Jay Scott

The larger budget has given Scanners a high-gloss Hollywood look, the editing is occasionally elegant and the special effects, which consist mostly of imaginative ways of turning actors into meat, provoke from the audience the desired response ("Oh, yuk]"), but he is careful to keep the violence within currently accepted boundaries. [19 Jan 1981]

Documentaries show us what can be seen; fiction features, to qualify as art, should visualize for us the usually unseen. Benny's Video, in which the thought processes of the characters are never delivered to the camera, is all surface. Its implicit claim is that by doing nothing, it is doing everything. But there are times, and this is one of them, when less is merely less. [27 Mar 1993]

More than merely another bad movie, it's the most depressing development yet in Coppola's career. It's a would-be cash cow bred cynically to excrete money, the arty answer to "Child's Play 2" or "Back to the Future III."

Alan Parker has directed the film as if he were a sniper: you never know when you're going to get hit next, but from the first moments you know you're being aimed at. The opening, with Hayes taping hash to his chest only to be apprehended at the airport, must have looked like standard stuff in Oliver Stone's script, but on screen it's unadulterated adrenalin, filmed with fast cuts timed in counterpoint to the sound of Hayes' pounding heart. [25 Oct 1978]

It is probably silly and certainly counterproductive to reject what Cry Freedom is merely because of what it is not. If it is not a great political film, it is an honorable attempt to add to political debate; if it is not a definitive biography of a great man, it does contain a mesmerizing incarnation of Biko in the person of U.S. actor Denzel Washington. [06 Nov 1987]

Inoffensive in its simplicity; its high, if naive, spirits send viewers out into the all too real streets clothed in the glow of a fantasy well-spun.

The Bostonians, from the novel by Henry James, is the story of their relationship, one of the strangest in literature. Unfortunately, that strangeness has survived the transfer to the screen less than intact, and satiric oddity has been replaced by romantic banality. Redgrave's performance - red-eyed, quivering, opalescent - is peerless, the one incontrovertible reason to see the film. [23 Nov 1984]

Walter Hill is a master moviemaker, and when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the minute the momentum slows, it's another story - a story about a movie with no story at all. [01 June 1984]

Creepshow is probably not everything the fans of each horrormeister hoped it would be (it is not, for example, in the same league as Cavalcanti's great anthology film, Dead of Night), but it's probably enough.[10 Nov 1982]

In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]

Humanistic and anti-war, Memphis Belle is predictably uplifting, as is the wont of producer Puttnam, but not at the expense of good sense. These were fine kids, this exciting and intelligent film says, and it wasn't their fault society couldn't find anything better for them to do than kill or be killed. Memphis Belle is a dance of life tapped out on a tombstone. [12 Oct 1990]

It's an undemanding yet bright delight. [16 Mar 1991]

Altered States can be accused of many things, but never of harboring a new idea. Because the script's lessons have been drowned in fruity religious imagery, Altered States is at most an accomplished horror film, the kind of stomach-churning movie to which people like David Cronenberg aspire. [23 Jan 1981]

The premise of Child's Play, in which the murderer is a much-merchandised doll patterned after cartoon characters known as Good Guys, is long overdue. Unfortunately, the package in which the present arrives is often too little, sometimes too much, and always too late. [11 Nov 1988]

Psycho III, directed by Perkins himself, is years behind the Hitchcock original in quality, it's light years ahead of Psycho II. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

When a Stranger Calls manages to scare the stuffing out of the audience - the film is authentically terrifying - without pouring more than a demi-carafe of gore. [22 Oct 1979]

Like most of Simon's work, the situation is gaggy and mechanical and predictable, but Miss Hawn may succeed in persuading you it's a screwball classic. [19 Dec 1980]

Director Michael Apted's Thunderheart is a fleetly-paced murder mystery cum conspiracy thriller marred only by an 'inspirational' Hollywood ending at odds with the trajectory of the plot. [3 Apr 1992]

Writer Tesich, previously responsible for Four Friends and Breaking Away, serves Irving's material straight up - the adaptation is thorough and four-square and seemingly unconscious of the bizarre nature of Garp's odyssey through modern mores. The strategy works. [23 July 1982]

