Jack Kroll

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]

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]

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]

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]

De Niro's exquisite underacting seems partly designed as a foil for Duvall's special ability to express repressed rage and explosive anxiety. They develop a complex and riveting relationship that's one of the most brilliant brother acts in screen history. [28 Sept 1981, p.87]

Cat People retains the psychological suggestiveness of the original while adding a blazing, carefully controlled eroticism and violence as well as state-of-the-art special effects and a ravishing over-all physical design. And it has the quintessential cat-person in Nastassia Kinski. As with all horror classics, what might be ludicrous is transformed into something gripping by the passionate logic of a grotesque metaphor. Alan Ormsby's screenplay has the logic and Paul Schrader has the passion. The result is Schrader's best work as a director. [05 Apr 1982, p.74]

Armstrong's first feature is a terrific job, a universally appealing story told with an integrity, humanity, warmth and humor you can taste. It is beautifully shot and performed with a style and sensitivity worthy of England's best actors. Russet-haired, bold-eyed, defiantly freckled Davis is like a summer storm, and Sam Neill has the rueful charm of a young James Mason. [22 Oct 1979, p.101]

I loved Star Wars and so will you, unless you're . . . oh well, I hope you're not...Star Wars is a hell of a lot of fun and Lucas makes fun a sparkling pop metaphor for the sheer joy of goodness that could even make friends out of men, mutations and machines.

Stanley Kubrick hungers for the ultimate. In The Shining, he has gone after the ultimate horror movie, something that will make "The Exorcist" look like "Abbott and Costello Meet Beelzebub." The result is the first epic horror film, a movie that is to other horror movies what his "2001: A Space Odyssey" was to other space movies. [26 May 1980, p.96]

Days of Heaven is a big advance, hauntingly beautiful in image, sound and rhythm, unashamedly poetic, brimming with sweetness and bitterness, darkness and light. [18 Sept. 1978, p.97]

One of the best American films of the year. [14 July 1986, p.69]

Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is the best American movie of the year, Scorsese's best film and at long last replaces Robert Wise's "The Set-Up" (1949) as the best film about prizefighting ever made. [24 Nov 1980, p.128]

Apocalypse Now is the ultimate war movie, a riveting adventure story, a searching and deeply committed probing of the moral problem of the Vietnam War -- and something more than all of these, transcending categories and genres in a way that only true art, and specifically true movie art, does at its best. The film seethes with violence, horror, madness, irony, humor, sweetness, anger, despair and hope, but the seething is controlled by the hand of a master. [20 Aug 1979, p.57]

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]

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]

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]

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]

True Stories is David Byrne's funny, worried, loving celebration of a disoriented America. [27 Oct 1986, p.103]

An odyssey of horror and suspense that's as tightly wound as a garrote and as beautifully designed as a guillotine. [24 Feb 1986, p.81]

Finney is remarkable. He plays Geoffrey like a ham actor, but a perpetual drunk is a ham actor: histrionics is the pathology of his sloshed behavior. Finney's body totters with the dignity of a wounded eagle. His face is a landscape racked by seismic tremors. He creates the fearsome effigy of a good man drowning in his own polluted goodness. [18 June 1984, p.92]

Junky, freaky, sadistic, masochistic, Mad Max has a perverse intelligence revving inside its pop exterior. It's a crazy collide-o-scope, a gear-stripping vision of human destiny careening toward a cosmic junkyard. [21 July 1980, p.71]

Taxi Driver is a disturbing, frightening film, but it has the desperate excitement that goes with its vision of the city. Scorsese's verminous New York is a descendant of Baudelaire's "anthill" Paris, Eliot's "unreal" London, the nightmare Berlin of such German films as Fritz Lang's "M." In this vision the great modern city is the crossroads where fenced-off forces break loose and collide. The overworld and the underworld embrace each other in a dance of mutual lusts that can only lead to violence. [1 Mar 1976, p.82]

An actor of great integrity, Scheider at last makes the powerful impression we've been waiting for; he plays Joe with wonderfully delicate and telling detail. You see all the lusts and weaknesses, but you see also an underlying sweetness, a kind of forlorn and desperate innocence that makes something deeply human out of good, bad, weakness, strength, triumph, defeat and all that jazz. [24 Dec 1979, p.78]

