David Ansen

Juxtaposes beauty and horror to fashion a savage and lyrical cinematic poem.

The nutty thing is, by the end of this jolly, oddly compelling and genuinely suspenseful documentary, the ridiculousness of such notions seems open to genuine debate.

Ridiculous, and oddly unforgettable.

Not a fiasco, a disaster or a scandal. But not as funny as it should have been, and not the trenchant office satire one was led to expect. As a comedy built on the juicy soil of revenge, "9 to 5" falls between two poles. It's not wild or dark enough to qualify as a truly disturbing farce and it's too fanciful and silly to succeed as realistic satire. Politically and esthetically, it's harmless--a mildly amusing romp that tends to get swallowed up by its own overly intricate plot. [22 Dec 1980, p.72]

It has the stately, well-crafted anxiety of a Hitchcock movie, except that the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same.

Rocky II may be superfluous, but it works. And it's successful in exactly the same way the original was - as an adroit mixture of grit, guts and treacle that whips the audience into a frenzy of satisfied wish fulfillment. [25 June 1979, p.81]

Sarah Thorp’s lazy script lurches from the lame to the ludicrous.

Von Trier, however, undercuts the universality of his own message with his meretricious closing credits, set to David Bowie's "Young Americans," which explicitly turns Dogville into an anti-American screed.

It's like a spectacular roadside accident: you can't turn away.

This Man in Black is, frankly, a bit of a wuss. As a love story, Walk the Line can seduce. As a biopic, it treads awfully familiar Overcoming Adversity turf.

The movie holds you in its grip from start to finish.

For sheer off-the-wall audacity, Tim Burton's demented Beetlejuice certainly demands respect, even if it's more enjoyable in concept that in execution. [4 Apr 1988, p.72]

Leon Gast's remarkable film -- which is intercut with terrific recent interviews with eyewitnesses Norman Mailer and George Plimpton -- is about much more than one stupendous fight.

With Rachel Portman's music tugging too hard for tears, the movie sometimes comes dangerously close to being the soap opera McPherson worked so hard to disguise.

Children of Men leaves too many questions unanswered, yet it has a stunning visceral impact. You can forgive a lot in the face of filmmaking this dazzling.

Veteran director Richard Fleischer brings to the Conan sequel some of the endearingly stolid craftsmanship of his old movies, while avoiding the lip-smacking sadism of the original. The movie is consistently dumb, though not hard to watch, but it would be a lot more fun if someone had bothered to give Conan a personality. [02 July 1984, p.45]

A streak of pitch-black humor, some bawdy detours and a touch of sanguine, sun-baked poetry Sam Peckinpah would have liked.

Funny, sentimental, cheerfully bawdy story of a wedding reunion that stirs up a hornet's nest of old loves, lusts and jealousies.

Both Henry Winkler and Sally Field have talent to spare, but there's just so far you can go with roles like these, and director Jeremy Paul Kagan, unable to settle on a tone, isn't any help. Winkler is too fresh and appealing by half - he acts like a man who's seen combat only on TV; he can't take us inside his pain. Field has to push her gamin charm to make up for the holes in her character, and she comes off actressy. When Ford is onscreen, the tinny echoes of old movies die away and Heroes takes on - briefly - the resonance of real life. [14 Nov 1977, p.78]

A demonstration of bravura acting.

Expertly shot in black and white on a shoestring budget (though maybe 10 minutes tool long), this fierce, smart jape gets you shaking with laughter, then leaves you simply shaking. [26 Apr 1993, p.64]

Torn between celebration and sendup, CB4 misses its big target as often as it hits. Still, it's hard not to chuckle when Rock, in a slow-motion lovers-running-in-the-field montage, trips and falls under an excess of gold chains, or when he experiences a nightmare vision of his future in the Hip Hop Retirement Home.

Rosen's film has none of Baskshi's visual razzle-dazzle, but it is loaded with character, and it has the relentless momentum of a good war movie. [20 Nov 1978, p.79]

The heart of the movie is in the Rocky-Rusty relationship, and as long as Bogdanovich sticks with Cher and Stoltz, his film is genuinely moving and largely free of cant. Far more problematic is the portrait of the biker gang who, for all their rowdiness, are about as threatening as Santa's elves. [04 Mar 1985, p.74]

Seabiscuit may be too airbrushed for its own good, but in the end nothing can stop this story from putting a lump in your throat.

Australia is a shameless—and shamelessly entertaining--pastiche. It works because Luhrmann, a true believer in movie-movie magic, stamps it all with the force of his own extravagant, generous personality.

It's amazing how a sense of humor can turn a formula film into a frolic.

In some of its most powerful sequences, Lee addresses the devastating impact of crack. In Jungle Fever, he is stretching his imaginative grasp (his women have much stronger voices than usual) and refining his technique.

Malle's film -- the most personal he's ever made -- goes out of its way not to tug on your heartstrings. Dealing with the most painful memory of his childhood in France during World War II, Malle has made a film of uncommon restraint. [15 Feb 1988, p.70]

This slick, handsomely produced thriller only gets the pulse half racing.

A style so chic, studied and murky it resembles a cross between a Nike commercial and a bad Polish art film.

Succeeds stunningly on its own terms.

The strenuously improbable finale in an indoor zoo -- incorporating every available lethal animal Hollywood could rent -- will have you on the edge of your seat . . . straining for the exit. Movies don't get much more impersonal than this. [28 May 1990, p.72]

Eastwood tells his haunting, sorrowful saga with such a sure, steady hand, only a very hardened cynic could fail to be moved.

Perfectly reflects the range of this funny, disturbing and complex tale.

Unless you are suitably bent, you might notice that the movie has little continuity and a plot that is no more than a grab bag of familiar Cheech and Chong routines. If you're suitably prepared, probably none of this will matter. There is something irrepressibly good-natured about the peppery Cheech and the zonked-out Chone as they low-ride through East Los Angeles and Tijuana in pursuit of the eternal high... In this funky, slapdash and occasionally very funny movie, dope is not an issue, it's a way of life. [2 Oct 1978, p.86]

Zaillian's meaty movie, at once bleak and hopeful, speaks volumes about the maddening distance between justice and the justice system.

