Jay Scott

There is a terrific little movie making the rounds, Repo Man, that demonstrates what can be done with vision, no money and faith in the audience; Buckaroo Banzai demonstrates what can be done with a lot of money, no faith in the audience, and a vision that begins and ends in the cash register. [13 Aug 1984]

In Scrooged, a sub-Saturday Night Live re-make parody of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Ghostbuster Bill Murray busts up two of the festive ghosts (Christmas Past and Future) and mugs more than Mr. Magoo. [24 Nov 1988, p.C19]

Brooks' bravery is spiriting; in his debut he has written an unlikeable character doing unlikeable things to likeable people. One wishes his talent as a director matched his chutzpah. [17 Mar 1979]

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

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]

The reign of the last emperor, a reign in name alone, was an exercise in style over substance; it is perhaps fitting that his cinematic biography should follow the same incarcerated course. [20 Nov 1987, p.D1]

For fans of violent but clever action films, RoboCop 2 may be the sultry season's best bet: you get the gore of Total Recall and the satiric smarts of Gremlins 2 The New Batch in one high-tech package held together by modest B-movie strings. [22 June 1990]

Stripped of absolutely everything Absolute Beginners has borrowed from absolutely everything else, the entire film would fit absolutely snugly into a cockroach's shoe. [19 Apr 1986]

An inspired variation on his familiar theme: the whore with a heart of gold is a man. [2 Feb 1980]

What's shocking about The Exorcist III is that it's a civilized albeit undemanding entertainment, more Hitchcock than Hellraiser. [20 Aug 1990]

Supergirl is made by people who can make a woman fly halfway around the world and can't get a plot to walk around the block. [22 Dec 1984]

Walter Hill is a master moviemaker, and when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the minute the momentum slows, it's another story - a story about a movie with no story at all. [01 June 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]

Not only is it mindless, it is also racist. Not only is it racist, it is also incompetent. Not only is it incompetent, it is also unfunny. [17 Dec 1979]

Slickly-made parapsychological murder mystery featuring a solid performance by Faye Dunaway as a fashion photographer who sees murders in her mind's eye. [06 Sep 1978]

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]

The one thing Sid and Nancy could not be convicted of was compromise and Cox has created a film true to that part of their spirit, but he has created something much more, a send-up and critique of the kind of cautionary celebrity biography exemplified by Lady Sings the Blues. [31 Oct 1986, p.D1]

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]

First Blood is a gung-ho action flick fast enough and brutal enough to become Stallone's first non-Rocky hit; on the profound sympathetic levels it seeks to address, however, it is an emission of profound stupidity. [22 Oct 1982]

Scorsese and Schrader have made a courageous film that people of all religions or no religion should be able to watch with identical fascination. [10 Aug 1988. pg. C.4]

The relationship between man and beast develops slowly and mystically - the island interlude, utterly without dialogue, lasts 50 minutes, and is one of the most sustained, lyrical, rapturous sequences in the history of motion pictures, a visual symphony whose beauty cannot be oversold. [15 Mar 1980]

Laughter, tears and Bette Midler: Santa's done a whole lot worse. [23 Dec 1988]

Days of Thunder relies on charm, loud noise and a few racing sequences to print money with Cocky's visage on the bills: there can be no suspense because there can be no possibility Cocky will lose. [29 Jun 1990, p.C1]

YET another movie about a woman who is Trouble, French director Louis Malle's lushly shot Damage wants to be Last Tango in Paris for the nineties, but it is structurally and psychologically so unsound - despite several excellent performances - that it is less arousing than soporific. [22 Jan 1993]

It does what it desires to do - it suspensefully squeezes the sweat out of the pores - but the salty stench it leaves behind in the persona of Annie Wilkes is a residue that transcends its intentions. [30 Nov 1990]

Fort Apache, The Bronx, set primarily in a precinct house, is the S & M Barney Miller... One comes away from the film exhausted, both by the excess of incident in the script and by the reality in which the excess is so obviously grounded. [7 Feb 1981]

The performers are powerless to bring life to this moribund courtroom drama...a snoozer.