Under Don Siegel's flag, no new territory is surveyed and the destination is familiar, but the journey proves to be a comfortable one and the victory waiting at the end is far from Pyrrhic. [19 June 1980]

A rancid, violent police picture starring and directed by Burt Reynolds who, like bad news, is everywhere this year. [19 Dec 1981]

Like Pretty Woman, Green Card doesn't aim high - comedy, sentimentality, sex and pathos are sufficient for its scheme of fantasy things - but with the exception of MacDowell, it achieves its modest aims unerringly. [11 Jan 1991, p.C1]

The premise of Explorers, directed by Joe Dante, who in the past (The Howling, the TV cartoon sequence of Twilight Zone - The Movie, Gremlins) has had style and ingenuity to spare, is equally promising, but it's worked out with the style and ingenuity of an indolent slug making its way across a slab of hot concrete in hell. [12 July 1985]

The frantic pleasures of this film add up to what used to be considered good fun; good Saturday morning fun; good Saturday morning fun to eat pancakes and pour maple syrup by; good fun that, once the day begins, is good fun soon forgotten. It's a pity Flash Gordon can't be screened at the breakfast table. [6 Dec 1980, p.E7]

The gamble of casting Misses Tomlin and Fonda in what would seem to be the wrong roles (Violet is the strong, efficient, hard-edged secretary; Judy the frilly, "feminine," inexperienced employee) pays off handsomely, especially with Miss Tomlin. When she is handed a memo by a senior secretary and smilingly snarls, "Thanks, Roz, I know just where to stick it," her line reading is worth the price of admission. The pneumatic Miss Parton sings the theme song with greater confidence than she brings to her acting: she is a sweet little thing, but she's no thespian. [20 Dec 1980]

With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]

Some viewers will decide that Benny & Joon strays too far from the brink; they will find its sentimentality cloying. Other viewers will applaud the classic silent film humour and will emerge with a glow they'll want to show off to their friends. Both camps can agree, however, that Mary Stuart Masterson, Aidan Quinn and Johnny Depp are quite good. [16 Apr 1993]

Wayne's World has been engineered to amuse people who are mirror images of its heroes, but it goes wickedly wrong: It's so dumb it talks down to the stupid.

Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]

Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, is decadent, overpoweringly erotic campiness coupled with soft-core pornography - blood, breasts, buttocks and big teeth. It's daring and those with a taste for the sexily sanguine will find it delightful. But it's not for the prudish. [13 Nov 1992, p.C1]

The relationships between the characters are designed to climax in the slaughter, but by then the static images, the lack of rhythm and the paucity of intelligence (Heaven's Gate is simultaneously without subtlety or clarity) have taken their toll and the movie is unsalvageable. [21 Nov 1980]

Except for the ending (more about that in a minute), Brainstorm is near the pinnacle of popular entertainment, just below "WarGames". [30 Sept 1983]

Victory, the new film by 74-year-old John Huston, is a civilized, professional, old-fashioned entertainment about men in groups. The picture is being hyped as a story of human spirit, prevailing against impossible odds, but it's a lot more low-key and a great deal more enjoyable than that. It's the story of the wake left by a great director sailing smoothly at half-mast. [31 July 1981]

Rocky III, unlike its twin predecessors, is a charmlessly manipulative movie. The magic is kaput. [28 May 1982]

When Christine's on the warpath, she foams at the grille. But her movie doesn't do right by her snottiness. Her movie, never scary but campily entertaining for about an hour, loses compression toward the end and the grumpy old thing finally sputters to a stall - gets flattened, poops out. [09 Dec 1983]

Essentially, it re-constitutes the war movie, and in so doing marries a feminist Rambo to Star Wars. [19 July 1986, p.D9]

Except in the performances of John Savage, as Hettinger, and James Woods, as Powell, there is little attempt to probe the reasons for behavior, and except in the stylized filming of the murder, there is little attempt to assign special importance to one event over another. The picture is a textbook example of the limits of objective reporting. [06 Oct 1979]

