conventional police procedural that might as well be titled "CSI: Roma."

The film is a classic, and deservedly so: the conjunction of Tracy's sly listlessness and Hepburn's stridency defines "chemistry" in the movies.

The picture is a smeary, dreary mess from start to finish.

The sudden, radical change of tone is something far beyond Mr. McKay's nascent abilities as a filmmaker, and Crush never really rights itself.

Carpenter displays an almost perfect understanding of the mechanics of classical suspense; his style draws equally (and intelligently) from both Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock.

With last week's elections in South Africa finally pointing the way toward a dismantlement of apartheid, it can't be said that the timing of "The Power of One" is particularly astute. But this is a film with no particular relationship to the real world in any case. [27 March 1992, p.M]

Isn't very successful at evoking the dream state, but does a good job of inducing it.

Made in 1937 by a relatively young and innocent Alfred Hitchcock, this British feature tends to be overshadowed by The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, but actually it’s only the uncharismatic casting that holds it back from being one of the most entertaining of Hitchcock’s English films.

The best visual design in the world doesn't mean a thing unless there's someone around with a rudimentary sense of story. Jeff Bridges, playing the human hero sucked into the machine, has to carry the film's entire burden of charm and appeal; he seems to have freaked out under the strain, turning in some surpassingly weird, alienating work.

Ashby is excellent on atmosphere but fair to middling on character. When the film makes a sudden transition from epic to melodrama, things fall apart.

Seen in the context of Roman Polanski's career it becomes something rich and strange, shaded into terror by the naturalistic absurdism that is the basis of Polanski's style.

Despite Leigh's and Lang's perfectly decent performances, the film never gathers a shred of credibility - perhaps on purpose, for that is what transforms its bleak vision into cruel comedy, making it possible to laugh comfortably at the characters. [11 May 1990, p.C]

What was wonderful in the Kurosawa film—the recruiting and training of the mercenaries—is just dead time here, though the icon-heavy cast helps out: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, and Robert Vaughn.

The gags in A Fine Mess aren't particularly inspired (there's a lot of eye-gouging and groin-kicking), but Edwards' stylistic assurance often has enabled him to do a lot more with a lot less. He's off his game in this one --lingering a fraction of a second too long over gags that don't deserve it, cutting up the action into two or three shots when a single image would have expressed the idea more clearly--and the results are pretty grim. [8 Aug 1986, p.AC]

The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford.

In a misguided attempt to break up the monotonous flow of talking heads, the filmmakers have inserted oddly chosen clips from newsreels and public-domain features, meant to illustrate abstract concepts (like eavesdropping or government) while generating some low-level laughs.

Has no local cultural history behind it. Its secondhand imagery and ideas seem to have barely involved its makers; it definitely does not involve its audience.

Carol Reed's careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed descended to in the last years of his career.

Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience--a kind of Kenneth Anger version of "Star Wars." (Review of Original Release)

Good, grungy fun.

Sex, lies, and videotape discovers a distinctive, laconic rhythm right from the start, thanks to Soderbergh's taste for holding his shots just a bit longer than conventional, slick editing technique would allow. [11 Aug 1989, Friday, p.A]

Though the costumes are beautifully designed, the chateau locations carefully chosen and the dialogue full of curling locutions, something cloddish and naive still comes through in Frears' direction, and not only because he can seldom get his shots to match. [13 Jan 1989, Friday, p.A]

Makavejev's ripping political/scatological wit isn't much in evidence, and the long middle section—involving Roberts's efforts to close down independent bottler Bill Kerr—is soggy and too familiar, but the film lives in a hundred different eccentric details and niceties of execution.

The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum.

The character designs are flat and derivative, the backgrounds crude and uninviting, and the movements jerky and minimal. It's a sad excuse for a movie, but then, it isn't really meant to be one. It's a commercial with a ticket price.

Bill Murray is the star of this pleasant 1981 comedy, but the late-60s values he incarnates (skepticism, spontaneity, antiauthoritarianism) are seriously out of step with the values of director Ivan Reitman, who prefers conformity, loyalty, and even something a little like patriotism. As a result the second banana of this service comedy, the affable Harold Ramis, becomes its genuine dramatic center: his struggles to keep his buddy Bill in line have a strange urgency and poignance.