Missing from Married to the Mob, written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, is the freewheeling structure, but everything else that makes Demme one of the friendliest of major U.S. directors is in glorious evidence. [19 Aug 1988]

Creepshow is probably not everything the fans of each horrormeister hoped it would be (it is not, for example, in the same league as Cavalcanti's great anthology film, Dead of Night), but it's probably enough.[10 Nov 1982]

Spader, the actor who rose to prominence in sex, lies and videotape, is excellent at delineating the erosion of Michael's conventionally celestial ethics, while Lowe, the actor who rose to prominence in the home version of sex, lies and videotape, is equally good at delineating the solidity of Alex's unconventionally sulphuric sadism. Sadistic or not, Alex knows how to give good time. So does Bad Influence. [12 Mar 1990]

The Black Stallion Returns is not a magic monument - it's only a terrific film for kids. [26 Mar 1983]

In concert with composer Bill Conti and scriptwriter Larry Gelbart, Neighbors has become a hyper insult festival in which four people pointlessly humiliate each other in a variety of increasingly vicious ways. Sample dialogue: "Leave that warthead alone. C'mon, we've got cesspools to suck." It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Shavian wit of The Gong Show, for the genteel grace of Saturday afternoon wrestling. [19 Dec 1981]

Two great beginnings disappoint in the end. If the novel is a dying form, film treatments are the poison. [21 Sep 1981]

A quick and clever thriller as nasty as a piece of shrapnel snapping the sound barrier, 48 Hrs. is as violent as it is funny. It is very funny. [03 Dec 1982]

It's undemanding good fun, even when the script turns sentimental. [14 Dec 1990]

Sad to say, poor old Nightbreed fails even as failure - it's bad, but it's not memorably bad. The odor it emits is less the stench of an eternal hell than the stink of a passing purgatory. If nothing is forgiven by the time you've done your time in the theatre, all is certainly forgotten. [20 Feb 1990]

Graham Baker, a British director of television commercials, makes a debut that is technically auspicious, and Robert Paynter and Phil Meheux, the cinematographers, have approximated the rich, chocolaty chiaroscuro of The Godfather saga. Does anyone care? [24 Mar 1981]

The picture is an inventory of film noir effects and attitudes, but Wenders has nothing new to say about the style, about the period, about Hammett or about the creative process. The Hammett case can be closed: a case of massive esthetic masturbation. [18 Sep 1982]

Altered States can be accused of many things, but never of harboring a new idea. Because the script's lessons have been drowned in fruity religious imagery, Altered States is at most an accomplished horror film, the kind of stomach-churning movie to which people like David Cronenberg aspire. [23 Jan 1981]

Predictable and maudlin. [14 Oct 1985]

The premise of Child's Play, in which the murderer is a much-merchandised doll patterned after cartoon characters known as Good Guys, is long overdue. Unfortunately, the package in which the present arrives is often too little, sometimes too much, and always too late. [11 Nov 1988]

It's a pleasant, unprepossessing picture of gliding charm and buoyant silliness, a fragile craft unencumbered by the weighty sophistication of camp, and it's one of the nicest surprises of the season. [17 Dec 1982]

Any chance the film might have had is trashed at the outset by Chase's disengaged style of non- acting and blas approach to pants-dropping. [28 Dec 1981]

This is insubstantial stuff, light as laughter, and every bit as fleeting. [13 Feb 1982]

Under Don Siegel's flag, no new territory is surveyed and the destination is familiar, but the journey proves to be a comfortable one and the victory waiting at the end is far from Pyrrhic. [19 June 1980]

The Mosquito Coast is a work of consummate craftsmanship and it's spectacularly acted, down to the smallest roles (Martha Plimpton as a classically obstreperous preacher's daughter, for example), but its field of vision is as narrow and eventually as claustrophobic as Allie's. [28 Nov 1986]

The problem with Paradise Alley is that it has been made by the character Stallone was playing in Rocky: it has the cinematic mind of a 14-year-old in the glossy body of a major movie. [14 Nov 1978]

It soars, all right, but it does it on automatic pilot. [10 June 1983]

La Bamba may in many ways be a catalogue of cliches, but they are cliches that Valens was able to live for his people for the first time, and they are cliches that Luis Valdez has been able to film for his people (for all people) for the first time.

