Gary Arnold

Although Rohmer's adaptation, shot in German with a cast of actors drawn from the German stage, is pedantically faithful to the letter of the original - almost word-for-word as well as scene-for-scene - it substitutes a style that seems woefully wrong. Rohmer's approach is too static and repressed to release the comic ironies Kleist perceived in the very premise of an honorable man's lapse leading to an honorable woman's distress and built into his brilliantly objective story-telling style. [21 Jan 1977, p.B15]

It's obvious that Blank has been forced into many organizational shortcuts in an effort to stitch the random footage together.

Victory, the latest effort from veteran director John Houston, represents a remarkable triumph of artificial obliviousness. The misbegotten hybrid screenplay struggles to cross the tradition of POW escape films like The Wooden Horse, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape with recent rabble-rousing sports sagas like The Longest Yard and Rocky. [31 July 1981, p.B3]

The Outsiders works itself up into overstylized tizzies during things like the rumble sequence, but its overall energy level is alarmingly faint, and the failure to add new dimensions or new material to the Hinton original suggests an exhausted imagination.

A ridiculously self-indulgent spree of satanic bogeymannerisms entitled Suspiria, virtually self-destructs in the opening sequence. Eager to menace the audience from every sensory direction, Argento doesn't so much create and sustain an illusion of terror as invite you to marvel at his garish ingenuity, at the spectacle of a filmmaker who can't resist overstylizing and upstaging his material.

An uncoordinated tear jerker certain to double up cynics and touch only those fans who prefer their favorites lost in a narcissistic fog. [26 Oct 1977, p.B1]

On screen, Reds evolves into an earnestly muddled mishmash of Romance and History. An intriguing, ambitious disappointment, it launches the Christmas movie season on a note of droopy-spirited seriousness...It isn't the running time alone that makes Reds a tough sell and a discouraging endurance test; it's the lack of an emotional payoff strong enough to justify an epic trek down the corridors of history. [4 Dec 1981, p.D1]

Fade to Black washes out by relying too heavily on assocations from older films. The excerpts from old movies are far more vivid and evocative than the host attraction. [12 Nov 1980, p.B7]

An absurdly upbeat romantic vehicle for John Travolta. The film-makers appear to believe that the moviegoing public craves a reassuring love story, at any cost. This film ends up as s counterfeit endorsement of the so-called simpler so-called values.

The most perfunctory and least imaginative of the recent cycle of horror melodramas, Motel Hell may be credited with a fleeting wry touch, but it wears out its welcome by running a minimum of ghoulish stunts into the ground. [25 Oct 1980, p.F4]

The movie is so shabbily written (by Dennis Hackin) and unevenly directed (by Eastwood himself) that the traditional obstacles to romantic comedy consummation are overwhelmed by superfluous complications and imprecise calculations.

It could be the basis of a genuinely interesting drama, for stage or screen, about conjugal relations in the theater. Obviously. John Cassavetes is the last person in the world likely to perceive or write that drama. [15 Apr 1978, p.C9]

Ice Castles has been shamelessly, and none too slickly, engineered to empty the tear ducts of customers primed to blubber at the sight of a Pavlovian cliche. [03 Feb 1979, p.D7]

Instead of being touched by this anachronistic road allegory, one is merely puzzled. What prompted this material, redolent of so many failed counterculture romances of a few years ago, to surface at this time? [04 Nov 1977, p.D5]

John Huston's movie version of Under the Volcano, which opens today at the West End Circle, seems to run out of pictorial ideas shortly after the credit sequence, a "dance of death" with skeleton dolls that establishes the setting in and around Cuernavaca, Mexico, on Nov. 1-2, 1938, during the Day of the Dead ceremonies. [13 July 1984, p.E4]

In the hands of a less amateurish director, The Philadelphia Experiment, now at area theaters, might have emerged as an ingratiating sleeper. [09 Aug 1984, p.D6]

The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again is content to deepen the rut left four years ago by its predecessor, The Apple Dumpling Gang, one of the dreariest Disney artifacts of the decade but a comfortable box-office success.

In short, Magic is unworthy of its name. It's frightfully feeble and obvious. [11 Nov 1978, p.F11]

The doting phoniness of the text has probably been aggravated rather than improved by a formidable casting coup -- uniting Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn for the first time in their illustrious careers and creating the shallowest heartwarmer in recent memory. [22 Jan 1982, p.C1]

Each new attempt to revive the Western seems to plunge the patient into a deeper coma. Arriving on the heels of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South, Alan J. Pakula's cataleptic Comes a Horseman suggests a conspiracy to kick the poor old Western while it's down. [25 Oct 1978, p.D13]

The finished film has no thematic or emotional integrity. It flip-flops withdesperate hypocrisy between clownish antics and indignant orations. [09 Feb 1978, p.B13]

The problem with S.O.B. is that it reveals another sort of failure on Edwards' part: his fondness for dwelling on this low point in his career. He neglects to update the scenario or liberate it from the self-pity he overindulged in at the time. In fact, it's residual self-pity that undermines S.O.B. as a promising satire of Hollywood mores and hypocrisies. Edwards' tendency to feel sorry for himself keeps intruding on the potential wackiness. [2 July 1981, p.C1]

Eyes is somehow too relaxing to be satisfying.

Some of the jokes are so raucously or goofily low-minded that you may laugh out of a kind of shocked weakness.

The tussle between David and The Needle seems to release a Pandora's Box of outrageous scenes. [24 July 1981, p.D8]

Nicholson looks severly overmatched against Lange but the basic problem is that the filmmakers miss the mutuality of the obsession envisioned by Cain -- an attraction that enslaves Frank and Cora, inspiring murder and betrayal in the wake of adulterous passion. [20 March 1981, p.C1]

As a rule, the filmmakers manufacture fake climaxes every 10 or 15 minutes, poop out and lapse into forgetfulness, just as if they were structuring the material for television. Norma Rae seems to reflect the confusion of veteran filmmakers so eager to please that they cease to think straight.

Private Benjamin seems coarse, sluggish and interminable as a comedy scenario.