This is high-risk chemistry, and the results are bizarre. The bulging forearms and corncob pipe are in place, but this Popeye hates spinach. The plot hinges on his Oedipal search for his Pappy (Ray Walston), the songs and minimal dances are designed for singers who can't sing and dancers who can't dance, and this gruff icon of pug nacious, all-American goodness has been set adrift on an abstract isle that can perhaps best be described as backlot Ionesco. Popeye's air of alienated whimsy makes for an odd family movie indeed. [22 Dec 1980, p.72]

One of the year's best: a rich, funny, enormously humane portrait of a middle-class Taipei family in the throes of romantic, economic and spiritual upheaval.

It's worth the price of admission just to hear Vilanch bouncing ideas off of a revved-up Robin Williams.

Hughes is just treading lukewarm water. Stotz is the blandest of his teen heroes yet. [16 Mar 1987]

This time out the versatile Soderbergh has cast himself as a sleight-of-hand artist. He's made deeper films, but this carefree caper movie is nothing to sneeze at.

Depp is such a soulful presence he gives you a glimpse of this maniac's pain and pathos. Bonham Carter is extraordinary. She reinvents Mrs. Lovett from the inside out.

Badham's not-inconsiderable accomplishment is to have produced a decently entertaining romp composed entirely of borrowed parts. But however much one regrets to admit it, the movie is fun. [02 June 1986, p.75]

Wonderful...Based on an autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson, My Life as a Dog captures the manic mood swings of a turbulent prepubescence with deft tonal swings of its own: under its sweet, puppy-dog surface, this movie has teeth. [25 May 1987, p.72]

The movie tries too hard. Too bad. This coulda been a contender.

Newell, no hack, tries not to milk the cliches shamelessly, and that may be the movie's final undoing. Lacking the courage of its own vulgarity, Mona Lisa Smile is as tepid as old bathwater.

Ready to Wear is all appetizers: the main course never arrives. Still, the critical savagery puzzles me. Altman's movie may be indefensible, but it's not unenjoyable. The fun of it is entirely superficial, like skimming a gossip column.

As well-crafted and sensitive as it is, the movie remains one step removed from inspiration.

Along the way, not just the storytelling but the original intention has gotten muddled. You leave The Alamo uncertain of what you're meant to feel: is this a celebration of patriotic sacrifice or an illustration of war's futility?

It's a real writer's movie, happy to linger on a psychologically telling moment--and audiences expecting a big payoff may feel disappointed. "Diner" isn't the kind of movie that jumps up and down to please. But while seeming to traverse familiar ground, Levinson and his superb young cast are sprinkling it with sparkling insights. [19 Apr 1982, p.96]

The viewer is diverted, but not terribly involved. As a romantic partner, hardware has considerably less resonance than Cary Grant. [06 Aug 1984, p.74]

Most of the time these rowdy kids are refreshingly real...Stand By Me, like Wilson's film, owes some of its appeal to sheer nostalgia, an easy enough emotion to evoke. But there is more here as well: sweetness of spirit, and comedy that comes from a well-remembered vision of the way we were.[25 Aug 1986, p.63]

Crossroads is an uneasy hybrid. The script, by 26-year-old John Fusco, wants both to offer authentic homage to the great Delta musicians and to appeal to the teen market. [24 March 1986, p.77]

As tempting as it is to ridicule Rocky III, the disarming fact remains that Stallone has created a very potent populist myth. It worked for him before, and it works for him again. Just as Sinatra can endlessly reprise My Way and still raise goosebumps, so Stallone can turn out shameless variations on his Believe-in-Yourself miracle play and still get the old adrenaline pumping. [31 May 1982, p.70]

Like a hot Santa Ana wind, this sexy, unsentimental thriller makes your senses tingle. [03 Sep 1990, p.66]

Never less than engaging; all that’s missing is a proper crescendo. The picture moves along briskly, even at two and a half hours, but it seems to be running on cruise control.

The Rock and Scott work up some nice comic chemistry, but it’s the dependably warped Walken who steals the most scenes. The frenetically edited fight sequences will satisfy the blood lust of the target audience.

Unless you’re 15 at heart, you may need anger management yourself after sitting through this aggressively crass comedy, which alternates between mean-spirited slapstick and arbitrary uplift.

Fat Man and Little Boy casts a wide net, but it never really traps its subject. The screenplay simply isn't up to the job. Only in the last half hour, as Trinity approaches, does dramatic fission occur. [30 Oct 1989, p.75]

Punch-Drunk Love is one dark, strange-tasting sorbet, its sweetness shot through with startling, unexpected flavors. It’s a romantic comedy on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

I respect it enormously, but it feels like an art film in search of a movie.

A rancidly hilarious slice of Americana. [01 Jun 1981, p.91]

This powerful, lyrical meditation on Arenas's life achieves a kind of hallucinatory urgency as it leaps and twists through his life.

There's not much depth to the charaterizations, but they're uncommonly vivid for a horror movie. You believe that these wildly disparate people are friends, and the growing sexual affection between Sutherland and Adams is conveyed with a nice, understated warmth. [18 Dec 1978, p.85]

Ron Howard's version is--no surprise--a funny, audience-friendly entertainment that's ultimately less scathing satire than conventional Hollywood romantic comedy outfitted in trendy new clothes.

Smith startles us with raw emotional honesty.

Nightmarish scenes are intercut with interviews with the real men. These could be more probing, and the film's urgency can tilt toward shrillness, but nobody else has made the disaster of Guantánamo so painfully vivid.

The list of marvels could go on and on, testament to the teeming imagination of Burton, who dreamed up this treat more than a decade ago as a young animator at Disney. Now, back at Disney, his magic toyshop of a movie has come to sweetly malignant fife. Chances are, it will be around for many Halloweens to come.

