Jay Scott

I'll personally toast the buns of anybody I hear saying anything good about the movie Broadcast News. Broadcast News is for boobs. It doesn't apply to us. Anyone who thinks otherwise is invited not to think, because thinking is for statues. [16 Dec 1987, p.C5]

Director Joel Schumacher has fashioned a film foul enough to qualify as an inadvertent satire - it's obvious Schumacher (D.C. Cab) wants the audience to care about the septet, but the writing is so rocky, the situations so contrived, the acting so awkward and the characters so self-centred, witless and amoral, it's almost as if St. Elmo's Fire had been conceived as a vicious anti-youth movie, a calculated attempt to destroy en masse the reputations of some of Hollywood's hottest young actors. [28 June 1985]

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]

The trouble with Body Double is not that it sets "new lows" in the treatment of women or anything else, but that a stunningly original talent has willingly hitched itself to a derivative vision. The person De Palma really degrades is himself. [26 Oct 1984]

A sadly miscalculated affair, a frigidly uninvolving interlude of torpid romanticism: welcome to Shivering Heights. [08 Nov 1982]

The picture is slightly too long, there are some special effects (especially during a storm at sea) that don't come off, and Vangelis's electronic moans on the soundtrack are sporadically anachronistic, but The Bounty is otherwise a spectacularly sustained piece of epic filmmaking. [04 May 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]

Hurt is so good at capturing the charming and chilling Ned that he almost makes up for the film's two primary weaknesses: Kasdan's inexperience and a message of significant unpleasantness. [28 Aug 1981, p.P17]

May be less than the sum of its parts, but its parts are more impressive than most other wholes around.

From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell. [16 Nov 1984]

A superior sequel to an amusing original. A new batch of slapstick and satire. [16 Jun 1990]

Time Bandits is the best children's picture since The Black Stallion, but it is a satiric, inventive, fantastical vacation for the filmgoer of any age: imagine an intelligent Raiders of the Lost Ark with a deeply bitchy sense of humor. [06 Nov 1981]

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]

William Smith, who plays Lucky Lonnie, a drag-strip racer in David Cronenberg's Fast Company, is a personification of country singer Waylon Jennings' voice: powerful and rich and funky and gentle. He doesn't hold Fast Company together - a vise the size of Paraguay couldn't hold Fast Company together - but his presence gives the movie an entirely undeserved distinction. [03 Oct 1979]

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 film's up-yours attitude toward authority is cheering, but as personified by Robert Culp (he's the mayor of New York), authority is so comic-strip in its hideousness that fighting it is beside the point. If the audience can't believe in the reality of the opponent, it can't believe in the reality of the fight. [15 Feb 1985]

A bouncy, witty, pleasurably scary children's movie that adults will enjoy more than they may care to confess. [02 July 1982]

Days of Heaven is so unapologetically beautiful, so calculatingly gorgeous, it is certain to arouse resentment in the minds of those who find visual hedonism a sin in movies, and to arouse suspicion, if not outrage, in those who require that movies have heart. [22 Sept. 1978]

To Live and Die in L.A., for all its amorality and downright immorality, is a cracker-jack thriller, tense and exciting and unpredictable, and more grimy fun than any moralist will want it to be. It has big hit written all over it: the premise, Miami Vice Meets The French Connection, may be perverse, but it's also inspired. [1 Nov 1985]

It's too dumb for adults and too sophisticated for kids. Or vice-versa. [9 June 1993]

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]

It may be true that in gambling money won is twice as sweet as money earned, but inart, only the earned has savor; The Color of Money earns enough of it to turn most other movies persimmon with esthetic envy. [17 Oct 1986, p. D1]

Fosse carries the movie to its conclusion steadily and superlatively, with a directness that is devastating and with a depth of insight that ameliorates, if only slightly, the ghastliness of the carefully choreographed images. [10 Nov 1983]

Lone Wolf gets mad as a bee-stung boxer dog. [18 Apr 1983]

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.

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.

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]

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]