David Ansen

If this Popsicle of a movie melts long before it's over, the first half has more good laughs than all of “Sweethearts.”

As a history lesson (Depression 101), Cinderella Man feels a bit secondhand. As a true-grit tale of redemption, however, it lands one solid body punch after another.

A wonderfully taut cat-and-mouse thriller.

Foxes is a funny, rueful, sexy little movie about coming of age in a junk-food culture. [10 Mar 1980, p.88]

Prelude to a Kiss has made the voyage from Broadway to Hollywood with its literacy, charm and full heart very much intact.

The Yugoslav-born Tesich is a wry romantic, a moonstruck jester, and his tendency toward excess is nicely complemented by Britisher Yates's crisp but delicate professionalism. With a superb cast at their disposal, they've taken a somewhat preposterous film noir plot and enriched it with quirky, meaty characterizations to produce a nervous comedy of menace about class distinctions and romantic and political obsession. [02 Mar 1981, p.81]

Like many of Winterbottom's movies, it falls a step short of its full potential. Its tact is both its strength and its weakness. The climax feels rushed: it's the rare movie these days that feels too short.

Compromising Positions has acting talent to burn and enough drollery to pass the time quite pleasantly. [9 Sept 1985, p.90]

It's a minimalist almost-love story told with epic flourishes.

Only near the end does the mix of melodrama, mush and message get out of hand.

Ultimately achieves that lump in the throat that is the romantic comedy's promised land.

It's strange energy - sexy, morbid, not quite human. There's an awful lot of blood in the movie and a lot of flesh, but there's little flesh and blood. The Fury is the work of a brilliant, droll, sadistic puppeteer. [20 Mar 1978, p.93]

Stillman remains a deftly funny portrait painter of the young, willfully self-involved Anglo-Saxon male.

Director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale assume you've seen the original and are ready to swallow whatever zany time-travel notion they offer. They're not wrong. As unapologetically broad and silly as this sequel it, it's also a good deal of fun, and its relentless velocity is part of the joke. [4 Dec. 1989, p.78]

This is a good introduction to the affable Chan persona. The comedy is broad, the inner-city Americana hilariously off-base, and the English dubbing may prove disconcerting to U.S. audiences. But the cheesiness is part of the fun.

Gordon's back at it in From Beyond, which puts the audience in the same pickle: do I laugh or do I scream? Both. [17 Nov 1986, p.89]

Like a TV movie, Suspect is aggressively and glibly topical, paying lip service to the plight of the homeless and the Vietnam vet. But the cast, which includes John Mahoney, E. Katherine Kerr and Joe Mantegna, is first rate, and the pace rarely flags. Take one salt tablet and enjoy. [26 Oct 1987, p.86]

What first feels like thin skit material gets funnier and sweeter. Damon and Kinnear make a terrific team.

The Madame Bovary-in-suburbia motif may sound familiar, yet the unusual mix of satire and melodrama feels fresh. Not everything works (beware the football scenes), but this adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel is hard to shake off.

If Barbarosa is a decidedly bumpy ride, its quirky ambitions are always interesting. Schepisi doesn't play safe, but he's a real filmmaker -- even his mistakes are arresting. [02 Aug 1982, p.62]

The script, by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss, veers unevenly between sharp, sophisticated malice and crowd-pleasing low humor, but director Ted Demme (Jonathan's nephew) keeps the laughs coming at a brisk pace. [14 Mar 1994, p.72]

Until the very end, when the script turns to heavy-handed pontificating, writer John Hopkins and director Bob Clark spin a decent, gruesome yarn, tying together the Ripper murders, political radicalism, bizarre Masonic rituals, royal indiscretions and government cover-ups. [26 Feb 1979, p.81]

Robbins's gutsy directorial debut isn't seamless art, but so what? After a summer in Hollywood fantasyland, at last we have an American movie that rattles our cage-and pokes a sharp spear into the body politic. Now that's entertainment.

The wonder of Invictus is that it actually went down this way.

Judged purely as an adventure story, it delivers enough thrills and violence to keep the action crowd engrossed. It also has enough social resonance to take us right back into those dark; schizophrenic years. [21 Aug 1978, p.66]

The French Lieutenant's Woman is one of the most civilized and provocative movies of the year, but it falls just short of greatness. Perhaps Reisz and Pinter are too innately reticent to wring the last drop of emotional power from Fowles's story. [21 Sep 1981, p.96]

This affable, well-built comedy is Reitman's best since Ghostbusters.

Somewhat raggedly directed by Richard Benjamin from an often witty June Roberts script, Mermaids is a likable coming-of-age comedy that can't quite decide how real it wants to be. In its weakest moments, it abandons psychological logic for fits of the cutes. But see it for Ryder, Cher and Ricci: they make this oddball family memorable. [17 Dec 1990, p.70]