Jay Scott

Pakula has staged Presumed Innocent with gravity - reverence, almost - and makes the most of the darkly elegaic images provided by cinematographer Gordon Willis. The careful, classical stateliness of the movie, with every picture planned and in its place, is in sharp ironic contrast to the legal chaos it exposes. [27 July 1990]

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]

And despite the technically impressive quality of the soundtrack, the movie, directed by Karel Reisz, misses the music. [4 Oct 1985]

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]

Miss Fonda has thought to make a thriller out of that unthrilling process. [12 Dec 1981]

This Is Elvis could have been called This Is America: it's a portrait of a face full of wounds, warts and wonders. [09 May 1981]

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]

With its wit, speed and bawdiness, it revolutionized screen comedy and influenced directors from Richard Lester to Francis Coppola. [05 Jan 1990]

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]

It don't mean nothin'. [28 Aug 1987]

Mostly, Cuba is boring. [24 Dec 1979]

Guilty of gross mellerdrammer & innocent of sophistication... Guilty of being dumber than WWF wrestling & innocent of hypocrisy about its cartoon violence.

Missing, which should easily turn out to be one of the year's best films, is essentially the taut, moving story of three people, two countries and one institution. [13 Feb 1982]

But at heart, the terrain mapped by Map of the Human Heart is emotionally shameless; it's a forties movie tossed into the nineties. It should find a lot of fans. [14 May 1993]

Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace is not, as can be gathered, a born auteur, but he is crafty at timing the jumpies - despite a silliness that increases as the movie goes on, there are enough left-field shocks to please even the most discriminating fan of what American Film has dubbed the "genre non grata. [25 Oct 1982]

Flashy Talk Radio offers little but babble: A mindless, hollow look at a sad symbiosis. [21 Dec 1988]

A serious and funny and subtle work - a work of art - that was easy to confuse with exploitation teeny-bopper quickies because it did what the quickies had tried to do. But Diner did it right. [22 Apr 1982]

Fried Green Tomatoes was obviously cooked up with the best of intentions but, like the dish to which it refers, it's rudimentary eats - not quite junk food, but not quite nourishing, either. [03 Jan 1992]

The performances in Cutter's Way are devastated by the script. [18 Sept 1981]

Sammy and Rosie is not only the best British film of the year, it's one of the best films of the year from any country, period, a raucously erotic dirge belted into the gaping mouth of a tomb. [30 Oct 1987]

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

The only memorable facet of The Blue Lagoon (at the York) is the visual prowess of the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros - but here the photography, unlike his work in Days of Heaven or Kramer Vs. Kramer, is too great. It's all there is, and its monumental beauty overwhelms the fragile orchids-and-jockstraps pastoral of the narrative, with its faux naif philosophy. [12 July 1980]

An idiosyncratic masterpiece and one of the few films in history that gloriously earns the appellation Proustian. [25 Sep 1989]

Any picture in which Burt Reynolds is a man unable to find a woman willing to have his child is quite clearly a limber farce and, sure enough, the most thoroughly stretched joke in Paternity, written by Charlie Peters and directed by Winnipeg comedian David Steinberg, is how utterly wrong Reynolds is for the role of Buddy Evans. [3 Oct 1981]

To his credit, writer-director Richard Stanley, a South African native now living in England, brings his own bloody specialties to the banquet, and Hardware, although neither original nor especially thought-provoking, does serve its intended purpose by sending the hungry horror film fan away from the table satiated and nauseated. Compliments to the chefs. [12 Oct 1990]

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

This film is all shiny inspirational veneer. It leads you to issues but it won't let you think...It may be good for you, but it's not entertainment. And it may not be good for you: lurking at the penumbra of the film's sunny celebration of brotherhood is the faint but unmistakable shadow of anti-Semitism. [26 Sept 1981]

Perfectly passable kiddie escapism. It has a thrill or two, and a chill or three, but it has no poetry, little sense of wonder, no resonant subtext (Jungian or otherwise), no art... When it's over, it's gone. Extinct.