David Ansen

Sarandon is touching and funny--a truly fresh performance. But the movie's sweet, elegiac heart belongs to Lancaster. Lou may be the role of his lifetime, and he carries it gently, obviously cherishing the gift. [06 Apr 1981, p.103]

The movie itself, like these guys, is defiantly old school -- confident, relaxed, professional.

This is the most personal, deeply felt film from the gifted director of "Under the Sand" and "Swimming Pool." Ozon leaches his melodrama of all sentimentality, and moves us all the more.

Writer John Patrick Shanley, whose mix of comedy and romantic whimsy produced intoxicating results in Moonstruck, mixes thrills, social satire and romantic whimsy in The January Man and gets mush. The whodunit is spectacularly implausible, the comedy misjudged, the romance forced. [30 Jan 1989, p.70]

How do you literalize heaven? It's a problem moviemakers have struggled with forever, and Jackson hasn't solved it.

Hill is a modern-day Peckinpah. But is there really a need for this pointless, graphic violence in the 1980s? Is this escapism, or is it just a distasteful, needless reflection of what has become horrifyingly common in the real world?... Only small boys will be able to keep a straight face. [4 May 1987, p.77]

With Saraband, the great writer-director has stepped back into the ring for one last epic wrestle with his demons. There is, as always, no easy outcome. But no one ever fought for higher emotional and spiritual stakes.

The Turning Point has its flaws - some overwritten scenes and lapses into staginess and sentimentality - but they are those of heady excess and are easily forgiven. One has the sense of a project perfectly matched to the people who made it. [28 Nov 1977, p.97]

Fortunately, whenever the movie starts to sag, Depp flies to the rescue. It’s a truly piratical performance: with his flamboyantly fluttering fingers he steals every scene in the movie.

There hasn't been a studio movie as unapologetically adult, sophisticated, and nuanced as Up in the Air in some time.

Aided by Vladimir Cosma's haunting score (and that great Catalani aria) and by Philippe Rousselot's bravura cinematography, Beineix makes an utterly stunning debut. "Diva" demonstrates the depth of pleasure a shallow movie can provide. [18 Apr 1982, p.96]

The movie crackles with the serio-comic tension of thin-skinned New Yorkers thrown together in a crisis.

In Peggy Sue Got Married, Francis Coppola takes a familiar, sitcomish premise -- the one about a grown woman who time-travels back to her high-school days -- and invests it with rich and surprising colors. Imagine a paint-by-numbers comic book put in the hands of a Rembrandt; the bold comic outlines remain, but the subject is transformed by the dark palette and subtle brushwork into a tale reverberating with complex, adult emotions. [6 Oct 1986, p.73]

This is an epic you have to listen to--it's about people who trade in words, who make revolutions in their heads, and Beatty and Trevor Griffiths's script is full of some of the best talk in any movie this year. [7 Dec 1981, p.83]

Like the march itself--which is only briefly glimpsed--Get On the Bus' is conceived as a challenge to black men to take accountability for their lives. A sermon wrapped in a road movie, at its best it can stir the soul.

Expect to be confused for 10 minutes. Then sit back and enjoy the ride.

The longest, grimmest and least funny of the trilogy.

The true allure of Titanic is its invitation to swoon at a scale of epic moviemaking that is all but obsolete.

While the elements in this coming-of-age saga may seem familiar, Eszterhas brings a fresh, immigrant's-eye perspective to his tale.

To blends sentimentality, shoot-outs and cool humor into a bewitchingly entertaining brew.

Corny and sweet, Doc Hollywood has its genuine charms, but they'd be a lot more charming if Caton-Jones and the screen-writers allowed them to sneak up on us. Instead, the movie oversells its whimsy and fits its quirkiness into a sitcom formula that's as preordained as the hero's moral rejuvenation.

What makes you giggle your way through much of the movie isn't the jokes--Jonathan Gems's script is surprisingly feeble, and Burton's comic timing is often flat-- but the sheer, oddball chutzpah of it all. [23 Dec 1996]

Downright repetitive! [30 May 1983]

First-time director Graeme Clifford, a former editor, hasn't set out merely to exploit this lurid legend, and he tries to suggest the multiple layers of the story, but he simply doesn't do his job well. The film has no rhythm, it's stagy and inauthentic-looking, and the patchwork script has that tinny ring that so often infects movies about real people. [06 Dec 1982, p.152]

This sweet, sometimes clunky chick flick is a likable teen romance, but not likely to arouse the giddy swoons Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey generated back in ’87.

With an arsenal of cool f/x at their disposal, the Wachowskis have come up with a dizzyingly enjoyable junk movie that has just enough on its mind to keep the pleasure from being a guilty one.

Narnia, brightly lit and kid-friendly, has an appealingly old-fashioned feel to it. Adamson, codirector of "Shrek," wisely doesn't try to hip-ify the tale, leaving its curious blend of medieval pageantry, Christian fable and children's bedtime story intact.

This is an elaborate production, but all the jazzy sets and explosions in the world can't disguise the story's complete lack of urgency.