Hill has never been better in shaping and pacing a movie that has the excitement, romance and resonance of the best popular art. [15 Oct 1984, p.118]

The actors are wonderful, especially the women who play El Hadji's first two wives - ladies of magisterial personality, social shrewdness and sexual pride. The wedding sequence in Xala makes the one in "Godfather I" look like a wedding party at McDonald's. This allegory of impotence in the body politic shows Sembene on his way to becoming an African Moliere. [13 Oct 1975]

[De Palma] is a superb visual artist, but more important, his visual patterns express the moral dislocations of a troubled society. In Body Double, De Palma has never been more perversely brilliant in his tracking of the pervasive lust -- for sex, for money, for power -- that floats through our culture like some poisoned aerosol of desire. [29 Oct 1984, p.134]

Star 80 is very strong stuff. Fosse is one of our best moviemakers; he shows us better than anyone the perverse beauty in decadence and the decadence that we can't seem to burn out of our dreams of beauty. [14 Nov 1983, p.98]

The sweet, funny, funky screenplay by Darryl Ponicsan (from Terry Davis's novel) is beautifully directed by Harold Becker ("The Onion Field," "Taps"), who gets performances so true and winning from his actors that you're smiling through the entire film. [25 Feb 1985, p.85]

If there's a problem with this film, it lies in its hieratic, almost operatic style, which at times veers dangerously close to the self-absorbed and sanctimonious. But the sheer scope and significance of the story win the day, and Joffe and his actors score some stunning achievements. [3 Nov 1986, p.81]

Lynch comes amazingly close to the logic of dreams and nightmares, in which successive layers of reality seem to dissolve, sucking you into a terrifying vortex. [11 Sep 1978, p.95]

This courageous film breaks new ground in movie musicals. [21 Dec 1981, p.49]

A powerhouse of a film, an epic of sixteenth-century Japan swarming with savage action and even more savage irony. [13 Oct 1980, p.131]

A unique and provocative film, ironic, funny, crazy and moving. [26 Oct 1981, p.78]

Sarandon and Davis give superb, wonderfully interactive performances: funky, fierce, funny and poignant. [27 May 1991]

Splendid film...Just as the recent "Chariots of Fire" did, Robert Towne's Personal Best takes the world of track and field as a microcosm for the ecstasies and pains of self-striving. And it dares, with great delicacy and insight, to show a loving sexual relationship between two young women, not as a statement about homosexuality but as a paradigm of authentic human intimacy. [8 Feb 1982, p.60]

The Terminator is a splendid meta-monster, Frankensteined for the computer age. And Cameron devises not one, not two but, well, let's call it X climaxes that will melt the hinges of your jaws. [19 Nov 1984, p.132]

Alan J. Pakula has succeeded brilliantly in converting that outworn myth into a brand-new myth that conforms to our time. Pakula drives moral and ideological meanings straight to your nervous system by the rhythms of his imagery and editing. But Pakula is subtler, less melodramatic. Redford and Hoffman really are ordinary guys doing an ordinary job. But film shows how their tenacity, their doggedness, become under pressure much more than mere professional virtues. [05 Apr 1976, p.85]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

Robertson, the former rock star, is a natural screen presence who's learning how to act; Busey is a sophisticated young actor who makes everything look natural. Best of all is Jodie Foster as a teen-age runaway who joins the carnival. Now 17, she has the wise but innocent smile of a kid Mona Lisa and an irresistible acting style that combines tough realism and pure poetry. [23 May 1980, p.75]

Price's vision was realistic and romantic at the same time, the violence painful but also sensual, the mood charged with a sweet hopelessness. Philip Kaufman's tough but tender film emphasizes this double vision. It's like Grease with brass knuckles. [16 July 1979, p.93]

Purists will cavil -- or choke -- and not everything works, but this film does more than rough justice to its source -- including McKellen's portrait of a man who tries to redeem his deformed body by deforming his soul. [29 Jan 1996, p.58]

