Jack Kroll

Almost certainly Joplin's friends, associates and many of her old fans will accuse The Rose of distortion, sentimentality, vulgarization andother crimes. They will not be entirely wrong, and yet Mark Rydell's film has a certain coarse, splashy integrity. And it has a remarkable, going-all-the-way performance by Bette Midler in her first movie. [12 Nov 1979, p.107]

The smartest, sweetest, funniest comedy in many summers. [08 July 1985, p.76]

Eating Raoul is only one of the many outrageous things that Paul and Mary Bland do in this outrageous black comedy that's almost certain to be the up-from-underground movie of the year. [11 Oct 1982, p.103]

Greystoke is entertaining, intelligent, even touching in its broad-scale treatment of a story that has always provided common ground for children and grown-ups. The main problem with this movie is that it's too short. [26 Mar 1984, p.74]

At times veering toward the portentous, the film nonetheless has the relentless rhythm of a juggernaut. The acting is first-rate American realism -- gutsy, funny and scary as the occasion demands. [09 June 1986, p.79]

Tempest is too long and often rambles when it should scintillate, but it has wit and heart, and some of its Shakespearean switcheroos have a touching charm. [16 Aug 1982, p.59]

An absorbing, well-crafted, honorable movie that seems almost as ambitious as the original operation itself. [20 Jun 1977, p.65]

Central America has become a kind of hell on earth, and "Salvador" scorches us with this infernal truth. [17 March 1986, p.81]

Matlin's performance in her first major role in her first movie is so good -- sensitive, sharp, funny -- that she's likely to be the first deaf actress to get an Oscar nomination. [20 Oct 1986, p.77]

Screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue and director Rob Cohen have reasonably literate fun subverting the knight genre. [10 Jun 1996, p.91]

And as Lucy, 19-year-old newcomer Helena Bonham Carter (whose great grandfather was British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) is like a charming, flustered Alice grown up into the more dangerous wonderland of reality. [10 March 1986, p.74]

A high-gloss, light-fingered flick that deftly picks your pocket of a few bucks and in return slips you two hours of neatly killed time. [30 June 1980, p.62]

Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been just another sensationalist movie version of a shocking best seller. But Richard Brooks has filmed it with power, seriousness and integrity. [24 Oct 1977, p.126]

The best thing about Black Sunday is its pulsating rhythm of suspense and the glittering texture of details it assembles as it drives its way toward its climax. [04 Apr 1977, p.73]

Bringing together Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin is a fairly inspired idea. And bringing them together in the same body is like heaping whipped cream atop inspiration. [17 Sep 1984, p.89]

As brutally unsparing as "Platoon" was, it was ultimately warm and embracing. Kubrick's film is about as embracing as a full-metal-jacketed bullet in the gut. [29 June 1987]

An offbeat, engaging little movie about the mad mad world of bodybuilders. [24 Jan 1977, p.61]

Faye Dunaway's performance has its own Gothic energy and insight. She catches the behavioral details of Joan Crawford--the throaty voice, dropping its "g's" with tough-guy casualness, the Venus' flytrap seductiveness. In her nightly chin strap, her sweat suit as she works out like a fighter, in Irene Sharaff|s brilliant period gowns and rings-of-Saturn hats, Dunaway catches the star's driving ambition, her obsession with a perverse ideal of perfection that turns human feeling into cruelty. She makes Crawford a fearsome portrait of the pathology of stardom. [21 Sept 1981, p.97A]

Lange gets deep into these numbers, the sound and spirit of Patsy seeming to stream through her face, body and hands with the musical equivalent of that hunger for living. Hominy Harmonies: Lange's energy, sensuality and intelligence pump iron into Getchell's script, which doesn't have the bite and color of his "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." [7 Oct 1985, p.88]

Rohmer, whose films ("Claire's Knee," "My Night at Maud's") are all about desire chilled in the icebox of custom, has brilliantly reproduced the impact of this rationally irrational story: he captures Kleist's almost surreal effect of a grenade whose exploding fragments somehow arrange themselves into a classically formal pattern. [1 Nov 1976, p.83]

Whatever it is -- movie, photographed stage show, TV spectacular -- Pirates of Penzance is a happy hybrid. [14 Feb 1983, p.85]

If Ang Lee sometimes piles on the sugar, he has made a truly sweet movie in a bitter time. It leaves a bracing aftertaste. [22 Aug 1994, p.62]

What makes Without a Trace important is the powerful, intelligent, seismic-sensitive performance of Kate Nelligan as Alex's mother. Nelligan literally creates the film's real theme -- the nightmare emotional world the victims of such crimes are plunged into. [07 Feb 1983, p.69]

There's a frenzied integrity to this wild and crazy movie that yells at us as a father yells at children who are playing with fire. [26 Apr 1982, p.75]

Chariots of Fire will thrill you and delight you and very possibly reduce--or exalt--you to tears...Chariots of Fire is for everyone; it's exactly what a popular film ought to be: superb work by first-rate people out to achieve the highest standards of excellence. [28 Sept 1981, p.88]

Despite pitfalls of bathos and silliness, Knightriders has a startling sweetness, warmth and humor. [13 April 1981, p.82]

Silver gets rich Delancey detail and savory acting from a charming cast, especially Irving and Riegert, whose subtle, funny-sad performance is a small miracle of cliche-avoidance. But finally "Crossing Delancey" confuses charm with the cutes. [05 Sep 1988, p.61A]

Danny Rose may be his most Chaplinesque film, and therefore his most dangerous: the fine line that Allen (like Chaplin) walks between sweetness and sentimentality has never been finer. [30 Jan 1984, p.69]