Jay Scott

The performances are pristine in their theatricality, Raul Ruiz Anchia's lighting is neo-classical in its velvety richness, and the script (by Mamet and Shel Silverstein) is unfailingly intricate and consistent, for all its flamboyant use of coincidence. But it is the art of Don Ameche's courtly, charismatic characterization that lifts Things Change above the level of a crafty, enjoyable stunt.

There is something very wrong with the attempt of Nine 1/2 Weeks to excite the sensualists and appease the moralists at the same time. Most of the sex is fairly mild, but there are hints of what Nine 1/2 Weeks must have been before Lyne was forced to recut it. [21 Feb 1986, p.C1]

This is a miniature classic, a pulp tragedy. [29 Sep 1990]

The re-make, directed by Philip Kaufman, has lost its intellectual innocence and throws in everything from Chariots of the Gods to recombinant DNA - it's as clever and hip as a New Times investigative piece. Paradoxically, by being so smart, the re-make seems a bit dumber than the original. But it's dumb in a nice way. [22 Dec 1978]

One of the best, funniest, most surprising and likeable American films of the year. [27 Aug 1979]

One does not expect to find references to Bertolucci in a action movie distributed by American International, but Mad Max is no ordinary action movie: it's a B-movie classic on the order of Truck Stop Women, and when its director, George Miller, steals from established filmmakers, he steals from the best. [15 April 1980]

Some viewers will decide that Benny & Joon strays too far from the brink; they will find its sentimentality cloying. Other viewers will applaud the classic silent film humour and will emerge with a glow they'll want to show off to their friends. Both camps can agree, however, that Mary Stuart Masterson, Aidan Quinn and Johnny Depp are quite good. [16 Apr 1993]

The plot contracts classically as it approaches its delectably bizarre climax but Desperately Seeking Susan never achieves the hilarity it promises; it's a pleasant enough picture, and it has a bona-fide look, but it lacks a style. It also lacks the qualities essential to farce - pace, verve, timing, surprise. [02 Apr 1985]

Like Pretty Woman, Green Card doesn't aim high - comedy, sentimentality, sex and pathos are sufficient for its scheme of fantasy things - but with the exception of MacDowell, it achieves its modest aims unerringly. [11 Jan 1991, p.C1]

The time Bogdanovich spends with Rusty and Rocky, and the time Rocky spends at a summer camp for the blind with a gorgeous blonde (Laura Dern) who falls in love with him, is time that is priceless. The time Bogdanovich spends with the cuddly bikers, especially the time he spends with Sam Elliott in a dismally ingratiating, cockeyed performance as Rusty's boy friend, is time that exacts a terrible toll: credibility. [08 Mar 1985]

The bad news is that Stella is an unintentionally hilarious mess, handily summed up by what Haskell sees as "the lowest level" of the woman's film - "(It) fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. [2 Feb 1990]

As a film, The Handmaid's Tale, effectively compressed in Pinter's terse screenplay and heightened by Schldondorff's Teutonic thriller techniques, both subtracts from and adds to Atwood's novel, while scrupulously preserving its interior paradox. [09 Mar 1990]

Up the Academy, directed by Robert Downey, combines Little Darlings, Meatballs and Animal House into a crude concoction that holds out the promise of approximating Mad Magazine's cheerful, sophomoric vulgarity. [09 June 1980]

Nighthawks, a cops 'n' robbers thriller with terrorists where the robbers should be and cops as counter-terrorists, has a dirty job to do and does it. That is not an endorsement. Thumbscrews and cattle prods are real good at what they do, too. [11 Apr 1981]

Sweet and relatively simple, a classic episodic melodrama of unabashed tenderness and unapologetic warmth, but it's not sentimental, and its offhanded explication of racism in rural Texas in 1935 is integrated so seamlessly with its dramatization of the widow Spalding's crusade to keep her farm, that the dark undercurrents of the film are easy to overlook.

Like most of Simon's work, the situation is gaggy and mechanical and predictable, but Miss Hawn may succeed in persuading you it's a screwball classic. [19 Dec 1980]

In-jokes for horror-film fans abound (the dog is named Jason, the monster in the Friday the 13th series; a cafe is the Craven Inn - Wes Craven directed the first Nightmare on Elm Street), and it's possible that those fans will be satisfied with the expensive, surreal special effects unleashed by director Renny Harlin. Everyone else is apt to agree with the teen-ager who dismisses Freddy by saying, "We all got better things to dream about." [19 Aug 1988]

The less-than-original theme is illuminated with grace and insight, with sensuality and spirituality, and Oshima stumbles only twice. Unfortunately, the missteps are major. [16 Sep 1983]

The second film, in which one teen- ager is possessed by the spirit of a murderer - this is a supernatural Jekyll and Hyde - sets horror film fans to laughing and eventually to booing.[20 Nov 1985]

As a risque children's entertainment, it's better than a street-corner dirty joke, but it's no place for adults to hang around. [17 July 1980]

Judged by the standards of the comedies that preceded it (and only by those standards), Ghostbusters is relatively sophisticated: it substitutes the silly for the gross, and even manages at the odd moment to take silliness into the sublime. [9 June 1984]

The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]

Fonda and Hepburn work gallantly against the mythic: Norman and Ethel are specific people, New Englanders, a middle-class pair without any special abilities or beliefs that might ease their slide into the oblivion at the end of life. They are Every Couple, delineated with a sharpness that only two consummate professionals working at the peak of their powers could provide. [18 Dec 1981]

The script, based by Ephron herself on her own tua culpa memoir of her marriage, is spread wide, but the film never goes deeper into its subject - estrangement and adultery - than a bent dipstick. Heartburn is gentrified Neil Simon. [25 July 1986, p.D1]

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 most amazing thing about this amazing movie may be that in the end it communicates the large uncertainties and small hopes of a twisted, inarticulate adolescent boy perfectly, and wordlessly. [14 Oct 1983]

Mel Brooks, the writer, director and producer of History of the World, is an ecologically sound filmmaker, a staunch adherent of recycling. If you laugh the second or third time, you defend the repetition as a variation on a theme; if you don't laugh, the charges are self-plagiarism and lack of imagination. [13 June 1981]