Jay Scott

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]

In the end, this musical is not a disgrace - Huston has too much experience to let the thing die. But he cannot summon the magic required to let it live. Watching Annie is like being buried alive in balloons. [21 May 1982]

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]

A surprisingly large portion of the picture is given over to a gritty and unexpectedly moving examination of a senseless but understandable feud between two wrongheaded, sincere people making all the wrong moves. [21 Oct 1983]

If Corman productions are lacking originality, ideas and expertise, they are at least devoted to the proposition that the attention span of the modern audience is shorter than the time it takes to soft boil an egg, and they are paced accordingly. Galaxy of Terror is one of the few films in existence that actually moves faster than its trailer. [26 Apr 1982]

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]

Nowhere in Phantasm II is there the wit of Phantasm the first. [8 July 1988]

Never before has Allen been able to integrate comedy and pathos as deftly as he does in Manhattan. [28 Apr 1979, p. 17]

The specifics of Hill's movie - and despite its straining for universality, it is all specifics - come approximately a decade too late; in the wake of Who'll Stop the Rain and Apocalypse Now (and even that great B-movie anti-war movie, The Big Red One), it sinks like an insignificant stone. [24 Oct 1981]

Army life sugar-coated in self-serving memoir. [25 Mar 1988]

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]

Mesmerizing.

Estimates of the movie's costs range between $35-and $70-million; whatever the price, it was not too much to pay. As gods go, Superman is one of the godliest; his movie is one of the best.

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

This is Sally Field's movie. Her performance - hyperbole completely aside - is peerless, one of the major achievements by an actress in the movies of any place and of any time. Reuben tells Norma Rae that when he wants a smart, loud, profane, sloppy, hardworking woman he'll call on her. From now on, when directors want legerdemain that becomes art, they're going to call on Sally Field.[10 Mar 1979]

For most of the movie, Murray desperately throws in schtick after schtick to try to keep the film afloat (Meatballs doesn't deserve him, and he certainly doesn't deserve it), but when facing Makepeace, who isn't allowed to do anything but trade a petulant pout for a wait-'til-the-sun-shines-Nellie smile, he caves in under the sentimental good cheer and becomes a nice guy, a role he is not especially suited to play. [2 July 1979]

More frightening than most horror movies, more erotic than most pornography, The Postman Always Rings Twice (at the Imperial) is a sour slice of bona fide Americana, a relentlessly pessimistic melodrama that conjures memories of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather and Chinatown. [21 March 1981]

The Keep has opened just in time - if it had waited another couple of weeks, it would have been the worst horror movie of 1984 and there wouldn't have been anything to look forward to all year. [17 Dec 1983]

A loopy, loving nine innings full of comic curve balls, emotional home-runs and euphoric, summertime music.

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

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]

What Porky's II has gained in sophistication from its "expanded view" it has lost in raunchy, anarchistic energy. Who wants a socially respectable pig out? [25 June 1983]

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]

Hair is entertaining - even fabulously entertaining - because it is so strange, so young, so innocent, so beneficent and adolescent, so lovable and so loving; it is entertaining because it is - all of it is - so impossible, so remote, so inconceivable in any place anywhere outside of a Hollywood musical. [28 Mar 1979]

The Loveless is neither trashy nor fun. It's art - or so it thinks, but its self-consciousness is grating and its congratulation of the audience for getting the camp is patronizing. [10 Sep 1982]

On the most rudimentary levels - basic believability and coherent exposition - Hardcore is a joke without a punch line. [03 Mar 1979]

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]

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]