Douglas Sirk is best known for his highly stylized Technicolor melodramas, but he also did superlative work in restrained black and white. There’s Always Tomorrow (1955) is a virtuoso study in tones, ranging from the blinding sunlight of a desert resort to the expressionist shadows of the suburban home where Fred MacMurray lives in unhappy union with Joan Bennett.

It still has several moments—most notably a completely offhanded kidnapping—when Cassavetes's inimitable off rhythms do strange and wonderful things to the conventionally written comedy. Big Trouble is just a footnote in the career of one of America's most innovative, unclassifiable filmmakers, but it's something to see.

Graham Greene's impeccably plotted spy story serves Preminger's personal aims with a minimum of modification, as the film develops themes of loneliness, debilitation, and obsessive security—all centered on the tragic survival of moral feeling in a world drained by reason.

To watch the biggest stars of their time in casual conversation, trading riffs and passing bottles, without benefit of publicists, handlers and security goons is to relive an innocent, anarchic time in the entertainment business when music, not marketing, was at the center of the enterprise.

This slick and entertaining 1975 film of Ken Kesey's cult novel will inevitably disappoint admirers of director Milos Forman's earlier work.

Cry-Baby doesn`t have a subject, but only a format-a rickety framework erected to suport a few broad gags and a few indifferently filmed production numbers.

As broad and cartoonish as the screenplay is, there is an accuracy of observation in the work of the director, Frank Novak, that keeps the film grounded in an undeniable social realism.

Allen`s over-reliance on narration to create his emotional effects reminds us that his art is primarily, if not exclusively, a verbal one. He has never engaged the visual side of movies, never grasped film`s capacity to express emotions and ideas in images. Allen is a teller, not a shower.

The film is ugly on so many levels—from art direction to human values—that it's hard to know where to begin.

The picture is amazingly compact (70 minutes), and the swift pacing helps temper the goo. The film is no classic, but it's a good example of its type.

Martin Scorsese transforms a debilitating convention of 80s comedy--absurd underreaction to increasingly bizarre and threatening situations--into a rich, wincingly funny metaphysical farce. A lonely computer programmer is lured from the workday security of midtown Manhattan to an expressionistic late-night SoHo by the vague promise of casual sex with a mysterious blond.

A good summer movie, directed with great verve and imagination and filled with innovative, eye-popping effects. Cameron never relinquishes his grip on the audience, smoothly segueing from action sequence to action sequence and topping himself each time. [3 July 1991, Tempo, p.1]

It becomes hard to tell just what Castaneda was advocating, apart from the liberal use of psychedelic drugs.

Leonard Kastle, a composer who turned filmmaker for this single feature, brings a spare dignity and genuine depth of characterization to his exploitation subject—the series of murders committed by Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck in the late 40s.

Hogan is an appealing performer, and Kozlowski has a brisk charm as his love interest. Indeed, the film functions far better as romantic comedy than it does as social satire, building an entertaining sexual suspense as an unacknowledged attraction builds between the two leads.

Unfortunately, Harold Becker's direction seems deliberately designed to pull the material toward the bland and conventional—toward easy payoffs and Rocky-style inspirational melodrama.

The project would have been much more palatable as a TV special; as it stands, it's just another symptom of the American cinema's addiction to facile mythmaking.

This 1979 teenage horror film has no redeeming style: it's a straight, pedestrian cop of Halloween, from the opening shock to the climactic battle against the psycho.

The humor is relentlessly cruel, smug, and disconnected from any sense of how human beings might behave in similar situations. But though she's hardly able to dominate the project, director Martha Coolidge does manage to insert some of the sweetly eccentric characterization that distinguished her Valley Girl: one of the heroes, played by Gabe Jarret, is actually believable and sympathetic as a socially insecure adolescent, and a few of the minor figures are brought to life with deft, simple strokes. Though ultimately obnoxious, the film lingers in the mind for a few moments of genuine charm.