The humour is based entirely on inversion which worked in your cartoons, and even on the TV show, but it's not enough to hold up a movie, even with the helping hand provided by a disembodied hand. [22 Nov 1991]

The daring ceases to be exploratory and turns, spitting and screaming, on itself. When Bakshi shows us an animated replay of the infamous 1968 pistol execution of a suspected Viet Cong sympathizer, he imparts to the event the grinning slapstick of a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote confrontation. It's as good a place to walk out of American Pop as any. [6 March 1981]

Wind is a rapturous experience. It's a sporting movie about the spirit of sport that never steps over the line into a win-at-all-costs ethos, or into the hypocrisy of it's-the-way-you-play-the-game-that-counts. [14 Sep 1992]

Is it possible for a horror movie to be too good? If it is, then Cujo is it: this is one of the few films on record where the combination of low shock and high style results in an experience that borders on the unbearably intense. The movie is spectacularly well-made, but it's nearly unwatchable. [29 Aug 1983]

Given Part II's quality, the final sequence, a series of clips from next summer's Part III, may be a major miscalculation. "To be concluded," reads the final title. Sounds more like a threat than a promise. [22 Nov 1989, p.C9]

An inspired variation on his familiar theme: the whore with a heart of gold is a man. [2 Feb 1980]

It must be said that the closing sequence, in which Arthur meets the misbegotten Mordred on an orange battlefield illuminated by a shield-sized red sun, is an epic, Oedipal masterpiece of authentic mythic power, a sequence so strong it shakes the torpor from one's shoulders and induces regret that the rest of the saga has been so juvenile, so lifeless and so lacking poetry or Shakespearean sweep. [11 April 1981]

The Two Jakes itself is less tragic than petulant, mired in a self-pitying remembrance of things past. [10 Aug 1990]

In-jokes for horror-film fans abound (the dog is named Jason, the monster in the Friday the 13th series; a cafe is the Craven Inn - Wes Craven directed the first Nightmare on Elm Street), and it's possible that those fans will be satisfied with the expensive, surreal special effects unleashed by director Renny Harlin. Everyone else is apt to agree with the teen-ager who dismisses Freddy by saying, "We all got better things to dream about." [19 Aug 1988]

This extraordinary film, a stiletto-edged domestic melodrama that, at different times, evokes the work of Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the other, unrelated Penn (Arthur, director of Bonnie and Clyde), is harrowingly honest in content yet lyrically elegiac in style. [21 Sep 1991]

It's undemanding good fun, even when the script turns sentimental. [14 Dec 1990]

Nighthawks, a cops 'n' robbers thriller with terrorists where the robbers should be and cops as counter-terrorists, has a dirty job to do and does it. That is not an endorsement. Thumbscrews and cattle prods are real good at what they do, too. [11 Apr 1981]

Despite some casting problems, director paints a convincing portrait of a frenzied world. [11 Dec 1987, p.D1]

This wildly black comedy says that in Hollywood, death becomes everyone. [03 Aug 1992]

That it all works is a tribute to Stu Silver's gaggy but never vulgar script and to DeVito's imaginative direction, but the movie would be unthinkable without its trio of funny folk. [11 Dec 1987]

The movie made me so happy, and here I am back on the subway with Nerdo, and there's this jerk across the aisle who's like ancient, 30 at least, and he's got the nerve to look right into my see-through Madonna lace outfit. And he winks. Oh, barf- ola.

The first half of Firstborn is a first-rate domestic melodrama, faultlessly acted by all concerned, though you may wonder if the interactions would not have been a bit more compelling had the invading force been a bit less obviously, obnoxiously evil. The second half goes over the edge into a Hollywood hell. [26 Oct 1984]

Glamorously tragic, Betty Blue is sensually shot and persuasively performed, but a solitary thought dropped into boy genius Beineix's colorfully bedecked wishing well of a movie would echo emptily into eternity. [12 Sep 1986, p.D1]

