Jay Scott

There is one thing you can say for the new horror film Phantasm (at the York): it certainly has its moment. [5 May 1979]

Cotton Club lacks the resonance of The Godfather; it's similar stylistically, but everything is coarsened, caricatured. What Coppola has achieved, however, is what Sergio Leone was after in Once Upon a Time in America when he tried to celebrate America by recycling the cliches of its gangster films. [14 Dec 1984]

There are two ways to look at Tightrope: as a Clint Eastwood Hollywood vehicle, or as a world-class movie that deserves to be judged with the best. By the first standard, Tightrope is an exceptionally realized thriller; by the second, it is an interesting failure, a movie that loses its nerve and resolves its contradictions in the slam-bang heroics of formula moviemaking. [18 Aug 1984]

Miss Tandy is so good, in fact, that when she leaves at the end of the first hour, the picture never quite recovers. The second hour is fine, but flat. [17 Dec 1982]

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]

Is it worth seeing? Yes. The ability to charm in the modern world is rare, and Ishtar does charm. Essentially, it's a teen film for adults, which is to say, it's mindless but not stupid good fun. And there are at least four times when the audience laughs out loud.

Wise Guys is never more than a nice time, but it's never less than that either, and because the timing of the jokes is so bang-on, it makes you wish De Palma would get away from the blood bag more often. [23 Apr 1986, p.C5]

What's wrong with The Color Purple - and nothing that's wrong with it keeps it from being a joy to watch - is what you'd expect of Spielberg: he chews on Alice Walker's hard edges until they're gummy. [21 Dec 1985]

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

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]

Jerzy Kosinski's witty but slim novel was based on a witty but thin conceit, and Hal Ashby's film of that novel is equally witty, equally thin. [09 Feb 1980]

No matter how many times the script instructs us that Valmont is "conspicuously charming," Malkovich is not charming, conspicuously or otherwise.

Director Robbins is a natural - he has managed to make a movie that is entertaining despite the handicap of having a main character who is at best a black hole. [30 June 1981]

The Final Countdown is an action picture, not a thoughtful rumination on time travel, nor even (per Time After Time) a picture with a puzzle - everything is subordinate here to the sweep and grandeur of an awe-inspiring, ocean-going masterpiece of American technology. [02 Aug 1980]

Once the riffs are over and put into place, Mo' Better Blues is approximately one-third fabulous, one-third boring, and one-third infuriating. [06 Aug 1990]

Entertainments like this are what Hollywood is said to be all about: larger than life personalities redeeming material smaller than a breadbox. [23 July 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]

Street Smart is marred by dumb coincidences and by an ending that is immoral - it abruptly applauds a form of exploitation it has spent most of its considerable energy criticizing - but its texture is grittily realistic and its psychosexual sophistication is surprising in an American potboiler. [17 Apr 1987]

Taken as a psychological parable, Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst is thoughtful and provocative. Taken as a political parable, it is gallingly reactionary, but it is also right, in more than one sense of the word. [28 Oct 1988]

The Dead Zone, from the book by Stephen King, a horror novelist whose prolific output is the scariest thing about him, is academic filmmaking all the way, a crafty Establishment tour de force. [21 Oct 1983]

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]

A patchwork quilt of clashing colors, but it's cozy and warm. [10 Oct 1981]

The movie is entertaining on a rudimentary, never-to-be-taken-seriously level. On the rare occasions when it does rise above the material, it's because Pierce Brosnan is chillingly effective as an assassin with the body temperature of a snake. [26 Aug 1987]

Edel's Last Exit generates visceral voltage, but the nation illuminated is the pre-unification West Germany of a mere moment ago, not the United States of 40 years gone by. [04 May 1990]

There are individual sequences alternately amusing and touching. [08 May 1984]

As long as it remains within the carefully constructed, peaceful and innocent cosmos of its opening, it's nonpareil. When it goes to war, it goes to hell. [18 Dec 1992]

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]

Eating Raoul is often very funny, but it guns down its targets (hot tubs, taco stands) without revealing anything new about them - it's broader than parody, less pointed than satire - and it crudely manipulates the audience into congratulating itself on its own hipness. [15 Oct 1982]