Jack Kroll

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]

Fawcett is admirable; evoking the pathos of beauty that turns from a blessing into a target, her own beauty is deepening into courage and talent. [1 Sept 1986, p.86]

Crash has no plot to speak of. It's a cinematic tone poem of collisions and coitus.

Henry & June doesn't finally cohere, but there's something noble in its evocation of the erotic in all its pleasure and pathos. [22 Oct 1990, p.74]

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

Director Harold Becker ("The Onion Field," "Sea of Love") makes "City Hall" absorbing in its evocation of New York fauna and rhythms. The problem is in the screenplay. [19 Feb 1996, p.68]

Lowe and Spader are quite good as alter egos of the moral shallows. But the film goes from shallow to callow. Director Curtis Hanson and writer David Koepp have turned out a glossy but hollow film noir that makes virtue and decadence equally vapid. [26 Mar 1990, p.53]

Paradise Alley lacks Rocky's primal simplicity: It's a parade of outrageous ploys that come pelting at you from all angles. [13 Nov 1978, p.106]

This movie is so angrily honest that it's a bit dotty. But the battles between Turner and Perkins have a real ferocity, and Turner's internal battle between sexual pride and fear is poignant and pertinent. [29 Oct 1984, p.134]

Its battle scenes have a raw, gritty power that's closer to an actual documentary than any other Vietnam movie (the director, John Irvin, is an Englishman with an extensive background in documentaries, including ones about Vietnam). But its uncompromising indictment of the antiwar movement back home is much too simplistic and undercuts the film's tremendous momentum as a record of the combat soldiers' hellish ordeal. [14 Sept 1987, p.83]

This movie has the weather of "Body Heat," the moral stance of "Absence of Malice" and the perverse plot-angle of "Tightrope." It's also not as good as any of these. [25 Feb 1985, p.85]

Boorman is both a romantic and a realist, an idealist and a skeptic, and Excalibur is an impressive but uneasy attempt to marry these opposites. [13 April 1981, p.82]

This is a smart and funny movie much of the time, but it's not that smart and funny, and it doesn't seem like old times. [05 Jan 1981, p.54]

Writer David Rayfiel and director Lamount Johnson are making murky connections between sex, religion, repression and the emotional sterility of avant-garde art. The result is both specious and seductive, a kitschy ode to the pervasive eroticism of contemporary culture. [12 Apr 1976, p.94]

The Elephant Man has great dignity, sweetness and compassion in this portrait of an unlucky monster who must fight to make other humans recognize his humanity. But it lacks dramatic punch and repeats its effects rather than developing a truly complex texture. [06 Oct 1980, p.71]

Like many movies with wimpy intellectual infrastructures, St. Elmo's Fire is not without a certain trumpery charm. [1 June 1995, p.55]

For about an hour the writing, acting and direction coalesce in a prismatic, hyperkinetic ode to end-of-century doom. And then the two-hours-plus film starts to subside into genre convention. [16 Oct 1995, p.86]

Sidney Lumet's new film does have its absorbing aspects, but it doesn't provide any jolting insights into the pervasive process that turns elections into advertising wars in which candidates come fixing at us like Peter Pepsi and Calvin Coke. [10 Feb 1986, p.79]

What makes Stallone a figure to be reckoned with is that although these films can be looked at as sledgehammer mindlessness, they contain not only action, but a mystique of action. For all the blood and thunder, there's a strange stillness at the heart of Stallone. [27 May 1985, p.74]

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

Polanski treats the hotel with the same virtuosity he displayed in filming the apartment in Rosemary's Baby, one of the most deeply satisfying thrillers ever made. Frantic doesn't maintain this level: there are some irritating illogicalities, and Polanski hasn't fully mined the possibilities of all the elements in his screenplay (cowritten with Gerard Brach), such as Arab terrorists in Paris and the tiny nuclear-bomb trigger they are after. [07 Mar 1988, p.68]