National Lampoon's European Vacation is directed by Amy Heckerling, whose career began with the spunky if not inventive Fast Times at Ridgemont High and continued with the inventive if not spunky Johnny Dangerously; this time, she's responsible for a picture that's neither inventive nor spunky. [29 July 1985]

Marshall elicits performances from Williams and De Niro that are exceptional. Awakenings is a small, simple movie about a large, complex issue, the waste of human opportunity. [19 Dec 1990, p.C1]

The insult begins with casting Cage, a patently American actor who makes no effort to Canadianize himself, as a Canadian legend: the role could have made a Canadian a star. It continues with races so sloppily edited the relative positions of the skiffs change dramatically during two-second reaction shots. [17 Jan 1986, p.C1]

To have a great time with Barfly's funny funkiness, you don't have to share Bukowski's soused attitude toward alcoholism, however; Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, whose wonderful performances transcend Bukowski's conceit, certainly don't. [13 Nov 1987]

Overboard is overdrawn and overblown: a lean romantic comedy has been enveloped in obesity. Garry Marshall's direction is worthy of a not very good television sitcom and John A. Alonzo's appalling cinematography gives the picture the appearance of having been shot through a cloud of mosquitoes. [18 Dec 1987]

Thoughtful, if predictable, movie: set against the Soweto Uprising of 1976 (but shot in and around Harare, Zimbabwe), the picture proffers two families, one white and headed by schoolteacher Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), the other black and headed by Ben's gardener, Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona). Both are devastated by apartheid, but to different degrees and for different reasons. [22 Sept 1989]

Robert Downey Jr., the kid who holds his own against James Woods in "True Believer", gives Chances Are what charm it has, but there's no saving this mystical romantic mess. It's fitting that the sexy and funny Downey has been cast as a soul trapped in another body - in Chances Are, he's imprisoned in a sitcom that's all situation and no comedy. [10 March 1989]

Absurd fun with a tortured relationship, Prick Up Your Ears follows facts with farcical fidelity. [01 May 1987]

Guilty by Suspicion is a morality play innocent of moralism and manipulation. It's what almost nobody thinks Hollywood is: decent. [15 Mar 1991]

Despite some fine performances, what should be a crystalline epic is a sloppy and sentimental tale of family life. Sterling performances in a leaden script. [05 Oct 1990]

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]

Is it possible for a horror movie to be too good? If it is, then Cujo is it: this is one of the few films on record where the combination of low shock and high style results in an experience that borders on the unbearably intense. The movie is spectacularly well-made, but it's nearly unwatchable. [29 Aug 1983]

The movie, directed by Marek Kanievska (Another Country), does have an ending, but it belongs on a lectern. It mechanically begs a lengthy list of questions in favor of a finger-wagging warning that purports to reveal the fate lying in wait for those who play with snow indoors, along with the rewards assigned to those who study hard back East, where it only snows outdoors. [6 Nov 1987]

Demme not only gives the script's nuttiness its due, he adds to it by filling the frame in virtually every scene with silliness - a motorcycle- riding dog, a harpsichordist, a man wearing a T-shirt that reads, "I don't love you since you ate my dog." [7 Nov 1986]

Witness is satisfying on so many levels it stands with "Cabaret" and "The Godfather II" as an example of how a director in love with his medium can redeem its mainstream cliches. [07 Feb 1985]

Forsyth's trademark surprises are a little less fresh and a little more predictable than in Gregory's Girl: the entire enterprise, while not stale, is labored. [04 Mar 1983]

When Christine's on the warpath, she foams at the grille. But her movie doesn't do right by her snottiness. Her movie, never scary but campily entertaining for about an hour, loses compression toward the end and the grumpy old thing finally sputters to a stall - gets flattened, poops out. [09 Dec 1983]

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

It is, to be sure, a Jaws ripoff, but it has enough sidelong wit and head-on scares to guarantee its revival as a classic cult item long after more expensive, ambitious efforts like Altered States have been forgotten. [13 Apr 1981]

Evil isn't a matter of banality in The China Syndrome; it's a barracuda in a three-piece suit. The film is thus weakened both politically and esthetically. The weakness does not stand in the way of the movie's cumulative effect, which is to weaken the knees, but as you make your way out of the theatre, knee-caps clicking like castanets, you may stop to wonder what kind of shape you'd be in if the one-eyed king's vision had been bifold.[24 March 1979]

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]

The Dark Crystal sees through a dark crystal: There is much to marvel at, but there is much that is obscure, and much that may not be there at all. [17 Dec 1982]

Had the film version of Pet Sematary, adapted straightforwardly by King himself from the novel, and directed with horrifying ineptitude by Mary Lambert (Siesta), been any good, it would have been a sizzling shockeroonie, in that it deals, to borrow King's italicized style, with things best left undealt with, notably resurrected murderous children and the terrors instilled by terminal illness. [24 Apr 1989]

Funny, heartbreaking and, yes, uplifting, The Long Walk Home takes the audience into a past that is always threatening to become the present; that it was made makes the future seem a little less threatening. [09 Feb 1991]

May be the best war movie ever made...Different is Kubrick's artistry and control, and his almost perverse, but philosophically progressive, refusal to impart to chaos a coherent narrative contour.