Everything Terms of Endearment's detractors accused Terms of being: a synthetic, manipulative tragi-comedy with performances more appropriate to a proscenium arch - or to a drag show - than to the wide screen. And yet, there are moments in the movie of high comedy and sequences of searing truth. At its worst, Steel Magnolias is vastly inferior to Designing Women; at its best, it brings to mind (but never equals) Tennessee Williams. [20 Nov 1989]

The Face is her face, the mannerisms are her mannerisms and Miss Dunaway manages magnificently to depict a woman whose acting off- screen is no better than her acting on.This is theoretically a modern horror movie about mother love but it is actually one of the funniest movies about how not to make a movie ever made. [25 Sept 1981]

In terms of psychology, it's an abysmal failure, too real to be symbolic, too symbolic to be realistic. [25 May 1990]

It must be the only movie ever made in which the hero's immediate goal in life is to wrestle in a different weight class. The film treats this event with all the fake reverence tabloid feature writers use to describe disabled people who learn to paint with their feet or mother dogs who swim across lakes to rescue endangered litters. [15 Feb 1985]

Much less painful than a walk in the summer heat, but not quite as pleasant as a swim in a cool pool. [15 Aug 1984]

Purple Rain is not a revolution. It's not even a good movie. What it is, is a cosmic letdown. [27 Jul 1984]

A happy surprise, a sweet and silly combination of the cheesy special effects of Japanese sci-fi movies and the witty slapstick of American silent films. [20 Apr 1981]

Rocky V, for all its faults, is not awful. It is inferior to the charmingly naive, Cinderella-in-sweat-pants opener of 14 years ago, but it's far superior to every other overdetermined installment. [21 Nov 1990, p.C1]

This means that Someone to Watch Over Me is a much more interesting movie (than "Fatal Attraction").[9 Oct 1987]

The film is primarily an excuse for Chase to demonstrate that though he may be a movie star he has yet to learn how to create, let alone sustain, a character, and for director Harold (Caddyshack) Ramis and screenwriter John (National Lampoon's Class Reunion) Hughes to demonstrate that some movie stars get the colleagues they deserve. [2 Aug 1983]

David Keith, a native of Tennessee, had a tiny role in The Rose (as Bette Midler's soldier friend) and he is one of the few in the Brubaker cast whose accent is authentic and who appears to have the wherewithal to survive in a penitentiary. His scenes are the only respite from the movie's shrill, simplistic self-congratulation. [21 June 1980]

This omnibus of four tales is cheerful, campy, garish, ghoulish and gross. That means it's a success on its own unambitious B-movie terms. [05 May 1990]

Sharply written by Billy Crystal and ably directed by Henry Winkler, Memories of Me turns out to be an enjoyably sentimental surprise - what it has going for it that the psychodramatic versions don't is a sense of humor, but it covers the same serious issues with a similar amount of depth. [07 Oct 1988]

Johnny Dangerously belongs to the comic genre known as the Dumb Movie, but it's a pretty smart example of how to be stupid. [22 Dec 1984]

The achievement of Educating Rita is a function of the distinguished performances, the agreeably archetypal situation and the scissor-sharp lines. [23 Sep 1983]

Director Kathryn Bigelow, who earlier proved in the vampire movie Near Dark that she has a thing for denim, leather and blood, is merely the overture to the violent shocks and severe sexual confusions (dozens of them) that give Blue Steel its dissonant, disruptive power. [16 Mar 1990]

A bouillon cube, a bland and boring thing with only a meagre resemblance to its source. [23 Oct 1984]

What's shocking about The Exorcist III is that it's a civilized albeit undemanding entertainment, more Hitchcock than Hellraiser. [20 Aug 1990]

FOR BATTERIES Not Included, intelligence is not required. [18 Dec 1987]

Sadly, 2010 is not going to make it any easier for the uninitiated to grasp the reasons its predecessor thrilled a generation: the only people 2010 is likely to thrill are the agents of the actors in the cast. [7 Dec 1984]

The problem with Paradise Alley is that it has been made by the character Stallone was playing in Rocky: it has the cinematic mind of a 14-year-old in the glossy body of a major movie. [14 Nov 1978]