Woody Allen's comedy Husbands and Wives is set in his familiar New York world of verbal, neurotic achievers, but there's something new in it, a rawness we haven't seen before. It makes you laugh, deeply, and it makes you squirm.

It's an engrossing tale, and Weir's languid, sun-dappled images are at once seductive and unnerving. Yet there's something hollow at the core, an unearned sense of importance, a reliance on mere mood to suggest mytsical depths. Why does Weir - and why should the audience - so easily accept these vanished schoolgirls as adolescent oracles, some sort of pagan Cassandras? The symbolic burden of Hanging Rock inevitably suggests the use of the Marabar Caves in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India," but the comparison only points up the shallowness of Weir's conception. His movie is stylish and entertaining, but what he is pushing as metaphysical profundity is closer to metaphysical mush. [5 March 1979, p.105]

Jordan is always best on his native Irish turf, and he's in grand mischievous form in this picaresque fable.

Lurching uncertainly from slapstick to tears, The Family Stone works hard to warm the cockles of our hearts. The cast is attractive. The sentiments are commendable. But the love Bezucha wants us to feel for the family couldn't possibly compete with the love they already feel for themselves.

Bjork gives what may be the most wrenching performance ever given by someone who has no interest in being an actor.

Once again Disney has come up with a winning animated feature that has something for everyone on the age spectrum.

What keeps you in your seat is the acting. Keener, crisply and coolly playing against type, commands the screen. [24 August 1998, p. 58]

A sad spectacle: it feels like an advertisement, but what is left to sell? [27 Dec 1982, p.62]

Luhrmann has raised the level of his game, deconstructing the Hollywood musical -- a genre all but left for dead -- and reassembling it with a potency that hasn’t been seen since “Cabaret.”

Under the tone-deaf direction of Peter Yates, Krull manages to be both lavishly overdone and bizarrely half-baked. [08 Aug 1983, p.55]

Richard Donner's sequel is more than eager to please -- it's desperate.

School Ties doesn't offer much fresh insight on its subject, but it tells its familiar tale well, adapting the straight-forward virtues of '50s storytelling to evoke that mythical era to which Pat Buchanan and friends would like us all to return. Mandel isn't a bludgeoner; his young, fresh cast is mighty good; and, to its credit, the movie resists the impulse to wrap everything up with a smiley ending. Anti-Semitism didn't go away in the '50s; it just lowered its voice for a while.[21 Sept 1992, p.78]

Like the original, Flash Gordon has nothing on its mind but moving its jet-propelled plot from one fairy-tale setting to the next. It's nice to see a movie accomplish exactly what it sets out to do, with wit and spirit to boot. [08 Dec 1980, p.105]

Ironweed is strong stuff. [21 Dec 1987, p.68]

Shorn of its inside references, it's a very mixed bag - pleasant but overlong, funny when Steve Martin is on hand and stultifying when Frankie Howerd goes into his Mean Mr. Mustard routines, full of wonderful music that too rarely reaches the boiling point and pathos that sinks to bathos. [31 Jul 1978, p.42]

A rousing tale of retribution that ties up the dangling threads with bold melodramatic flourish. [09 Nov 1987, p.77]

Pitched too broadly to get very deeply under your skin. Still, there are some smarts at work here, and it will make you laugh.

This is a movie afraid of its own shadows.

Taps aspires to be both a movie for the conservative '80s and a youth-in-revolt, anti-military movie of the '60s. The contradictions break the dramatic spine of director Harold Becker's film, which grinds to a predictably violent climax without ever having made its basic premise believable. How many teen-agers do you know who would sacrifice their lives for a military school? [28 Dec 1981, p.65]

This brilliantly disturbing movie is constructed with surgical precision. Haneke lets no one off the hook least of all the viewer.

Shortbus tends to work better in its first, comic half, than in its second, more serious stretch, where the characters' trials and tribulations flirt with soap opera. The actors, formidable with their clothes off, aren't always as expressive fully dressed.

All the state-of-the-art technology in the world is no help to an actor saddled with Lucas's tinny dialogue.

A patchwork affair held together by spit, a prayer and the volatile, baby-faced charm of Richard Pryor. [15 Aug 1977, p.77]

Crazy Heart gets to you like a good country song--not because it tells you something new, but because it tells it well. It's the singer, not the song.

First-time director James Signorelli and his four screen-writers fall right into the trap of imitative fallacy -- they want to show us a vulgar, tacky character and do it by producing a vulgar, tacky movie. [22 Aug 1983, p.73]

What stays with you finally is not the mystery's byzantine twists and turns, which are fun but don't resonate very deeply. It's the time, the place, the palpable feel of community. [2 Oct 1995, p.85]

The Escape Artist is chockablock with intriguing ingredients, none of which pays off. It's a true oddball, but as much as one would like to encourage iconoclasm in Hollywood, a movie this incoherent can only induce exasperation. [14 Jun 1982, p.88]

Gus Van Sant, working from the tangy, well-written script, gets so much humor, grit and emotional truth out of this tale that the familiar formulas behind it simply fall away.

Turning the pious cliches of World War II melodrama on their heads, Boorman has made his most dizzyingly funny movie, an anarchic celebration of family. The warmth that exudes from these turbulent recollections isn't a sentimental heat but a joyful one: Boorman's eyes see the foibles and betrayals of adult life, the casual savagery of children, and forgive all. It's an idyll set amidst urban rubble. [19 Oct 1987, p.84]

Their (Murray/Johansson) brief, wondrous encounter is the soul of this subtle, funny, melancholy film.

Woody Allen is back in sharp comic form, though it's likely that his abrasive black comedy Deconstructing Harry will alienate as many people as it tickles.