A stodgy Universal thriller from 1941, redeemed by a name-heavy cast.

The two different ends require shifts in point of view that are beyond Sayles's talent as a visual storyteller, and the film does not cohere. Yet many of the individual scenes are charming, funny, and pointed, and the movie gives off Sayles's usual glow of goodwill.

Ralph Bakshi gathered retired animators from all over the world to work on his 1972 film, misleadingly billed as the first feature-length cartoon for adults. The results, inevitably, were disappointing; Bakshi just didn't have the money to make it right.

The film's confused moral sense is summed up by the contrast between the Aiello and Spader characters. Though both are professional killers, Aiello is somehow coded as "good" because he takes time to make pasta, and Spader is "bad" because he plays mildly kinky games with his mistress (imposing South African model Charlize Theron). [27 Sept 1996, p.43]

No classic, but neither is it a joke.

William A. Seiter directed this 1935 release, with a light touch but not enough style to transcend the machinations of the trifling plot.

Director Slava Tsukerman doesn't have any new ideas, though this 1982 feature does improve on some old ones, notably its use of a rapid parallel montage technique to enliven the ancient Warholian comedy of boredom and underreaction by cutting to different characters and different shticks.

Garson Kanin directed this late, trivial screwball comedy (1940), and while it’s pleasant enough, the freshness is definitely off the bloom.

It's just about as awful as you'd expect, despite the presence of two first-class screenwriters.

As with most Thalberg projects (the director of record was Frank Lloyd, but he barely matters), it's tainted by a fair amount of middlebrow stuffiness, but it's a fleet piece of storytelling and serves to enshrine one of the great ham performances of all time, Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.

For all its overfamiliarity, this is a good play, easily Simon's best, and Matthau and Lemmon inhabit it with grace and style.

The film uses standard techniques to tell its tale -- videotaped interviews with survivors interspersed with newsreel images from the period -- but does so with integrity and attention to detail.

Big moves with polish and assurance. It's too soon to tell whether Marshall has anything of her own to say, but Big is proof that she can handle the Hollywood machine, and that is no small thing.

The movie has no sense of temptation and no real taste for revolt-it's a good little film that knows its place. Van Peebles' direction has a by-the-numbers competence but no discernible personality.

Dense, contradictory and distressingly honest, Valley of Tears is that rarity among political documentaries: a genuinely thought-provoking film.

This 1971 thriller about a heroin bust is solid, slick filmmaking, full of dirty cops, shrewd operators, and slam-bang action. Friedkin's close study of Raoul Walsh pays off in the justly celebrated chase sequence.

This 1965 hit is the sort of film that reeks of emotional Muzak, the most elemental responses programmed right into the scenario. Every audience sniffle and tear has been taken into account.

Edwards's attention to detail pays off; while this isn't his best film, it is far superior to most problem dramas of the early 60s.

The film excels as a visual exercise, as a study in adolescent psychology, and even as astute political analysis (it's the dragon who holds the fiefdom together).

What's missing most conspicuously from Great Balls of Fire is an interest in the historical and cultural context that made Lewis' career possible - that moment when a dying rural tradition intersected with a booming urban economy to create a whole new kind of music and with it, a whole new America. McBride treats the '50s as a joke - a montage of "Leave It to Beaver" complacency and H-bomb panic. The truth is more complex than that, and a better story. [30 June 1989, p.A]

And yet there is enough of a core of sincerity to turn even the most preposterous moments-such as the film's dream-sequence finale-into something moving and true: You buy the feelings, even as the situations degenerate into the ludicrous and absurd. [17 Aug 1990, Friday, p.C]

For all of its simplemindedness and deck stacking, the film is distressingly well made—Pollack is no artist, but he has a glistening technique (there aren't many American directors left who know how to plan their shots for such smooth cutting) and a strong sense of how to hold, cajole, and gratify an audience.

Douglas Sirk's famous 1959 remake was pure metaphysics; this version emphasizes the social content, particularly in its Depression-era attention to class nuances.

The emotional impact of Shark Skin Man is negligible.

