Jack Kroll

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]

Simon shies away from the more interesting implications of his own growth in favor of ingratiating his audience. This weakens the movie versions even more than the original plays. [04 Apr 1988, p.72A]

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]

Spielberg has gone to such lengths to avoid boredom that he has leaped squarely into the opposite trap: this movie has such unrelenting action that it jackhammers you into a punch-drunk stupor. This may be the first movie whose audience O.D.'s on action. [4 June 1984, p.78]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

The film is too dumb to work as patriotic exhortation and too mawkish to work as blood-and-guts exploitation. It's a long commercial in which the Marlboro Man has become the American Guerrilla, with his good buddies, good guns and a bottomless case of Coors. [03 Sep 1984, p.73]

Frothing from two mouths, they parody film noir, megaviolent thrillers, sports allegories, ravaged-war-veteran movies, existentialist Westerns, even Busby Berkeley musicals.

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 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]

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]

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

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]

[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]

Some of this is mildly amusing, but most of it is thumpingly obvious. [01 Oct 1979, p.77]

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]

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]

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

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

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]

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]

This lean, hard, ruggedly acted film is hardly ingratiating, but its clenched power has a cruel and compelling beauty. [04 July 1977, p.77]

Such soft fare that it makes your eyes feel gummy. Andrew Bergman's script has no comic tension and no thrills. [3 June 1985, p.65]