The less-than-original theme is illuminated with grace and insight, with sensuality and spirituality, and Oshima stumbles only twice. Unfortunately, the missteps are major. [16 Sep 1983]

As a film, The Handmaid's Tale, effectively compressed in Pinter's terse screenplay and heightened by Schldondorff's Teutonic thriller techniques, both subtracts from and adds to Atwood's novel, while scrupulously preserving its interior paradox. [09 Mar 1990]

The violent but impressive Bad Boys doesn't waste much time getting down to business. Bad Boys is about a generation of teen-agers who have learned from television to want the biggest and the best, and it's about a generation in the process of angrily learning that it's going to be forced to settle for the littlest and the least. [22 Apr 1983]

The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]

One more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, done badly, even if the novel was written by Stephen-can-do-no-commercial-wrong-King, is not what the world needs. [23 Apr 1993]

The U.S. invasion of Grenada is treated with Highway's gung-ho simplicity as a flag-waving American triumph. That may make the conclusion of Heartbreak Ridge a personal victory for Highway, but it makes the film's heartfelt patriotism pathetic. [6 Dec 1986]

A technically slavish and totally atrocious Hollywood remake. [19 March 1993]

Overboard is overdrawn and overblown: a lean romantic comedy has been enveloped in obesity. Garry Marshall's direction is worthy of a not very good television sitcom and John A. Alonzo's appalling cinematography gives the picture the appearance of having been shot through a cloud of mosquitoes. [18 Dec 1987]

Whoopi Goldberg can make you laugh and make you cry, and she's attractive and kind of come-hithery in her own bug-eyed way. [10 Oct 1986, p.D1]

This is insubstantial stuff, light as laughter, and every bit as fleeting. [13 Feb 1982]

It's an unpredictable, mesmerizing journey nearly every shady second of the way.

If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]

Neither Nicholson nor the talented Miss Steenburgen, in her film debut, could rise above the patched-together script. The promising parody of anti-mythic Westerns, and of mellerdrammers (the railroad wants to snitch Julia's land), decays into a love story whose parameters are all too narrow and all too familiar. [07 Oct 1978]

The one surprise, in a product purposely designed not to surprise, is the performance of Connie Stevens as Yvette Mason, the good-looking but aging and overweeningly vain "fun" teacher every high school student has run across ("I love your hair, Miss Mason," cracks one of the coeds, "all 300 pounds of it"). Somehow, Miss Stevens pulls a character out of cotton candy. [11 June 1982]

Wonderfully directed - the interiors are lit like Caravaggio, the action sequences are smooth as a well-oiled .38) - but is less than wonderful, unless you're the kind of moviegoer who loves to cheer when human "vermin" gets its guts blown out. [10 Dec 1983]

The Black Hole isn't mediocre or even bad - it's dreadful...[It] looks, sounds and feels like a careless, cynically manufactured B-movie. Uncle Walt must be spinning in his cyrogenic vault. [24 Dec 1979]

The problem with the taboo-busters is that they feel calculated - in the past, Lynch's creepiness seemed casual and natural - and they take Wild at Heart so high it can't come down; the picture repeatedly jacks itself into frenzy only to crash into lethargy.

Spielberg hooks us again with state-of-the-art craft, the director taps into powerful myths, both primal and pop, and makes them seem new. He allows grownups to return to childhood, but manages to catch fish in all generational waters.

One of the pleasures of "Old Acquaintance" was watching two fanged pros chew scenery. One of the pleasures of Rich and Famous is watching two toothless amateurs gum everything in sight, including each other (the penultimate confrontation, when the teddy bear, symbol of the friendship, is ripped into stuffing, is outrageously funny). [10 Oct 1981]

The stars are of the first magnitude, the direction is sharp as a scalpel, the premise (vampirism sans fangs, garlic and other Transylvanian paraphernalia) is only semi-silly, and the visuals are suitable for exhibition in a gallery specializing in high gloss S & M. [29 Apr 1983]

The intelligence and wit of this glass-slipper heart-of-gold fantasy are shocking.

It is an agreeable example of how a picture conceived as "product" need not condescend to the audience it exploits. [11 Apr 1983]