As an actor, Eastwood has created his most complex, fully dimensional characterization in Tom Highway; as a director, he has worked to put that characterization in a remarkably mature, self-critical context. Heartbreak Ridge is a film of genuine substance and courage.

Sluggish, repetitive, and strangely timorous, with little of the zap and imagination of the Pythons' television work.

The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances.

Its optimism has a certain naive charm, though it also seems one step removed from a clinical condition. [28 May 1993, p.C]

With his perfect pacing, elegant narrative design, and depth of characterization, Richard Lester has made as good a matinee movie as could be imagined: it's a big, generous, beautifully crafted piece of entertainment, with the distinctive Lester touch in the busy backgrounds and the throwaway dialogue.

A film of fragile and esoteric pleasures, The Man in the Moon is not a movie that can be recommended to the general public and should probably even be protected from it. But for those who can respond to its tiny formal beauties, it is something to treasure. [04 Oct 1991, p.C]

A loose but often amusing collection of gags.

For all the film's popped eyeballs and severed limbs, Beetlejuice retains an innocence that makes the grotesque humor very appealing. Burton has captured the sweet ghoulishness of a 12-year-old pouring over horror comics, dreaming of the greatest Halloween costume ever invented. [30 Mar 1988]

Wyler lays out all the elements with care and precision, but the romantic comedy never comes together - it's charm by computer. [Review of re-release]

The charm of the film (and it does have an effective degree) ultimately seems as synthetic as Jack's. Perhaps the real pickup artist of the title is Toback himself, hiding behind a winning smile as he attempts, for the first time in his career, to hustle the audience.

Patton's personality--conveyed with pointed theatrical flair by George C. Scott--is registered in rich tones of grandeur and megalomania, genius and petty sadism.

The film comes closer to working than it has any right to, given the curious casting (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) and director Ridley Scott's inability to sustain dramatic tension or build a coherent scene.

Clint Eastwood wisely chose a strong, simple thriller for his first film as a director (1971), and the project is remarkable in its self-effacing dedication to getting the craft right—to laying out the story, building the rhythm, putting the camera in the right place, and establishing small characters with a degree of conviction.

Though there is an artist's instinct behind Cadillac Man-an instinct that does surface here and there, with a particularly piercing line of dialogue or powerful gesture-it`s quickly blotted out by the Williams formula.

The film is long (142 minutes), claustrophobic, and intense, yet it works with elegance and rigor, like a philosophical problem stated and solved.

As the envious, destructive best friends of the central couple, Jim Belushi and (especially) Elizabeth Perkins have the actor's know-how to fill in the gaps, but as the lovers, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are hopelessly pallid.

Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.

The review format, intercut with demythicizing glimpses behind the scenes, aspires to a cynical Brechtian snappiness, but the drama is too thinly imagined, the meanings too familiar and heavily stated, for this 1976 film to gather any real interest.

A strange and funny film, smart, complex and difficult to shake.

Blaze is a high-spirited, though slightly botched follow-up to Shelton's appealing Bull Durham of 1988, drawing on the same combination of enthusiastic heterosexuality and cozy male bonding. Politics here takes the place of baseball in the earlier film: another all-American team sport, with its veterans and rookies, official rules and unspoken scams, high idealism and casual corruption. [13 Dec 1989, p.1C]

A romantic comedy of grace, buoyancy and surprising emotional depth, filled with civilized pleasures.

As LaMotta, Robert De Niro gives a blank, soulless performance; there's so little of depth or urgency coming from him that he's impossible to despise, or forgive, in any but the most superficial way.

It is a sincere, thoughtful work, though not a very accomplished one.

The real love story here may be between Todd the exhibitionist and Mr. Verow the voyeur, peeping in on his character's activities. They look to have a long and happy future together.