If you can overlook the obvious flaws -- a bumpy beginning, a villain whose motive is both too obvious and hard to swallow -- The Bodyguard has its flashy, shallow pleasures. There's some wit in Kasdan's script, and plenty of dread in the big Oscar-ceremony climax (reminiscent of "The Man Who Knew Too Much"). When it works, it's like watching a paranoid edition of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." [30 Nov 1992, p.80]

Cobb is a refreshingly spiky antidote to Cataclysm all the Hollywood paeans to the suffering glory of the game. Ty Cobb approached baseball as he approached life: take no prisoners and leave scorched earth behind you. His greatness and his monstrosity can't be untangled. Cobb allows us to honor his achievements, but with no false illusions. It puts the ball in our hands: if this is an American hero, we need to figure out why. [12 Dec 1994, p.72]

For action junkies, The Bourne Ultimatum will be like a hit of pure meth. It's bravura filmmaking in the jittery, handheld, frenetically edited Paul Greengrass style.

Since somebody this year was bound to make a movie called Valley Girl, let's be grateful the job fell to director Martha Coolidge, who has a light, satirical touch, and screenwriters Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane, whose modest exploitation movie is thoroughly good-natured. [09 May 1983, p.85]

Eastwood takes the audience to raw, profoundly moving places. If you fear strong emotions, this is not for you. But if you want to see Hollywood filmmaking at its most potent, Eastwood has delivered the real deal.

Movies that make mental illness cute and poetic tend to give me the heebie-jeebies, and this one doesn't help its case by being evasively vague about the nature of Joon's condition. That said, it should be granted that Benny & Joon is one of the more palatable and inventive examples of this suspect genre, its inherent sappiness leavened by screenwriter Barry Berman's wit and director Jeremiah Chechik's clever use of familiar silent-comedy routines. [26 Apr 1993, p.64]

This new-wave fairy tale revels in unlikeliness and is not afraid to take its inspiration from sources as disparate as Diva, Madame Bovary and The Prince and the Pauper. The collision of inimical styles is its theme. Fortunately, even when the mile-a-minute plot is careering all over Manhattan, the movie seems to be following some cracked and sweet internal melody of its own. Which may be why this featherweight concoction lingers in the mind longer than you'd think possible. [08 Apr 1985, p.85]

The Wild Bunch still retains its sorrowful, fatal power because of the complexity of Peckinpah's attitudes about violence. He forces us to confront our own voyeuristic ambivalence; we're alternately horrified by the butchery and exhilarated by the orgiastic energy his balletic spectacles stir up.

In every detail - the superb soundtrack, the rich cinematography, the dinstinctively edgy editing - Rain Man reveals itself as a movie made with care, smarts, and a refreshing refusal to settle for the unexpected. [19 Dec 1988]

The secret of Volcano's success as a better-than-average disasterama is its nonstop pace.

Director Seidelman thrashes about in search of a tone: there's no weight to her images; the plot twists seem arbitrary and contrived. By the end you've lost interest in Ruth's revenge and can't wait until Streep gets back on screen. Watching her prod her face into new shapes in the mirror, contemplating a face-lift, you momentarily forget you're watching a mediocre movie and marvel at real comic witchcraft. [11 Dec 1989, p.88]

There have been and will be worse sequels than City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold, but there are few that seem so unnecessary. Slickers II, directed by Paul Weiland, is so harmless it's numbing: a little male bonding, some sagebrush slapstick, a couple of decent quips and a gift-wrapped moral. I kept wondering how the filmmakers mustered up the energy to go to work every morning. [27 June 1994, p.54]

A terrific piece of work: smart, inventive and executed with state-of-the-art finesse.

Vertical Ray slows our rhythms and heightens our senses: it's a shimmering, tactile experience.

Instead of losing myself in the story, I often felt on the outside looking in, appreciating the craftsmanship, but one step removed from the agony on display. Revolutionary Road is impressive, but it feels like a classic encased in amber.

Platoon is a ferociously compacted work, but the filmmaking rarely calls attention to itself; it never distracts from the dirty, horrific subject at hand..."Platoon" captures the crazy, adrenaline-rush chaos of battle better than any movie before. Stone is ruthless in his deglamorization of war, but not at the expense of the men who fought there. [5 Jan 1987, p.57]

Never mean-spirited, A Dirty Shame has some big laughs, but it's a one-joke movie that shows its strain well before the finish line.

Marvin's taciturn performance--a moving demonstration of masculine grace under pressure--may be his finest.

Steven Knight’s smart, if overly plotted, script delivers social insights tautly wrapped in genre thrills.

As a "Revenge of the Nerds" redux, Superbad isn't perfect. But it's super close.

Zorro, the Gay Blade doesn't have an offensive or pretentious bone in its body; it's one of the few comedies around that can properly be called cute. That's no put down. [3 Aug 1981, p.50]

Brilliant, but shallow.

A lumbering, self-important three-hour melodrama that defies credibility at every turn.

Screenwriter Ropelewski piles one silly plot contrivance upon another, and the characters start behaving like nitwits.

One can safely doze through the extremely bland first hour, which feels more like an advertisement for marine theme parks than a suspense movie. [1 Aug 1983, p.47]

There's no point in overpraising The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. It'd a scary but predictable genre piece that telegraphs its every move.

The eroticism in Cuaron's road movie (which broke all box-office records in Mexico) is the real deal: tactile, sexy, psychologically charged.

It's not to be missed in any language. In a year that has given us such marvelous animated movies as "Ratatouille" and "Paprika," this vibrant, sly and moving personal odyssey takes pride of place.

Every bit as tasteless, irreverent, silly and smart as the Comedy Central cartoon that catapulted creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone into the Hollywood catbird seat.

Heartburn deflates before your eyes: it's less a slice of life than a slice of lifestyle. [28 July 1986, p.70]

The secret of their endurance is not just in the grossness of their humor -- though their new film is even funkier and funnier than "Up in Smoke." As flipped out as their patchwork story gets, it always stays in touch with a very specific urban reality, a world where you make jokes out of taking a urine sample to your parole officer and find hilarity in Cheech's pathetic attempt to sing his naive Mexican-American protest song. [11 Aug 1980, p.69]

Puiu's is the art of the seemingly artless: he takes a story that's utterly unglamorous and mundane, and transforms it into something mythic.