Kramer vs. Kramer is one of the most sensitive and least judgmental film about relationships ever made in the United States.... One of the important films. [15 Dec 1979]

As should be obvious by now, Harvey Keitel is a lucky man indeed: how many actors, stuck in an atrocious film, have so many immortal lines? [20 Feb 1980]

The stars are of the first magnitude, the direction is sharp as a scalpel, the premise (vampirism sans fangs, garlic and other Transylvanian paraphernalia) is only semi-silly, and the visuals are suitable for exhibition in a gallery specializing in high gloss S & M. [29 Apr 1983]

A shamelessly commercial and determinedly vulgar director, such as Flash Gordon's Mike Hodges, might have made the film work; it might have succeeded on one level instead of failing on many. [13 Dec 1980, p.E7]

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]

The film is primarily an excuse for Chase to demonstrate that though he may be a movie star he has yet to learn how to create, let alone sustain, a character, and for director Harold (Caddyshack) Ramis and screenwriter John (National Lampoon's Class Reunion) Hughes to demonstrate that some movie stars get the colleagues they deserve. [2 Aug 1983]

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

Writer Tesich, previously responsible for Four Friends and Breaking Away, serves Irving's material straight up - the adaptation is thorough and four-square and seemingly unconscious of the bizarre nature of Garp's odyssey through modern mores. The strategy works. [23 July 1982]

More than merely another bad movie, it's the most depressing development yet in Coppola's career. It's a would-be cash cow bred cynically to excrete money, the arty answer to "Child's Play 2" or "Back to the Future III."

The Face is her face, the mannerisms are her mannerisms and Miss Dunaway manages magnificently to depict a woman whose acting off- screen is no better than her acting on.This is theoretically a modern horror movie about mother love but it is actually one of the funniest movies about how not to make a movie ever made. [25 Sept 1981]

Hook's cast is admirably adept at getting across what little boys are made of. [22 Mar 1990]

The movie is less a sequel to the original, in fact, than it is a remake - a more energetic, more absurd and possibly more entertaining remake. [17 Dec 1980]

The biggest anti-bonus of all, however, is the subject itself: running amok in middle-age. The French have already gnawed that particular turkey meatless. Now it has been passed to North Americans, who are picking the bones. Those bones rattle. [6 Oct 1979]

The plot is squeezed dry in this bloody Valentine from Hollywood and becomes annoyingly predictable. Thriller stumbles on its own success

The manner in which the writer, Richard Matheson, and Jeannot Szwarc, in his glory days the director of Jaws II, conspire to tell the story should not only render the audience tearless, but speechless as well. [11 Oct 1980, p.E7]

The Golden Child is certainly not a Michael Ritchie movie - the talented director of Smile and The Candidate is never more than a referee in the war between the special effects and the star. The special effects win, which is no victory, but the star is not knocked out. [13 Dec 1986, p.F5]

Pakula has staged Presumed Innocent with gravity - reverence, almost - and makes the most of the darkly elegaic images provided by cinematographer Gordon Willis. The careful, classical stateliness of the movie, with every picture planned and in its place, is in sharp ironic contrast to the legal chaos it exposes. [27 July 1990]

Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, is decadent, overpoweringly erotic campiness coupled with soft-core pornography - blood, breasts, buttocks and big teeth. It's daring and those with a taste for the sexily sanguine will find it delightful. But it's not for the prudish. [13 Nov 1992, p.C1]

And despite the technically impressive quality of the soundtrack, the movie, directed by Karel Reisz, misses the music. [4 Oct 1985]

Director Michael Apted's Thunderheart is a fleetly-paced murder mystery cum conspiracy thriller marred only by an 'inspirational' Hollywood ending at odds with the trajectory of the plot. [3 Apr 1992]

Miss Fonda has thought to make a thriller out of that unthrilling process. [12 Dec 1981]

This Is Elvis could have been called This Is America: it's a portrait of a face full of wounds, warts and wonders. [09 May 1981]