Saint Jack should clear away all irrelevancies, reminding us that Bogdanovich is a gifted and distinctive director who should be making movies, not enemies. [07 May 1979, p.88]

The fun of They All Laughed is that it's both blithe and knowing, a work carefree in its spirit and careful in its art, somehow French in the way of (so help me!) Rene Clair. [30 Nov 1981, p.105]

The first major film dealing with photojournalism, Under Fire expertly uses the American movies' conventions of excitement and romance to put into sharp focus tough questions of truth, ethics, politics and ultimately consciousness itself. [24 Oct 1983, p.124]

Switch plays witty and wise games with every shade of sexuality. [20 May 1991, p.56]

The gags as usual vary in quality from gold to zinc, but what makes Silent Movie more than a string of gags is the comic sensibility of Brooks. [12 Jul 1976, p.69]

Marathon Man is an intelligent and largely satisfying thriller, written by William Goldman from his own novel, directed by John Schlesigner and photographed by Conrad Hall. But the most satisfying element is the work of Olivier, one of the few who turn acting into one of the great humane progressions of Western civilization. [11 Oct 1976]

The Onion Field is one of the best films of the year, a powling, gripping, disturbing movie that has its own far-from-simple vision of evil in our wretched and sinister cities. [24 Sep 1979, p.107]

Moving like a dream that explodes into reality, Chocolat is blessed with superb acting, especially by its star, the African-born Bankole. His quiet eloquence and suppressed passion express the human cost of an unjust political system. [27 Mar 1989, p.68]

The Streep-De Niro show is bringing back the sizzle and savor of the golden age of movie couples. [03 Dec 1984, p.78]

Slacker is a very funny, oddly touching, weirdly appealing look at the young (and not so young) people who live (sort of) in the nooks and crannies of this college town. [22 July 1991, p.57]

In THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN, they're at their most golden, ethical and sexy. This ability to make right-mindedness so seductive, stylish and debonair is what makes The Electric Horseman such a sweet and beguiling movie. [17 Dec 1979, p.112]

Sidney Lumet's film tries very hard to be an original blend of realism, black farce and probing comment on the McLuhanatic Age that creates instant show biz out of what used to be called life. [29 Sep 1975, p.84]

Superman turns out to be a surprisingly infectious entertainment, nicely balanced between warmth and wit, intimacy and impressive special effects, comic-strip fantasy and several elements that make the movie eminently eligible for Deep Thinking about rescue fantasies, cherubic messiahs and other pieces of popcorn metaphysics. [1 Jan 1979, p.46]

A genuine work of the popular imagination. It's the first true populist science-fiction film, a blend of the most startling, far-out special effects with the most ordinary human material of the American Heartland. [21 Nov 1977, p.88]

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]

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

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]

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]

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

Murphy raw is better than the well-done ego served up in Beverly Hills Cop II. But he's become a brilliant wise guy, unlike his hero Richard Pryor, who can turn profanity into poetry and hipness into humanity. [11 Jan 1988, p.57]

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]

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]

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]

Edwards has given Dudley Moore his best vehicle since Arthur. [31 Dec 1984, p.67]

Nickelodeon is Bogdanovich's sweet funny homage to the days before World War I when America played with its new toy, the movies, in those converted storefronts or jerry-built pantheons where for a nickel you could enter the new magic darkness of electric centuryIn that flickering, faintly salacious darkness, a new innocence was born. [27 Dec 1976, p.56]

A reasonably engaging kids' flick that is given humor and heartbreak by director Michael Dinner and a cast of splendidly scruffy young players. [11 Feb 1985, p.73]

The film is laudable, but Grass's book was lacerating. [21 Apr 1980, p.90]

The jaggedness will put many people off, which is a shame, because this is a rewarding film that asks only that you stay alert and use your senses. [15 Mar 1976, p.89]

Whatever its imperfections of structure and symmetry, Cry Freedom is an exciting film because of Attenborough's passionate feeling for the complex, bitter war for justice that's going on in South Africa. [09 Nov 1987, p.79]

The overall effect of Grenaway's film is mixed: disturbing, too schematic to be entirely convincing, unforgettable as few movies are. A key element is the powerful acting of a distinguished cast. [23 Apr 1990, p.73]