It’s too early to place Eminem alongside those Hollywood giants (Jimmy Cagney/John Garfield), but the promise is there. He understands the power of being still in front of a camera. Compact, volatile and burningly intense, he’s got charisma to spare.

The superbly acted Spider is muted in comparison: it’s a quiet nightmare, painted in hospital greens and rust browns.

It's like nothing you've seen before. Yet, over all, the story it tells seems predictable, secondhand, and its "profound" revelations hackneyed. [12 Sep 1983, p.88]

Indeed, their most inspired moment is a total non sequitur -- a parody of "Jaws" involving a Baby Ruth bar and a pool full of terrified swimmers. Nonetheless, between Dangerfield's jokes, which charge like rhinos, and Chase's droll backhand swipes, there are just enough laughs to keep this harmless farce rolling to the eighteenth hole. [11 Aug 1980, p.69]

Tony Bill's first film as a director has moments of genuine charm and humor, it doesn't overinflate the adolescent agonies of its 15-year-old hero, Clifford Peache (Chris Makepeace), and it has a nice feel for the indignities and intimidations of a boy's high-school life. But it rings true only when it stays in the classrooms and hallways of the Chicago public school to which Clifford has just been transferred. When it follows him home to the posh hotel where he lives with his father (Martin Mull) and his grandmother (Ruth Gordon), My Bodyguard suddenly feels like a pilot for a bad sitcom. [25 Aug 1980, p.74]

Brutal and precision-made, Thief is a high-tech crime movie that closes in on its subject with such relentless purpose that it approaches abstraction. Nothing enters Mann's frame that is not designed to be there: the expertise he honors in his criminal hero is mirrored by his own meticulous craftsmanship. He gets the job done--and blows you away while doing it. [30 Mar 1981, p.82]

This fragile, precious chamber piece, co-written with Susan Minot, rarely seems worthy of the high style lavished upon it. [24 Jun 1996 Pg.83]

It happens to be one of the most wildly (and disturbingly) inventive animated films I've seen.

The semifunny Semi-Pro is amiable enough, but you never feel there's much at stake.

For me, there's a problem with The Hulk, always has been, though it hasn't seemed to bother the tale's legions of fans. When the sensitive, physically unprepossessing Banner/Norton turns into the gargantuan, muscle-bound, growling Hulk, there's a total disconnect.

That this relentless barrage of psychological and physical torture is extremely well made and powerfully performed--Watts hurls herself into her physically demanding role with heroic conviction--somehow makes it worse.

Night and the City hits a false note at the finish. Forgive that and relish the movie's snappy, low-life high spirits. [19 Oct 1992, p.67]

Indoors, it's Jane Austen. Outdoors, this red-blooded, exuberantly romantic version of Pride and Prejudice plays more like Emily Brontë. Purists may object, but most will find this love story irresistible.

Scherfig and her wonderful cast slyly transmute the quotidian into the magical. It’s like watching flowers bloom in a concrete garden.

This shamefully underpromoted, gloriously silly romp made me laugh harder than any other movie this summer. Make that this year.

Gangs is a dream project Scorsese has wanted to make for 30 years. You have to honor its mad ambition. But sadly, it feels like a dream too long deferred.

Hugo's themes may be timeless, but in this version the viewer is all too aware of the passing time. [04 May 1998, p.81]

Zwigoff doesn't hype up the gags, and his deliberately deadpan style gives even farfetched jokes an edge of reality.

If you can lose like a winner, can you win like a loser? And if it doesn't matter if you win or lose, how come Sly always wins? Maybe these ambiguities will be resolved in his next opus, when Sly, playing Oldsmobile Cutlass, enters the high-stakes arena of championship horseshoe pitching. [23 Feb 1987, p.79]

There are times when you wish the movie was a mini-series. This is meant both as a tribute, for the Ganguli family is so engaging you'd be happy spending much more time with them, and an acknowledgment that a tale this expansive doesn't always fit comfortably within the constraints of a feature-length frame.

What makes The In-Laws so engaging is not simply the escalating madness of Andrew Bergman's story (such whimsy could easily grow tiresome), but the deadpan counterpoint supplied by the two stars, who navigate their way through mounting disasters with an air of hilariously unjustified rationality. Bergman's script was tailor-made for Falk and Arkin, and they make the most of it. [02 Jul 1979, p.68]

A rousingly funny slapstick comedy about the day John, Paul, George and Ringo set off a tidal wave of adolescent hysteria in New York City. Surprisingly, nostalgia accounts for very little of the movie's charm. [01 May 1978, p.91]

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman has written quips, not characters and Joel Schumacher still seems miscast as a Bat-action director: he stages the mayhem confusingly and the comedy too broadly.

Only the first half of Johnny Dangerously really works, but then such nonstop silliness is almost impossible to sustain. [14 Jan 1985, p.53]

This movie has teeth, and it's not afraid to bite. [6 July 1981, p.7]

This hothouse tale of grief, sex and betrayal is told with a cool detachment that renders it commendably unsentimental--and slightly remote.

If Forgetting Sarah Marshall doesn't reach the inspired heights of "Knocked Up" or "Superbad," it runs a very respectable second.

A dizzying mixture of the sophisticated and the naive, the deft and the clumsy, Bulworth is overstuffed, excessive, erratic -- and essential.

This is a one-of-a-kind action flick: a tale of triumph tinged at every moment with tragedy.

There's a great story here, but it feels like American Gangster hasn't been mined for all its riches.

A mostly successful attempt to resuscitate a series soiled by silliness, sloppiness and Joel Schumacher.

Comic electricity.