The first half of Firstborn is a first-rate domestic melodrama, faultlessly acted by all concerned, though you may wonder if the interactions would not have been a bit more compelling had the invading force been a bit less obviously, obnoxiously evil. The second half goes over the edge into a Hollywood hell. [26 Oct 1984]

With its wit, speed and bawdiness, it revolutionized screen comedy and influenced directors from Richard Lester to Francis Coppola. [05 Jan 1990]

The relationships between the characters are designed to climax in the slaughter, but by then the static images, the lack of rhythm and the paucity of intelligence (Heaven's Gate is simultaneously without subtlety or clarity) have taken their toll and the movie is unsalvageable. [21 Nov 1980]

It don't mean nothin'. [28 Aug 1987]

Mostly, Cuba is boring. [24 Dec 1979]

Guilty of gross mellerdrammer & innocent of sophistication... Guilty of being dumber than WWF wrestling & innocent of hypocrisy about its cartoon violence.

Missing, which should easily turn out to be one of the year's best films, is essentially the taut, moving story of three people, two countries and one institution. [13 Feb 1982]

But at heart, the terrain mapped by Map of the Human Heart is emotionally shameless; it's a forties movie tossed into the nineties. It should find a lot of fans. [14 May 1993]

Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace is not, as can be gathered, a born auteur, but he is crafty at timing the jumpies - despite a silliness that increases as the movie goes on, there are enough left-field shocks to please even the most discriminating fan of what American Film has dubbed the "genre non grata. [25 Oct 1982]

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

A serious and funny and subtle work - a work of art - that was easy to confuse with exploitation teeny-bopper quickies because it did what the quickies had tried to do. But Diner did it right. [22 Apr 1982]

Fried Green Tomatoes was obviously cooked up with the best of intentions but, like the dish to which it refers, it's rudimentary eats - not quite junk food, but not quite nourishing, either. [03 Jan 1992]

The performances in Cutter's Way are devastated by the script. [18 Sept 1981]

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]

It is an agreeable example of how a picture conceived as "product" need not condescend to the audience it exploits. [11 Apr 1983]

The only memorable facet of The Blue Lagoon (at the York) is the visual prowess of the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros - but here the photography, unlike his work in Days of Heaven or Kramer Vs. Kramer, is too great. It's all there is, and its monumental beauty overwhelms the fragile orchids-and-jockstraps pastoral of the narrative, with its faux naif philosophy. [12 July 1980]

An idiosyncratic masterpiece and one of the few films in history that gloriously earns the appellation Proustian. [25 Sep 1989]

Any picture in which Burt Reynolds is a man unable to find a woman willing to have his child is quite clearly a limber farce and, sure enough, the most thoroughly stretched joke in Paternity, written by Charlie Peters and directed by Winnipeg comedian David Steinberg, is how utterly wrong Reynolds is for the role of Buddy Evans. [3 Oct 1981]

To his credit, writer-director Richard Stanley, a South African native now living in England, brings his own bloody specialties to the banquet, and Hardware, although neither original nor especially thought-provoking, does serve its intended purpose by sending the hungry horror film fan away from the table satiated and nauseated. Compliments to the chefs. [12 Oct 1990]

Essentially, it re-constitutes the war movie, and in so doing marries a feminist Rambo to Star Wars. [19 July 1986, p.D9]

This film is all shiny inspirational veneer. It leads you to issues but it won't let you think...It may be good for you, but it's not entertainment. And it may not be good for you: lurking at the penumbra of the film's sunny celebration of brotherhood is the faint but unmistakable shadow of anti-Semitism. [26 Sept 1981]

Perfectly passable kiddie escapism. It has a thrill or two, and a chill or three, but it has no poetry, little sense of wonder, no resonant subtext (Jungian or otherwise), no art... When it's over, it's gone. Extinct.