Donner has directed with a strong, quiet sense of human nuance that includes enough irony to give the bum's rush to the self pity that keeps trying to sneak into Max's Bar. [05 Jan 1981, p.55]

Paul Rudnick's clever screenplay is deftly cartoonified by director Barry Sonnenfeld. [22 Nov 1993, p.57]

This movie is so packed with character, incident and detail that it seems to whiz by like a ferocious number by a high powered jazz ensemble. In the process it skimps on connections and short-circuits many of its emotional relationships. But Coppola, called in to rescue the project and working under crazy financial and creative pressure, has come up with a vision of jazz-age fever in which violence, romance and race are choreographed to the music of the Harlem renaissance. [24 Dec 1984, p.52]

For Your Eyes Only is one giant second-unit film, an anthology of action episodes held together by the thinnest of plot lines. Most of these episodes are terrific in their exhilaratingly absurd energy: Steven Spielberg himself would not sneer at them. [29 June 1981, p.72]

This Freudian folderol is actually well handled by writer-director Richard Tuggle, who wrote the script for Eastwood's Escape From Alcatraz and here, in his first shot at directing, gives Tightrope a quietly effective tension and suspense. [27 Aug 1984, p.68]

De Palma's takeoff on the Godfather genre doesn't have the subversive slyness of Prizzi's Honor. Wise Guys aims lower, but that's an honorable direction in which to aim, and De Palma and writer George Gallo riddle the belly with dumdum laugh bullets. [19 May 1986, p.73]

Director Irvin Kershner handles the early part with wit and style, but he's hamstrung by Lorenzo Semple's script, which is based too much on "Thunderball." Still, there are fun passages. [10 Oct 1983, p.93]

Kansas City can be regarded as a jazz tone poem on themes of race, politics, money and the movies themselves.

There's plenty of violence in The Long Good Friday, but it's good old macho man-against-man violence and the film has crisp direction from John Mackenzie and a tight, smart, sophisticated script by a first-rate English playwright, Barrie Keeffe. [15 Mar 1982, p.78]

It had to happen. The most foulmouthed movie of all time has been written by a woman. Nancy Dowd's original screen-play for SLAP SHOT is a landmark. Like female jockeys, lesbian ministers and distaff sportscasters, this sharp-eared, engagingly impudent young writer has struck a blow for equal rights, a field that stretches from realms of the spirit to jock itch. The first in a coming avalanche of sports-oriented movies, this strenuously irreverent film about a minor-league hockey team in Middle America will set tongues wagging over every sports buff's beer glass, every culture-vulture's wine goblet, every pundit's brandy snifter. [7 Mar 1977, p.68]

A perversely appealing apotheosis of cuteness. Almost inadvertently, the film becomes an ultimate comment on American innocence that can only refresh itself by regression. The unseen patron saint of Parker's stylish movie is not Little Caesar but Humbert Humbert. [27 Sept 1976, p.89]

A pure, rousingly entertaining action movie which makes it clear that "binary oppositions" are good guys vs. bad guys and "ideological meanings" are us vs. them[17 July 1989, p.52]

Like Renoir, Mazursky has warm affection for his supermaterialists and his tattered tramp. The joke and wisdom of this movie is that they need each other. Joke and wisdom don't always interlock perfectly, but the movie has more than its share of savvy comedy and sharp social perception. [03 Feb 1986, p.68]

There is genuine sweetness in this nougat-hearted movie -- in the friendliness of Ashby's direction, the caressed clarity of Haskell Wexler's cinematography and, most of all, the acting of Jon Voight. [11 Oct 1982, p.104]

There's an aura of liberal ineffectuality about The Brother, but it's touching and amusing and confirms the originality of Sayles. [08 Oct 1984, p.87]

The Idolmaker would be worth seeing if only for its modesty, which is a blessing in these days of ersatz epics. It's a small, honest, decently entertaining film with one outstanding performance. [08 Dec 1980, p.107]

Penn and McGuane have made an intelligent, entertaining Western, nicely balanced between the protagonists and the well-woven, colorful tapestry in which they're placed. [24 May 1976, p.103]