The word for The Changeling is chilling. Medak doesn't pummel the audience with gore and Exorcist-type shock tactics. More than once, he raises real goose bumps using nothing more extraordinary than a bouncing rubber ball. [31 Mar 1980, p.82]

Hooper doesn't dig very deep into its Hollywood subject, but it's a good example of decent, no-frills filmmaking that lets a surprising amount of feeling seep through the cracks of its all-action formula. [21 Aug 1978, p.67]

As brilliantly shot as it is brutally single-minded, this is a war movie shorn of all its usual accouterments: the battle is the plot.

The potential for a funny, touching satire about teen-age sexuality is here, but it emerges only fitfully in director Ronald F. Maxwell's rather patronizing, sitcom approach. One can imagine what a Milos Forman or a Francois Truffaut could have done withthe giddy ambience of sex in tentative first bloom, but texture, verisimilitude and spontaneity are nowhere to be found in Maxwell's clean, postcardlike scenes, which seem strangely underpopulated. [24 March 1980, p.78]

All the surprises strenuously cooked up by screenwriter Patrick Smith Kelly and director Andrew ("The Fugitive") Davis can't overcome the movie's inability to make us care about any of its paper-thin characters.

Constructing a work of implacably interlocking images, the 76-year-old director -- as clear-eyed, still and attentive as a beast of the forest observing human folly -- has produced an Olympian protest against the modern world. Yet his lucid mastery produces not despair, but an odd exhilaration. [16 April 1984, p.93]

Gremlins 2 has its horror-movie side, but the grisly is definitely subordinate to the gags. Only a snob could resist such a generous level of lunacy.

Whether you regard her as a symptom or a cure for a culture still locked in its eternal battle between the puritanical and the prurient, [Madonna's] out there at the barricades. In Truth or Dare, she's at her button-pushing best.

Lively, likable and refreshingly unsensationalistic about the drugs and sex that come with the territory, this techno-propelled mash note to the rave spirit sticks to the surface.

Poor Affleck. He doesn’t just have to singlehandedly save the world from nuclear destruction, he has to erase our memories of Ford and Baldwin. That’s a tall order for any actor, and Affleck, an expert at playing cocky, callow yuppies, just doesn’t have the heft.

Lurid, illogical and utterly off-the-wall, this funny-scary exercise in low-budget schlock is a marvelous orgy of cheap thrills, including a supernaturally sinister mortuary, a hideously wriggling severed finger, one furry flying creature, dwarfs from the Undead, and the goriest - indeed the only - blood-sucking flying steel ball in movie history. [16 April 1979, p.86]

A vital entertainment that struts confidently between comedy and drama.

Though a few scenes are amateurish and the lighting is less than polished, "The Wedding Banquet" is such a genial, openhearted sitcom that only a confirmed grump could resist it. [16 Aug 1993, p.61]

A heavyweight contender unafraid to take on some of the most harrowing moral and social dilemmas of the day... Prince of the City takes us into the jungle and into the halls of justice, and forces us to see how precarious the line between them is. It's a true horror story. [24 Aug 1981, p.67]

Unlike Clark's extraordinary books of black-and-white photography, Kids is stunningly anti-erotic, though not untainted by sensationalism. By condensing all this inflammatory material into a 24-hour time frame, Clark and 19-year-old screen-writer Harmony Korine create an overwrought narrative that's sometimes tedious in its relentlesshess.

The zinger of a climax is, appropriately, the blackest joke of this blackest of comedies. [17 June 1985, p.89]

Smart, generous, as subtle as it is expansive, this is storytelling of a rare order. Six hours may seem like a big investment, but the emotional pay-back is beyond price.

Schrader has never been one to coddle an audience, and this is as uncompromising a vision as he has given us.

A wicked delight. Adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoe Heller's acclaimed novel, it's at once a comedy of cluelessness and class, a melodrama of two women in the grips of wildly inappropriate obsessions, and a "Fatal Attraction"-style thriller.

With such a broad satirical target, it's a shame that Ritchie's aim goes awry. Because Semi-Tough covers fresh territory, you keep rooting for it to connect. [28 Nov 1977, p.98]

Director Carl Franklin is a talent to watch: he gets subtle, textured performances from his fine cast; he knows how to let a scene breathe; how to create dread without strong-arming the audience. And on the subjects of racism and crime and the way the rural and inner-city experiences are linked, this modest film noir has a lot to say between the lines of its action plot.

The Reader can feel stilted and abstract: the film's only flesh-and-blood characters spend half the movie separated. But its emotional impact sneaks up on you. The Reader asks tough questions, and, to its credit, provides no easy answers.

In snuggling up so close to his heroine, Mazursky sacrifices some of the wild satrical highs we expect from him - the andante pacing could use a little more allegro (and a little less help from Bill Conti's overdone score). But we are more than rewarded by Muzursky's generosity and insight. He's burrowed deeper into the upper middle-class psyche than ever before, and if it's sometimes uncomfortable there, the unease is one we recognize as our own. [13 Mar 1978, p.75]

Nair and Witherspoon pull back from the ferocity of Thackeray's portrait: they're afraid we won't find Becky Sharp likable enough. Yes, she's the most brilliant, bold and vibrant creature in this social panorama, but she should also be chilling.

As tempting as it may be to herald Romero as the Swift of schlock, his shopping-mall metaphor is really little more than a clever gag. The director's technique has been refined since his "Living Dead" days, but his grasp of characters is still pretty crude, and he reveals himself to be an all-too-predictable liberal moralists when he singles out the woman and the black as the true heroes. These objections should not-and won't-keep Romero loyalists away. For blood, guts and chuckles, most horror fans will undoubtedly find Dawn of the Dead finger-lickin' good. [7 May 1979, p.90]

Kloves doesn't want to play by conventional romantic comedy rules, but he hasn't quite figured out what to replace them with. After the first seductive hour, which dances on the edge of comedy and melancholy, The Fabulous Baker Boys grows increasingly frustrating. The audience is enjoying Klove's hip, knowing update of romantic conventions, but the director seems to think he's making "realism": he misjudges the gravity of his story, and his touch becomes more ponderous. [23 Oct 1983, p.84]

When the satire stays focused on Streep or her snooty Brit assistant (Emily Blunt), "Prada" is malicious fun. But the central story about how smart, idealistic Anne Hathaway, as Miranda's drably dressed new assistant, loses her soul in pursuit of success and great shoes is dramatically anorexic.