Sitting through what is so far the worst movie of 1988 is enough to make any cuckoo's nest seem sane. [3 June 1988]

The Stunt Man, which is scary and sorrowful and stirring and sexy - in other words, everything a big Hollywood popcorn-cruncher of a movie should be - is the best movie about making a movie ever made. [11 Oct 1980]

His first visit was bad, this is worse. [09 Nov 1990]

Delicatessen is a carniverous sausage - lots of fat, a few meaty bits. [10 Apr 1992]

Because it attempts so much more than Excalibur, the disappointment of Knightriders cuts deeper. Romero wants to tell the tale, to comment on it and to relate it to the present; he wants to bring contemporary satirical life to the myth, a service he performed cannily for the Dracula legend in Martin. [18 April 1981]

This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]

Raiders of the Lost Ark (at the Eglinton) is a cinematic roller-coaster, thrilling and frightening in equal measure, a heart-pounding slide down greased lightning. [12 June 1981]

Disney unleashes a mousey minor masterpiece. [02 July 1986, p.C5]

The ending can be read as conclusively upbeat or as corrosively ironic. Still, Youngblood is never less than fascinating, and it's a bit like the game it explores: the times you don't want to look at it are the times you can't look away. [31 Jan 1986, p.D1]

Neither Nicholson nor the talented Miss Steenburgen, in her film debut, could rise above the patched-together script. The promising parody of anti-mythic Westerns, and of mellerdrammers (the railroad wants to snitch Julia's land), decays into a love story whose parameters are all too narrow and all too familiar. [07 Oct 1978]

House of Games is so bad it seems reasonable to conclude that God was out of town and Mamet's muse was in a coma. [16 Oct 1987]

The film is a respectable, claustrophobic and slick piece of work, and cinematographer Nestor Almendros' color strategies - Rembrandt-like light at night, lemony tones during the day, desaturated sepia at Auschwitz - are arty to a fault. [14 Dec 1982]

Sadly, 2010 is not going to make it any easier for the uninitiated to grasp the reasons its predecessor thrilled a generation: the only people 2010 is likely to thrill are the agents of the actors in the cast. [7 Dec 1984]

Although Tom Stoppard's script lifts Ballard's spare dialogue directly from the page, the context in which it is placed is kitsch. [11 Dec 1987]

Rob Reiner's not up to it: when the movie is meant to be romantic, the tone is frequently mushy and sexless, and when it's meant to be anachronistic and satiric, it's vaudeville-vulgar.

Victory, the new film by 74-year-old John Huston, is a civilized, professional, old-fashioned entertainment about men in groups. The picture is being hyped as a story of human spirit, prevailing against impossible odds, but it's a lot more low-key and a great deal more enjoyable than that. It's the story of the wake left by a great director sailing smoothly at half-mast. [31 July 1981]

There is a dearth of novelty in Young Guns II, but screenwriter Fusco proceeds as if the material were not familiar and seems to be having a hell of a time exposing it to an audience of teen-agers who wouldn't know John Ford from Ford Fairlane. [03 Aug 1990]

Ruthless People is a farce rather than a satire and it's far less ambivalent toward the behavior it depicts than All in the Family was - it actively encourages the audience to tee-hee over people being horrible to each other. Dale Launer's script is often extremely funny, especially when Midler is around, but it's an extended sick joke that doesn't realize it's got a disease. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

If you see Clue only once, and it's hard to imagine seeing it more than once, even for the five different minutes, the "A" is by far the best, featuring as it does (this does not give away the identity of the murderer) a splendidly funny shtick from Madeline Kahn. [13 Dec 1985, p.D5]

With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]

Terms of Endearment is the rare commercial picture that sets audiences to laughing hysterically and crying unashamedly, sometimes within consecutive seconds, and then shoos them out of the theatre in contented emotional exhaustion. [23 Nov 1983]

Splendidly viewed through Gordon Willis' gleaming black and white cinematography, the story of Danny Rose, narrated by a group of aged comics reminiscing at the Carnegie Deli, becomes a bittersweet examination of dreams that don't come true. [27 Jan 1984]

David Keith, a native of Tennessee, had a tiny role in The Rose (as Bette Midler's soldier friend) and he is one of the few in the Brubaker cast whose accent is authentic and who appears to have the wherewithal to survive in a penitentiary. His scenes are the only respite from the movie's shrill, simplistic self-congratulation. [21 June 1980]

The movie made me so happy, and here I am back on the subway with Nerdo, and there's this jerk across the aisle who's like ancient, 30 at least, and he's got the nerve to look right into my see-through Madonna lace outfit. And he winks. Oh, barf- ola.

