Jack Kroll

As a straight thriller Condor comes down to thrills that work and thrills that don't. [29 Sep 1975, p.84]

Onstage, trapped in the mini-wasteland of the parking lot, the creeped-out kids crackled like lightning in a bottle. Linklater's meager attempts to open up the movie drain its energy.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

In a way it's silly to review a movie like this; it's like reviewing a case of acne. John G. Avildsen, the checkered-career director who made Rocky, has made this one a kind of Pebbly -- a Rocky for teenychoppers, about a semi-wimpy kid named Daniel (Ralph Macchio) who's constantly being clobbered by the creeps in his high school until he's taught karate by his janitor, Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki [Pat] Morita). [25 June 1984, p.69]

Admirable in many ways, Coming Home succumbs to the same American lust for romance and heroism for which it implicitly condemns its doomed Marine captain. [20 Feb 1978, p.87]

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

The updated King Kong doesn't really believe in itself; it snickers, straightens its face, roars and tramples, snickers again. Behind the bigness lurks a conventionality of spirit.It does have a certain thunderous fun from time to time, but that's not the stuff that dreams are made on. [20 Dec 1976, p.102]

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]

Swing Shift has neither enough laughs nor enough sobs. [23 Apr 1984, p.80]

The screenplay, by Rafelson and Charles Gaines from the latter's novel, has all the ingredients of an American Gothic, and that's what you get. But the theme of the young dropout who opposes the system with ironic apathy until something (usually something violent) needles him to action is moldy around the edges, and by now Jeff Bridges seems to be playing that role in his sleep. [17 May 1976, p.111]

This film has almost none of the scraggy, raunchy, irreverent anarchy that gave "Animal House" a kind of perverse anti-style. There's nothing at all perverse about Meatballs; in fact, it's so cutesy, squeaky-clean that it becomes Andy Hardy with a few extra belches. [9 July 1979, p.68]

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]

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

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]

Hasn't the South as a cornucopia of Lovable Eccentrics worn out its welcome? After Tennessee Williams? After Carson McCullers? After -- what, you say your appetite for L.E.'s is insatiable? Then Miss Firecracker, which Beth Henley has adapted from her 1984 play, is your heaping platter of that delicacy. [01 May 1989, p.75]

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]

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 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]

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 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]