David Ansen

Mandoki's gripping film may pull on the heartstrings too knowingly, but it's hard to forget the sight of the village’s children lying silent and still on every rooftop, praying the recruiting soldiers below will pass them by.

A superbly taut and well-made thriller that jumps from Geneva to Rome, from Paris to Beirut, from Athens to Brooklyn, each lethal assignment staged with a mastery Hitchcock might envy.

Using shadows and strikingly designed sounds, Pellington skillfully creates an atmosphere of otherworldly, invisible menace. Gere and Linney, both solid, dance around the edges of a romance.

No simple diatribe against capital punishment, it's a strong film, made stronger by two terrific performances.

Thanks to fine acting and its vividly unconventional protagonist, it pumps fresh blood into a conventional formula.

When it catches fire, this great-looking movie offers hilarious diversions.

A romantic comedy for an era of diminished expectations.

Deep Blue Sea gives good rush -- earning its stripes as one terrific junk movie.

Domestic violence has never been more savagely portrayed on screen.

Tthough it is action packed, spectacularly edited and often quite funny, one can't help feeling that Carpenter is squeezing the last drops out of a fatigued genre. Ten years ago this would have been one wild and crazy movie; in this era of ruthlessly efficient entertainments, it's a rather one-note evening. [14 July 1986, p.69]

What Scott brings to this, for him, surprisingly conventional genre moving is a superb sense of mood, seductive settings and a nice feel for the comedy of colliding social classes. Yet for all its tension and style, the movie feels thin. The obligatory violent ending is a real letdown: implausibly plotted and much too familiar. And while there's nothing wrong with Berenger's solid, witty performance, he's a little bland. [12 Oct 1987, p.84D]

Smart, informative and lively polemic.

The first test of a horror movie comes not the morning after but in the midst of the onslaught. By these standards, Monkey Shines is a white-knuckle triumph. Romero's film has its lurid, nonsensical lapses, but it touches some deep nerves. It's as unsettling as anything he's done. [08 Aug 1988, p.66]

This powerfully contained, painfully funny performance has to rank with the greatest work Nicholson's ever done -- This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you’ll be glad you went along for the ride.

Raises Hollywood's depiction of war to a new level.

Pirates is pure Polanski, but it's unfortunately not good Polanski. Attempting to revamp the swashbuckler genre the way he parodied Dracula movies in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," he's produced an abstract action comedy so emotionally detached it's impossible to stay involved. [28 July 1986, p.70]

There’s not a whisper of melodrama or sentimentality in the way Moretti tells his tale, guiding us through the stages of grief with calm, devastating lucidity.

Ferociously intense, furiously kinetic, it’s expressionist film noir science fiction that, like all good sci-fi, peers into the future to shed light on the present.

What keeps this movie honest is the characters, each of them a mass of conflicting instincts, virtues and vices. You know Gonzalez Inarritu comes from outside Hollywood because he doesn't divide the world into heroes and villains.

Take this classical-farce premise, put it in the very accomplished hands of the neoclassical director Blake Edwards, and you have yourself a real comedy -not a mere grab bag of gags but a deliciously accelerating divertissement on the theme of role-playing, sexual and otherwise. [22 March 1982, p.84]

Baby Mama is rescued by two scene-stealing veterans: Sigourney Weaver as the smug, patrician owner of the surrogate company, and a priceless, ponytailed Steve Martin as the self-infatuated New Age owner of Round Earth. These two aren't onscreen a lot, but the movie seems most fully alive when they are.

Stone creates such a sizzling, raunchy, vital world that the cliches almost seem new.

It's basically a mindless paean to goofing off, with interludes of dubious seriousness. [16 June 1986]

Criticizing it is like spitting in the wind, but at the risk of sounding like the spoilsport villain of the piece (a snippety liberal Washington bureaucrat, wouldn't you know), there's a smug, bully-boy spirit underneath this supposedly merry romp. The message is Go for It, and the theme song tells us 'Youv'e gotta have a dream to, make a dream come true," but what have our dreams come to? Breaking the 55-mph speed limit? In this movie, paradise is being able to land a Piper Cubin a busy city street to pick up another six-pack. Unfettered individualism has come to this: drive hard and carry a big Schlitz. [13 July 1981, p.81]

There is one reason, and only one, for anyone to check out Vertical Limit. The hanging-by-a-fingernail mountain-climbing sequences are spectacular.

The nimble Hanks again proves his delicious way with a double take; Long is nothing if not likable, and Godunov is a supremely silly narcissist. If the filmmakers had trusted these performers more, and stuck closer to reality, things might have turned out better. Instead of a real-estate fiasco anybody could roar at in recognition. The Money Pit has been inflated into a noisy destruction derby. [21 Apr 1986, p.82D]

James Bridges's film, which he co-authored with Aaron Latham, has a mood and rhythm of its own -- it's in no hurry to knock your socks off. You have to get to know the characters, just as it takes time for them to get to know each other. Then suddenly, when Bud and Sissy's premature marriage starts to fall apart, you find that you care, and the spell is cast. Bridges shows an extraordinary gift for directing actors, and he gets a string of marvelous, fresh performances. [09 June 1980, p.84]

Year of the Dragon leaves itself wide open to attack -- it has huge flaws and absurdities -- and Cimino is responsible for most of them. But this revved-up, over-stuffed movie is undeniably alive, teeming with evidence of Cimino's gifts as a filmmaker and his gaffes as a thinker. It's dazzling, and it's dumb. [19 Aug 1985, p.69]