Denying us any catharsis, Haneke becomes a stern, finger-wagging lecturer; he seems to mean his movie as punishment, conveniently forgetting his own role in the crime. [11 March 1998, p.38]

Graciously filmed by Martin Brest and imaginatively performed by Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, the tired concept yields a steady stream of little discoveries and surprising insights that add up to some uncommonly rich comedy. [20 July 1988]

Alive represents one of Hollywood's increasingly rare attempts to create a religious drama, but that novelty aside, the film is stiff, overlong and frequently risible. [15 Jan 1993, p.F]

Clayton lacks the Jamesian temper, and his film is finally more indecisive than ambiguous. Too much Freud and too little thought.

Billy Wilder's 1954 version of the Samuel Taylor staple was a perfect vehicle for Audrey Hepburn, though the cut is too tight for her costars, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. [Review of re-release]

However poorly the material has aged, Cimino has not come close to tapping its potential. [05 Oct 1990, p.D]

Zappa's most ambitious compositions (performed by the London Philharmonic) share screen time with nostalgic freak humor. [26 Dec 2013, p.30]

It’s pretty much all genre and no nuance, though Michael Curtiz’s direction is surprisingly soft and light.

Archetypal 50s science fiction—light on brains and heavy on sexual innuendo (1954). But director Jack Arnold has a flair for this sort of thing, and if there really is anything frightening about a man dressed up in a rubber suit with zippers where the gills ought to be, Arnold comes close to finding it.

Forgettable nostalgia trip from 1974, shot in 16-millimeter by the enterprising Stephen Verona and Martin Davidson. Somehow, this little exploitationer ended up launching the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler, Perry King, and Susan Blakely.

Perkins tries to imitate Hitchcock's visual style, but most of the film is made without concern for style of any kind, unless it's the bludgeoning nonstyle of Friday the 13th.

Something large and abstract is stirring here, though the film's ultimate implications are chilling

While it doesn't have the soft-edged sense of wonder that the Travers books have, Walt Disney's 1964 version of the Mary Poppins story does manage to avoid the usual saccharine excesses of his live-action work.

It's all oddly sweet, and, for the viewer at least, more than a little dull.

Arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the most stylistically influential films of the 60s.

Roundly condemned as a glorification of drug dealing, it's actually an acrid film noir on a classic theme—the hood who must make one last score before he quits the business.

Like the massive shipboard set that is its centerpiece, the film is huge and impressive - though, again like the captain's imposing vessel, it stubbornly and disappointingly remains at anchor. Hook never sets sail.

It's a highly professional piece of Hollywood sentimentalism.

It's a deeply, creepily dishonest piece of work. [27 Oct 1989, p.G]

A model French psychological drama in which very little action occurs but feelings and intuitions are documented with precision and discretion.

Americans now want a rooting interest in their journalism, just as they do in their sports and entertainment. Mr. Moore knows how to give that to them, and so - in a much more dignified, documented way - does Mr. Greenwald.

Given the grosses of the original, a sequel to Teen Wolf was inevitable-and it was inevitable, too, that the sequel would lose the quality of innocence and unconscious artfulness that made the first film work. The material has been broken down, analyzed and reassembled with scientific precision; what was instinctive in the original has become self-conscious and calculated in the followup, and the spirit is gone.

A River Runs Through It emerges as hopelessly middle-brow-the kind of diluted, prettified art traditionally associated with PBS and the Academy Awards. [09 Oct 1992]

The Mission is "The Killing Fields" without Dith Pran, a movie that simply asks the audience to share its moral smugness. It wants us to feel good about feeling bad. [14 Nov 1986, p.AC]

Here is a rich tale of our times, very well told with an appropriate minimum of means.

Though Mr. Hayata seems convinced that he is a colorful, romantic figure, the movie itself is crushingly mundane and unlikely to attract any audience beyond close relatives.

This 1979 movie adaptation of the cult TV series is blandness raised to an epic scale. Robert Wise's bloodless direction drains all the air from the Enterprise.

Entirely too well-behaved.

Like its main character, the movie hits the road with no final destination in mind, and the manic inventiveness that sustains the early passages becomes strained and weird by the end.