There isn't an ounce of genuine affection on display. Fenton and Barbato already made a documentary of the same title about Alig, and their fascination with this vapid, charmless pied piper of decadence remains a mystery.

Ninety minutes into this massive movie the attack commences, and the spectacular images come hurtling like fireballs. This is, let's be honest, what we're here for, and what most Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movies serve up best: the poetry of destruction.

Manages to take an urgent, important topic and turn it into standard Hollywood melodrama. What a waste.

The movie wants to make a serious point that old folks shouldn't be treated as children; the message would be easier to swallow if the moviemakers didn't treat the audience the same way. [20 Oct 1986, p.78b]

Hughes may deserve more plaudits as a social worker than a filmmaker, but you have to admit his hokey situation plays. The reason is the five terrific young actors, who bring more conviction to these parts than they perhaps deserve.

He’s (González Iñárritu) conjured up a dark, brutal vision of urban life that sticks to your skin like soot.

Working Girls has its shortcomings (the madam is too caricatured, the script occasionally reads like rehashed research), but the film, a fiction with the conviction of a documentary, fascinates and provokes. [06 Apr 1987, p.64]

At first, Blue Collar looks like an interracial buddy movie. Then it shows signs of becoming a caper comedy. Finally - and powerfully - it turns out to be that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genuinely political film. And a damned good one at that. [13 Feb 1978, p.98]

Filled with delicious backstage drama, and superb actors reveling in the opportunity to play their 19th-century counterparts.

Richard Benjamin's first film as a director, My Favorite Year, is a valentine-shaped satire with a tone of courtly rowdiness all its own. [04 Oct 1982, p.77]

Intimate, moving and playful.

A meditation on love, faith and science in the guise of a thriller, the movie's a tad schematic, but thoroughly gripping.

Once the shock value rubs off, this hyped-up movie reveals itself to be as empty as the desperate boys it pretends to explore. [05 July 1993, p.57]

A heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac. These fresh, unexpected juxtapositions are a specialty of the writer Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), a sworn enemy of cliché.

The entire solemn, portentous edifice that is The Village collapses of its own fake weight. Just about everything that makes Shyamalan special misfires here.

Fletch Lives feels like TV, but at least it's clever, unpretentious TV. [20 Mar 1989, p.83]

I expected to laugh; I didn't expect to be moved.

Violence belongs in Dracula - the problem is simply that Badham is not good at it. Virtually every big action scene is confusingly staged and clumsily edited. It is particularly sad to report that Olivier is terribly misused. [23 Jul 1979, p.70]

The simplicity of Sicko's argument is also its power.

This is one of the silliest movies ever made--and lots of instantly forgettable fun.

Writer-director Ray has a no-fuss style that is quietly, thoroughly gripping.

Trying for a tone somewhere between an art film, an absurdist comedy, a horror movie and an old Saturday-matinee serial, he's made a handsome, cripplingly self-conscious thriller that's devoid of any real thrills. [3 Feb. 1992, p.65]

Time Bandits is at once sophisticated and childlike in its magical but emotionally cool logic, and this tone is perfectly captured in young Warnock's appealingly sensible performance. Cleese, Warner, Richardson, Holm and Connery are in great form, and the bandits (David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Malcolm Dixon and Tiny Ross) are all gifted comic actors. Made on a modest budget, Time Bandits is a wonderful wild card in the fall movie season [09 Nov 1981, p.92]

Infused with the bleak romanticism of Melville's gangster movies ("Le Samouraï," "Bob le Flambeur"), and deepened by his own experiences in the Resistance, this hard-bitten tribute to freedom fighters makes most current movies look flabby and undisciplined. Don't miss it.

Though The Bounty is almost willfully perverse in thwarting audience expectations, and though it ends anticlimactically, you can't dismiss it. You know you've seen something. A spell, however faint, has been cast, like the one the island casts on the Bounty's crew. [14 May 1984, p.81]

A technological triumph. [19 May 1980]

You're not sure where it's headed, but with an ensemble this good the aimlessness seems invigorating. It's when the plot kicks in that Newell's movie gets less interesting. It's frustrating to see such a promising premise, and such a delightful cast, wasted.

Moore’s stunning, subtle performance as a woman trapped in the conventions of her time encapsulates the film’s brave, double-edged beauty.

It's hard not to be impressed by Kerry's courage and calm leadership--and to wonder if that guy will show up again.

The more the computer-generated images take over, the sillier The Haunting gets. By the end, the computers have chased all the scares away.

Jarmusch's punk minimalist style, deadpan humor and delicious timing are all his own, and his oddball drifters, whose major goal in life is hanging out, are three slob existential stooges Sam Beckett might envy. You wouldn't choose to hunker down with them in real life, but they're great company on screen. These dead-end kids may be headed nowhere not so fast, but their oddball odyssey is headed straight for cult-movie heaven. [08 Oct 1984, p.87]

Blood Diamond only skims the surface of many important subjects--the script doesn't begin to explain what the civil war was about. But if it opens a few eyes, it will have done its job.

The change of locale to Washington, D.C., Venice, Calif., and New Orleans only re-emphasizes the fact that this sleek comic-strip mix of violence and romance could take place anywhere except in the real world.

Jacquet's movie is as visually ravishing as "Winged Migration," and more gripping.

In this distressingly generic spy spoof, it's not Maxwell who's clueless, but the filmmakers.

Andy Tennant's flimsy but generally likeable comedy is tailor-made for Smith's cheerfully suave comic style, and the movie goes out of its way to avoid any hint of sleaziness.