The Black Hole isn't mediocre or even bad - it's dreadful...[It] looks, sounds and feels like a careless, cynically manufactured B-movie. Uncle Walt must be spinning in his cyrogenic vault. [24 Dec 1979]

Clive Barker is not without a sense of humor. And he's certainly not without a sense of what will scare his audiences senseless. [28 Dec 1988]

The title is a tease: Quest For Fire is the quest for understanding, the quest for an answer, the quest for The Answer. Quest For Fire maintains that in the space of 80,000 years we have walked a long, long way, and have come scarcely any distance at all. [12 Feb 1982]

In High Hopes, Leigh regularly expresses love for the very people to whom he is putting the boot... As a satire, High Hopes is an esthetic joy. [14 April 1989]

Both Cobra and Raw Deal are designed primarily to get the audience off on violence, and both are successful; what makes Raw Deal marginally preferable is not only the bizarre charm of its star, but the fact that the filmmakers are honest about what they're up to and do not unduly exploit the hostility of the audience.

Timeliness aside, it's an electrifying and erotic film-noir thriller in the Hitchcock tradition - James Stewart could have been cast as Tom Farrell - right up to the final five minutes, which feature a surprise ending that is a shock primarily because it makes little logical sense; surprise endings should click satisfyingly into place once the shock has worn off, but this one stirs up questions that refuse to settle. [14 Aug 1987]

In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]

When it's good, it's because it's imitating its predecessor (but it suffers from tired spilled blood) and when it's bad, it's because it's imitating its own imitators. [31 Oct 1981]

No so-called serious gangster film has ever been more fun, or less dangerous, or more intrinsically feminist, than GoodFellas. Even "I Married the Mob" was scarier.

Thanks largely to Petersen, Manhunter does occasionally evoke the peculiar pleasures of Harris's novel, and it does get under the skin, but only because the picture amounts to an aural mugging: the soundtrack, credited to The Reds & Michael Rubini, is Tangerine-Dream-styled electronic offal cranked up to rock concert decibels. [15 Aug 1986, p.D11]

A slow-moving but otherwise efficient Canadian B-movie that gives the audience what it came for: blood and guts (the title, coincidentally, of Lynch's previous film). It is similar but inferior to Carrie, Halloween and When a Stranger Calls; it is similar but superior to Friday the 13th. [17 Sep 1980]

Director Kathryn Bigelow, who earlier proved in the vampire movie Near Dark that she has a thing for denim, leather and blood, is merely the overture to the violent shocks and severe sexual confusions (dozens of them) that give Blue Steel its dissonant, disruptive power. [16 Mar 1990]

Howard the Duck is the end of the line: any more infantile than this, and the filmmakers are going to vanish into the nearest womb. As a comedy, Howard the Duck is less humorous than that well- known Lucas laugh riot, Return of the Jedi, but it is good at one thing - wasting money. [02 Aug 1986, p.D9]

The Year of Living Dangerously is chic, enigmatic, self-assured - and empty. [18 Feb 1983]

Says the audience: "Howcum they make movies like this?" [9 Nov 1985]

This is the kind of pitchur where if somebody gets his foot blowed off (somebody do), it makes everybody laugh, yuk yuk. Rip Torn (he's a sheriff) says, "The only thing worse than a politician is a child molester." It's mighty fine to get that kind of perspective. Makes you realize Extreme Prejudice ain't so bad after all. [24 Apr 1987]

As Lou, an almost prissily natty numbers runner certain that everything - even the ocean - has deteriorated, Burt Lancaster gives the performance of his life. [17 Apr 1981]

The reach of this sprawling, ambitious epic often exceeds its grasp. It has something in common with its hero. [5 Dec 1981]

The achievement of Educating Rita is a function of the distinguished performances, the agreeably archetypal situation and the scissor-sharp lines. [23 Sep 1983]

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]

A non-stop, shoestring trip with more adventures and a helluva lot more smarts than you'll find in most American movies...All in all, there's more plain fun to be had here in 10 minutes than in a whole hour on the road with that jerk Indiana Jones.

Peggy Sue is by no means a masterpiece of movie art, but it is an example of the sort of thoroughly enjoyable middle-brow Hollywood picture - clever, thoughtful, literate - that went missing about the time Peggy Sue got married. [10 Oct 1986]

Scarface is a B- movie with singularly silly psychological pretensions: its neo-primitivism is to the complex moral cosmos of Francis Coppola's "Godfather" saga as Disney is to Dickens. [09 Dec 1983]

A happy surprise, a sweet and silly combination of the cheesy special effects of Japanese sci-fi movies and the witty slapstick of American silent films. [20 Apr 1981]

Most of the time the film is simply stupid; not offensive, just silly. [03 May 1983]