In Bright Lights, Big City, director James Bridges ("The Paper Chase," "Urban Cowboy") has made just about the best film imaginable from Jay McInerney's best-selling but fundamentally undramatic novel. Mustering the considerable technical skills at his disposal, Bridges-who took over the project well into shooting when the first director was fired-has turned in a smooth, polished commercial film that at least has the virtue of effectively showcasing Michael J. Fox for his fans. There just isn't much else in the material for Bridges to work with.[1 Apr 1988, p.A]

Slightly bloated Bond, with too much technology and a climactic slaughter that's a little too mindless to be much fun. Still, Adolfo Celi—with his “heat and cold, applied scientifically”—makes a most memorable villain.

It's a funny, frequently rousing film, with a warmly appealing acting partnership at its center-between basketball hustlers Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson.

The confusing screenplay, by John Eskow and Richard Rush, makes a few fumbling attempts to get a plot going (Downey crash-lands and has to be rescued by Gibson; later, their CIA bosses try to frame them for drug smuggling), but mainly the movie tries to get by on attitude, which is a mistake when Mel Gibson is its main perpetrator. [10 Aug 1990]

The picture unfolds as a light romantic comedy that adults will probably find familiar but tolerable, while their age-appropriate offspring will be transported to new heights of cinematic enchantment.

Efficient and absorbing...In spite of Kaufman's frequent faults of taste and judgment, the film flies on the strength of its collective performances—which range from the merely excellent (Scott Glenn) to the sublime (Ed Harris).

This is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance.

Amazingly arrogant, immoral film.

Every moment is hyped for maximum visual and visceral impact, but Scott doesn't display the slightest bit of interest (or belief) in the actual characters and situations.

Mitchell Leisen, the director, hadn't yet developed the light touch with actors he would display memorably later in the decade, though some of his trademark pictorial effects are in evidence.

The crude technique of director Sean Cunningham borrows whatever sophistication it has from Halloween's precise and elegant point-of-view shots of the killer, though Cunningham often cheats by using the ploy inconsistently. For all its shoddiness, the film manages, just barely, to achieve its ignoble goals--it delivers what it promises.

Canadian-made unpleasantness (1975) about a psychopath stalking a college town. Bob Clark's direction is enthusiastic but sloppy-a presaging of his later Porky's. [02 Dec 2010, p.52]

This 1927 silent feature won the first Academy Award for best picture, establishing a tradition of silliness that hasn’t been broken to this day, but there is some thrilling flying footage and impressively expensive spectacle.

Bigelow's is a synthetic talent, in the good sense of the word: She draws together a rich, imaginative range of cultural references (the film noir, the Western, the horror movie, the love story) and narrative styles (the lyrical, the expressionist, the action-based, the psychological), making something new out of the traces of the old. [2 Oct 1987, p.A]

Under Minnelli’s direction it becomes a fascinating study of a man destroyed by the 50s success ethic, left broke, alone, and slightly insane in the end.

It's a western, of sorts, and for the first half it's a lot of fun. But then things fall apart, and the film becomes fatally episodic.

Tired, poorly paced Bond from 1967, with Sean Connery displaying his discontent. Donald Pleasence's Blofeld has a memorably creepy softness, but that's about it.

Hitchcock's discovery of darkness within the heart of small-town America remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death.

This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing.

David Lean's studied, plodding, overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in E.M. Forster's haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India.

Quickly moves beyond the oppressive into the cruel and unusual.

Offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is.

It is an intriguing subject, though so far all that Morris has brought to it is a combination of the morbid and the cruel; he needs to develop some sympathy, too. [16 Sept 1988]

Though overexplicit and underdeveloped, Clive Barker`s Hellraiser is a horror film with enough personality and ambition to rise slightly above the run of the genre.

This story of a party girl (Audrey Hepburn) in love with a gigolo (George Peppard) allows Edwards to create a very handsome film, with impeccable Technicolor photography by Franz Planer. [Review of re-release]

A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.

[An] amiable, rambunctious New World production, aimed ostensibly at the teen trade but more obliquely and effectively at the new wave cult...It's more cleverly cut than shot—which means that it moves quickly and energetically even as the concepts and characters disintegrate.

