David Ansen

A one-of- a-kind horror movie: hilarious, a little scary and strangely poignant. Campbell’s cranky, valiant, sad-sack King is a soulfully funny creation.

The first-time writer-director, Englishman Richard Kwietniowski, has adapted Gilbert Adair's novel with wit, economy and a delicate understanding that the funniest comedies are played with dead seriousness.

The women in this smart, highly entertaining comedy don't pack guns, but relations between the sexes are such that a well-placed knee in the groin can come in handy.

Defies any expectations you bring to it. There are sights in Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's eye-opening documentary that will confirm and confound both right and left.

What was a ragged but often hilarious charmer has been genetically altered into a deafening and desperate mutant.

Noyce orchestrates the suspense with impressive visual flair, using the constricted setting to great advantage. But an hour into the tale impatience sets in when it becomes clear that neither he nor screen-writer Terry Hayes has anything more in mind than pressing our fear buttons. Ultimately, this is just a waterlogged damsel-in-distress movie. [17 Apr 1989, p.72]

Ruthless People is a tight, vulgar, low-down black farce that starts funny and, wonder of wonders, gets funnier as it goes. [30 June 1986, p.59]

Director Stuart Rosenberg and screenwriter W. D. Richter have a strong, grim, angry story to tell, and the urgency of their convictions overcomes the frequent clumsiness and confusion of the telling. Unsparing in its evocation of brutality, and unswerving in its commitment to Brubaker's radical, uncompromising ideals, the film at its best provokes a powerful sense of tension and outrage. [23 June 1980, p.75]

Comedy and suspense, satire and shame are all mashed together--with breezy confidence.

Of course, hanging over this ironic tale is the deeper historical irony--that many of the "good guy" rebels Charlie is funding (and we're cheering) will become our mortal enemies...It's as if "Titanic" ended with a celebratory shipboard banquet, followed by a postscript: by the way, it sank.

For a number of reasons The Duchess isn't all it could have been. It's fun, but falls short of fabulous.

The loving exhumation of an earlier cinematic style suggests that the director is looking to regain his own moviemaking innocence, to make the kind of picture that moved him as a child. But you can't go home again -- not on secondhand, sentimentalized memories. In transferring Hinton's teens to the screen, Coppola and screenwriter Kathleen Knutsen Rowell have idealized them to the point of cliche. [4 Apr 1983, p.74]

If The Pope doesn't fly Sinatra-high or dig Scorsese-deep, it is an appealing commercial movie with a gritty sense of the city, an effective narrative drive and a very watchable cast of pungent performers. [25 June 1984, p.68]

The plot is madcap nonsense, and the comic aim is sometimes very broad and very low, but the belly-laugh quotient in Arthur (The In-Laws) Hiller's movie is the highest since the last Midler movie, Ruthless People. [26 Jan 1987, p.76]

Miller's strength, and his weakness, has always been his tendency to see things in black and white, which is what makes "The Crucible" moving, and also suspect. I recommend Hytner's movie highly, but a part of me resists a work that makes the audience feel as noble in our moral certainty as the characters it invites us to deplore. Some part of its power seems borrowed from the thing it hates.

Michael Beck (of "The Warriors") shows no discernible talent for musical romanticism Olivia ("Totally Hot") Newton-John sings prettily but is totally tepid, and the ever graceful Gene Kelly deserves a medal for keeping a straight face. Robert Greenwald, the director, should look into another line of work. Perhaps opening a disco? [18 Aug 1980, p.85]

A brainy three-ring circus.

With honesty, charm and an uncanny sympathy for all its characters, the film takes us deep inside the awkward and exhilarating experience of first love.

The second installment was better than the first, and this one is best of all. It has spectacular action scenes and imaginary creatures, and it’s by far the most moving chapter. The performances have deepened.

Barry Sonnenfeld's bouncy, immensely likable adaptation.

Even though Alvin Sargent's script lacks both grace and plausibility and director Sydney Pollack has succumbed to pretentions of European artiness, star chemistry might have made this love story catch fire. [03 Oct 1977, p. 71]

Face/Off is a summer movie extraordinaire: violent, imaginative, crazily funny and, oddly moving. Hollywood has finally wised up and let Hong Kong auteur John Woo strut his stuff in all its undiluted, over-the-top glory.

Just because Sandler's Sonny makes little sense as an actual human being doesn't mean he won't make you laugh.

I'll take the Disney any day, in spite of the fact that the characters are cardboard, that the dialogue belongs in a deflated cartoon balloon, that the ending is hopelessly murky and that the acting -- by Schell, Anthony Perkins, Yvette Mimieux and especially Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster and Joseph Bottoms -- is abysmal. The magic of Peter Ellenshaw's production designs disarms the critical mind: the child in me had a dandy time. [24 Dec 1979, p.79]

The great Spanish director's fourth triumph in a row--following "All About My Mother," "Talk to Her" and "Bad Education"--Volver (which means "coming back") flows effortlessly between peril and poignancy, the real and the surreal, even life and death.

Forget "Bonnie and Clyde"; even compared with "Night Moves," which also starred Hackman, Target disappoints. [18 Nov 1985, p.94]

I staggered out of this shameless, interminable movie feeling as if I'd been force-fed a ton of mealy, artificially sweetened baby food.

Arthur is not the best comedy of the season, which is a pity because it has the best comic team--Dudley Moore as a childish, perpetually soused millionaire named Arthur Bach and John Gielgud as his snobbish, reprimanding and adoring valet, Hobson. [27 July 1981, p.75]