Jay Scott

Over The Edge is a good, dangerous film, and it's good in part because it is dangerous - it puts you in touch with these kids' frustrations, and it allows you to feel the relief an explosion brings. [25 June 1982]

The deployment of the hardware may be extraordinary, but it doesn't overshadow the human dimension of this summer sequel. [4 July 1990]

If Blaze is not historically or psychologically reliable, it is a reliable good time. This is a meaningless movie, but there's no arguing with Ron Shelton's skills as a frothy screwball romantic: in Blaze, nobody gets burned. [14 Dec 1989]

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]

In My Bodyguard the warfare is entirely internecine, and the movie, for all its shortcomings, is an exceptionally perceptive (and funny) study of the terror that can be visited upon an innocent victim. [23 Aug 1980]

The first comedy about that war, Good Morning, Vietnam manages to be uproariously funny without ignoring or trivializing the tragedy. It's awkwardly contrived here and there, especially during its recon patrols into Vietnamese life, but for the most part Mitch Markowitz's skeletal script is smart enough to dig in, hunker down and stay out of Robin Williams' line of fire. [22 Dec 1987]

Runaway Train, which could have been Kurosawa's Wages of Fear, has been re- written by a committee and does not explore the theme so much as hold it up for ridicule: Runaway Train is an also-Ran. [23 Dec 1985]

If you have missed Janis Joplin, and if you have looked forward to Bette Midler's debut in a role she seemed born to play, you should leave the theatre at that precise moment. Almost everything else in and about The Rose, except a few concert sequences and the occasional occasions when Miss Midler falls out of character and into her stage persona of The Divine Miss M, is infuriatingly tedious, depressing, pretentious, obvious and downright pushy. [10 Nov 1979]

A rip-off of The Birds, but not as scary. [21 July 1990]

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]

Fred Schepisi's sensuously staged film version of John le Carre's spy thriller, is energetic but thoughtful, a virtually perfect adapatation of a virtually perfect novel. [18 Dec 1990]

Dracula may not be as big a success as it should be - we don't like our myths dissected, after all, and there is an uneasy (but workable) truce in the film between subtle stylization and the demands of the contemporary horror audience for gore. [14 Jul 1979]

Alice Tate seems at first to be no more than a grimly sweet nothing, but she evolves into a giddily sweet something. So does her movie. [25 Jan 1991]

The Witches of Eastwick is an uproarious and entirely successful attempt to examine the differences between the sexes by couching the examination in mythological terms. [12 June 1987]

For all its contrivance, it's lively and amusing and occasionally disconcerting in its reproduction of what life was like in the mid-to-late teens.

A lark from start to finish. [1 July 1987]

In Hollywood terms, Beverly Hills Cop harks back to the semi- good old days, to the studio era when stars were not always relied on to fix everything - this is unquestionably a star vehicle, but the star, an employee of his own production company, has been smart enough to surround himself with other, by no means lesser lights. [4 Dec. 1984]

White Hunter, Black Heart is a beautifully made elaboration of a thesis that has thankfully lost its antithesis to time. [15 Sep 1990]

A masterpiece, but of a unique kind... A gorgeously filmed, supremely well-acted, intricately written film noir about now.

THE BOND by which to compare all other Bonds is Goldfinger and by that standard Moonraker, the 11th chapter in the exploits of Agent 007, is second-best. But, by the standards of most of the other candy served up as summer fare, Moonraker is marzipan - it's so insubstantial it melts in your mouth, but its flavor is distinctive and you can't get enough of it. [30 June 1979]

Polanski has always inspired comparisons to Hitchcock, back to Cul-de-Sac and up to Rosemary's Baby and beyond, but this is the first time he has intentionally set out to replicate the thrills, chills and laughter of Hitchcock's best work. He succeeds, but with a difference: the last half-hour, at once improbable and horrible and self-referentially satiric, is pure Polanski. [27 Feb 1988]

American Me is a graphic and honest effort that, unfortunately, becomes a catalogue of other films on similar subjects. Its depiction of prison life is much too slow, too long, too repetitive and too familiar. [13 Mar 1992, p. C3]

Casting Eastwood in a friendly, bumbling, light romantic lead is like asking Ethel Merman to sing a lullaby: in the end, nothing is forthcoming but overkill. Clint Eastwood was already famous for that. [16 June 1980]

Even when their material is not much more substantial than a punchline overheard in a playground, Cheech and Chong, in their routines together, make being funny look as effortless as Ella Fitzgerald makes singing sound.[23 July 1980]

It is emphatically not for people who like either Twain or the more sophisticated manifestations of the Arthurian legend (the Camelot musical or Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex) but it is a well-directed, nicely acted bit of slapstick that has young audiences squealing with delight. [13 Aug 1979]

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

A tough, effective, socially conscious melodrama in the old Warner Brothers tradition. [15 Feb 1982]

The Return of the Living Dead, a parody of George A. Romero's unforgettably frightening Night of the Living Dead, is not for everybody, but it's one of the funniest films of its kind ever made. [16 Aug 1985]