Clifford can muster no interest in the cardboard characters or absurd plot developments, which leaves Gleaming the Cube to limp along listlessly between indifferently filmed skateboard demonstrations.

McBride's presentation of Richard Gere is frankly pornographic, perhaps the only way to handle this Victor Mature of the 80s; Valerie Kaprisky costars—meekly.

Dull and lifeless.

Hugely funny, but it's also liberating-precisely because it centers its aim on that cold, closed system and blows it apart. The straight lines are shattered; the empty spaces in the images are packed full until they burst. [2 Dec 1988]

There is something disturbing in the way the film elevates cynicism and detachment into heroic attitudes.

Perhaps the series is simply getting cynical and tired.

Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals, draining the Hitchcock moves of their content and complexity. He's left with a collection of empty technical tricks—obtrusive and gimmick-crazed, this film has been “directed” within an inch of its life—and he fills in the blanks with an offhand cruelty toward his characters, a supreme contempt for his audience (at one point, we're compared to the drooling voyeurs who inhabit his vision of Bellevue), and a curdled, adolescent vision of sexuality.

It took (Cronenberg) several films to come into his own as a filmmaker, but even his earliest work reflects his obsessive interest in the human body as raw material that can be transformed -- for better or for worse -- by strong emotions. [08 Jun 2004, p.E3]

Clearly understands its target audience of first-generation Indian-Americans and has its pleasures to provide.

An awesomely, stiflingly professional piece of work, with a fleet, superficial visual style, perfectly placed climaxes, and a screenplay (by Douglas Day Stewart) that doesn't waste a single character or situation - everything is functional, and nothing but functional.

The film is flat, dull, and sloppy.

The film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.

It's a wholly passive performance, and one that touches not at all on Pryor's special gifts. This man desperately needs a new agent.

The cast is uniformly high spirited and attractive, and Ms. Beyer's direction, apart from a few over-weighted Wellesian camera angles, is functional.

A generally effective sex comedy, distinguished by its origins (Brazil) and the considerable appeal of its star, Sonia Braga. (Review of original release)

John Badham, a last-minute replacement on the project, impresses with his Spielberg-inflected direction of the young actors and his efficient management of competing plot levels. But much of the credit should go to Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, and Walon Green, whose screenplay deftly links the boy's sexual and moral maturation with a similar development on the part of the computer, thus accomplishing the thematic goal of “humanizing” technology that all the video-game movies—and video games themselves—have been striving for.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift star in Howard Hawks’s epic 1948 western—one of the few such projects in which the human element takes its rightful precedence over spectacle.

One of the most pleasant foreign films of the year, a funny, graceful and immensely good-natured work.

Kubrick is after a cool, sunlit vision of hell, born in the bosom of the nuclear family, but his imagery--with its compulsive symmetry and brightness--is too banal to sustain interest, while the incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense.

An ambitious screenplay (by Andrew Klavan) is done in by wavering direction (by Jan Egleson) in A Shock to the System, an independent feature that is still worth seeing for its well-chosen cast of medium-priced performers, including Michael Caine, Elizabeth McGovern, Peter Riegert, Swoosie Kurtz and Will Patton. [23 Mar 1990, p.H]

A sober, focused piece that asks Americans to take another look at what is going on in their own backyard.

Reasonably entertaining, if too long and too literal.

Demme is satirical but never cruel, and sweet but never syrupy: this film marked the emergence of one of the most appealing directorial personalities of the New Hollywood.

Demented disquisitions on Catholic theology vie for supremacy with camp humor and horror-movie conventions, leading to a conclusion that somehow manages to conflate The Wild Angels and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

It's fast-paced and full of gaudy action, yet it's thoroughly unsatisfying, largely because it's so lazy: once Stallone (also the screenwriter) and director George Pan Cosmatos have sketched out the standard genre archetypes, they leave it at that, not bothering to fill in the niceties of characterization, plausibility, motivation, and suspense.

It's very funny, and at times exhilaratingly so. But when real life tragedy is used as a basis for movie comedy, some consideration of responsibility has to enter the equation.