The Secret of NIMH is an ambitious and entertaining debut that will delight and terrify kids everywhere. If there are flaws in NIMH they are a product of its ambition: visually, moments when the animation is almost too busy to take in; dramatically, an eclectic and overstuffed plot that threatens the balance of the movie. But better a surfeit than a soporific. [12 July 1982, p.75]

The beauty of Welcome to the Dollhouse is its pokerfaced objectivity, which neither condescends to its pubescent victim nor romantically inflates her plight.

Bizarre, edgy and haunting tale.

One of the things that makes Signs such a refreshing summer movie is that it goes against almost all the grains of contemporary Hollywood razzle-dazzle filmmaking -- as did “The Sixth Sense.”

A decidedly mixed bag.

It may be clumsily made, shamelessly contrived and utterly cynical in its calculated uplift, but there's no getting around it: the damn thing is funny.

She's Gotta Have It, a black-and-white movie made on a shoestring by the 29-year-old black filmmaker Spike Lee, is fresh in both senses of the word -- sassy and original. [08 Sept 1986, p.65]

Peaks early, then descends into portentous nonsense.

Manages to be simultaneously subversive and sweet.

Recklessly perched on the edge of the ludicrous, this examination of a destructive erotic passion unfolds with an unsettling mixture of steam and mordant iron.

Though sprinkled with comic gems, Big Top Pee-wee runs out of gas in the home stretch. Kleiser, of Blue Lagoon fame, is too bland for the job -- the tame Big Top finale makes you yearn for the cartoonish pizzazz of Big Adventure director Tim Burton. [01 Aug 1988, p.54]

Eye of the Needle never really catches fire. Marquand and screenwriter Stanley Mann may have overestimated the strength of their story: they serve it up unembellished, with competent but imperhat...Eye of the Needle isn't a bad film, just an unnecessary one: it was a better movie as a book. [3 August 1981, p.50]

Shot with gritty flamboyance by Robby Muller, cast with a fine eye for fresh, tough-guy faces, To Live and Die in L.A. may be fake savage, but it's fun. Friedkin can still cook up a good set piece: there's a tense, comic three-way chase in the L.A. airport, and a bravura car chase designed to evoke memories of "The French Connection." [11 Nov 1985, p.80]

A paint-by-numbers old-fashioned romantic epic, Head in the Clouds is neither romantic nor epic, but it does succeed at old-fashioned.

A finely polished, stirring court-martial drama that retells the true story of three Aussie soldiers who are put on trial for the murder of Boer prisoners of war and condemned to death by the British, who hypocritically deny that they were acting on Kitchener's orders. [15 Sep 1980, p.104]

A fast and furious feature film that starts at a gallop and never stops to catch its breath. [9 Aug 1993, p.57]

Has a flavor all its own-sweet, whimsical, homegrown. A quirky romantic for the 21st century, July finds humor and magic in places where no one has looked before.

The filmmakers are clearly in awe of the Chicks' fighting spirit. If you think Maines's original Bush remark was disrespectful, wait till you hear what she calls him here. Maines is not ready to make nice, and neither is this riveting documentary.

What this version offers is the chance to watch Russell Crowe and Christian Bale—two of the more charismatic, macho leading men around--duke it out psychologically, while another fine but less well-known intensity artist, Ben Foster, steals

Those who haven’t seen “Lock, Stock” will probably get a bigger kick out of Snatch than those who have. The second time around, what seemed spontaneous can sometimes feel strained.

Most of the time, Demme's deliberately unstable mixture of moods and genres produces electric results. Rachel Getting Married takes a familiar subject--the raw nerves of American family life with--and draws fresh blood.

The journey requires patience and the willingness to suspend your expectations of what a Burt-and-Goldie movie ought to be. This is a movie about what happens to a Fun Couple when they're not having fun. [27 Dec 1982, p.61]

The movie becomes a crazy quilt of competing stories, none of them properly developed. You could cut half the major characters out of Mr. Brooks and never miss them.

[Aldrich's] aiming so low in The Choirboys that he's even lost his technical competence; the movie's not just fetid, it's inept. [02 Jan 1978, p.59]

This true story, deftly embellished by writer Jeremy Brock and directed at a bracing English trot by John Madden, is a splendid showcase for its three superb leads. [28 July, 1997, p. 69]

Press and Blunt are major discoveries: in this sly and wonderfully atmospheric gem, they conjure up the role-playing raptures of youth with perfect poetic pitch.

You have to pay close attention to follow the double-crossing intricacies of the plot, but the reward for your work is dark and dirty fun.

Singleton's powerhouse movie has the impact of a stun gun. [15 July 1991]

The film is mostly successful in transporting the viewer to another age: the costumes, the body markings, the fierce Mayan masks, all feel right. And keeping the dialogue in subtitles was a smart move. Even better are the faces, which never fail to fascinate. But for all the anthropological research that went into the movie, what is Apocalypto trying to say?

Marshall is a good technician, but there's no sense of artistic adventure in his sometimes exciting, sometimes draggy movie.

Thanks to Ejiofor's wonderful performance--his easy, commanding body language wordlessly convinces you of his character's nobility--and Mamet's knowing take on the arcane world of Brazilian jiujitsu, Redbelt never loses its muscular hold on your attention.

It’s as formulaic as "The Sum of All Fears," but it feels fresher, hipper, less inflated.

As warm and lived-in as an old pair of boots, The Snapper is an honorable feel-good movie.

A pretty damn good summer movie.

An adult love story that's trying for stiff-upper-lip poignancy.

Ratner's version is friskier, shallower-and more fun.

You don't have to have lived through the period to find this wrenching. And you don't have to doubt Estevez's sincerity to find it emotionally opportunistic.

A clever, pleasingly sentimental tale of prehistoric times.

In its sweet, witty and modestly sentimental way, it delivers the romantic frissons that many star-studded, would-be blockbusters of the heart lumber in vain to achieve. [30 Apr 1979, p.81]