As a director, Bogdanovich seems caught in much the same predicament as that of his characters, a victim of his own history. [28 Sep 1990, p.B]

Under the direction of last-minute replacement Richard Benjamin, the results are insufferable—grotesque, chaotic, demoralized.

Too sympathetic to really dislike, but too benign to leave an impression. [05 Jan 1990, p.G7]

The end result is somewhere between Franz Kafka and William Castle, but still worth seeing.

The Abyss is at its best during such moments of reverie-when the abstract metaphors and the unique physicality of the deep sea setting come together to produce powerful, unvoiced meanings. The film does have its beckoning depths; what it needs is a more polished surface. [9 Aug 1989, Tempo, p.1]

Proof that you can buy an Academy Award, with David Niven, Cantinflas, and 44 stars in cameo roles spending a lot of Michael Todd’s money as they tour the world in Jules Verne’s balloon.

Directed by Richard Benjamin from a screenplay by John Hill and Bo Goldman, Little Nikita is quite a surprise-a film that moves through several layers of irony and absurdism to arrive at a strong and solid emotional core. [18 Mar 1988, p.A]

Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet.

For the record, this movie stars George Burns and Charlie Schlatter, and its one distinguishing feature is a consistent tastelessness, which still doesn't manage to make it much fun. [08 Apr 1988, p.H]

Crass but imponderable, bizarrely mixing glowingly back-lit sentimentality with stomach-churning violence and juvenile sex jokes.

Informal, pleasant film that ably captures Mr. Traoré's spirit.

Mr. Gilbert wants a movie with both a golden glow and a corrosive center, something he has not quite achieved here.

Though clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, Scream of Fear is closer to Orson Welles in its baroque visual design and delight in style for style's sake. [21 Oct 2008, p.C4]

While liberally dosing the action with humor, Underwood is able to preserve an undertone of genuine menace and substantial suspense. His shooting style is clean and classical, distinguished by camera movements that emphasize the line of the action without becoming conspicuous in themselves.

A strong and subtle horror film.

There is some exquisite Technicolor photography by Leon Shamroy, but director Henry King never moves the action beyond respectful superficiality.

Z doesn't communicate anything—except for the doubtful propositions that pacifists are more threatening to right-wingers than communists and that fascist terrorism and homosexuality go hand in hand.

Experimental in form, it's also open and appealing in its vision of romantic redemption, an avant-garde romp that's also a great date movie. [8 Mar 1996, p.40]

There are moments of genuine charm and solid invention, but it's a film that doesn't believe enough in itself. [28 Aug 1990, p.4C]

Akira remains the work of a cartoonist, rather than a born animator: Too much of the movie is played out in the static frames of a comic strip, and when movement is used it isn't to define character (as in Disney) or establish a rhythm (as in the Warner cartoons) but simply for its physical impact. Pounding away, it becomes monotonous. [30 Mar 1990, p.D]

One of Robert Altman's most charming exercises in cabaret humor and off-the-cuff modernism.

If the movie has a weakness, it's an over-reliance on Bond-style car chases and mass action scenes, which take away from the much richer and more original character comedy. But Mankiewicz's basic instincts seem admirable. He knows that a movie begins with people, and that`s a very good start.

Billy's burning, self-destructive energy is about all Young Guns has going for it-the suicidal kicks James Dean found in chickie races are here transposed to six-gun shoot-outs, filmed in a slow-motion process that strives vainly to evoke Sam Peckinpah. [12 Aug 1988, p.H]

Class Action occupies itself with long passages of family melodrama, most of it as familiar as the courtroom drama but far less entertaining. [15 Mar 1991]

The film's didactic passages cancel out its dramatic integrity, and the results are strangely neutral and unmoving.

Does little more than add another title to the very long list of movies influenced by George Romero's 1968 horror classic, "Night of the Living Dead."

The film is split down the middle, with many elegant symmetries and curling plotlines bridging the two halves: one part is a bracing, funny, almost Keaton-esque comedy starring Harry as a deadpan center of disaster; the other is a brooding, brutal film noir, starring Sondra Locke as a vengeful femme fatale.