The Lost Boys mixes comedy and horror with a dexterity that augments each. Dracula and Peter Pan were antipodal products of the same society: bringing them together has resulted in a marriage that would make Bram Stoker snicker and J.M. Barrie bawl. [1 Aug 1987, p.C5]

License to Drive, directed by Greg Beeman and written by Montreal's Neil Tolkin, is not only stupid, a virtual requirement of summer teen exploitation movies, it's also nasty: it's been designed to turn its swooning target audience into a pajama party of neurotics. [08 July 1988]

A two- hour-plus surrealistic bummer - it makes the audience feel as if it is coming down from a virulent drug. (The pacing, the images, the music and the endemic menace recall clinical descriptions of cocaine-induced paranoia.)...A disgusting, misanthropic movie.

Humanistic and anti-war, Memphis Belle is predictably uplifting, as is the wont of producer Puttnam, but not at the expense of good sense. These were fine kids, this exciting and intelligent film says, and it wasn't their fault society couldn't find anything better for them to do than kill or be killed. Memphis Belle is a dance of life tapped out on a tombstone. [12 Oct 1990]

Once you overlook the laborious contrivance of Jerry's background, Down and Out in Beverly Hills is a sharp, sweet comedy of affluent manners. [31 Jan 1986]

As directed by Michael Dinner from Charles Purpura's script, the movie combines the anti-Catholic satire of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You with the rowdy sexuality of Porky's and the stereotyping of every mediocre teen film ever made. [8 Feb 1985]

There are two movies in Superman III, one a witless and obvious and often cruel comic strip, the other a blithe and subtle and often amusing exercise in middle-brow camp. Not only do the two halves never come together, they are in active opposition. [17 June 1983]

Even if your idea of a good time is watching a man dressed as a malevolent oak tree extend his branches and literally tear a woman's heart from her chest, I think you ought to pass on The Sword and the Sorcerer. [26 Apr 1982]

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

What Cruising does have, then, is a claim to narrow truth and limited verisimilitude. What it does not have is a mind. [15 Feb 1980]

Silkwood is a friendly, kooky and caring film. [09 Dec 1983]

Along the way, director Jonathan Kaplan (Over the Edge, Heart Like a Wheel) deftly extracts from Virgil's predicament rivers of the milk of human kindness and encourages excellent performances from Broderick (Ferris Bueller is old enough to smoke and drink beer legally in this one, but he still looks like a kid) and Helen Hunt, Virgil's Wisconsin trainer. [20 Apr 1987]

The manipulative Star Wars-style score is the only novelty on tap in Silverado, which has a plot too drearily complicated and arid to summarize and an attitude almost unbearable in its dryly smirky assurance that it knows what you want from a Western, which is to say, action that never quits, emotion that's never felt, characters that are never real and situations that are never sensible. [10 Jul 1985, p.S7]

Given Part II's quality, the final sequence, a series of clips from next summer's Part III, may be a major miscalculation. "To be concluded," reads the final title. Sounds more like a threat than a promise. [22 Nov 1989, p.C9]

Cinema Paradiso converts you to the credo that art can indeed be holy.

Photographed in stark black and white by Robby Muller with music by both Waits and Lurie, Down By Law (a slang expression meaning in control), more conventional and livelier than Stranger Than Paradise, and a lot less strange, is as up to date as tomorrow and as familiar as yesterday. [19 Sep 1986]

Much Ado About Nothing is side-show Shakespeare, neither vulgar nor memorable - it's a date movie for couples who read. [7 May 1993]

This means that Someone to Watch Over Me is a much more interesting movie (than "Fatal Attraction").[9 Oct 1987]

Cat People, a remake by the not noticeably gifted director Paul Schrader, of a 1942 RKO mood piece about a lady who thought herself capable of turning into a panther, is many things, not every one of them bad: as a B-movie, this fantasy of a young woman who develops the distressing habit of changing shape after sex is moderately entertaining. [05 Apr 1982]

In the hallowed Hollywood tradition of mindless flash, F/X turns the suspension of disbelief into airy entertainment. [7 Feb 1986, p.D3]

The movie remains an embodiment of Spielberg's commercially cunning brand of clankingly retro filmmaking, despite the wit and charm brought to their Spiel-speak dialogue by the talented young performers, The Goonies is less a movie than an entertainment machine. [7 Jun 1985, p.E1]

Predator 2, an alien-monster movie that is racist and violent, not to mention atrociously acted and ham-handedly directed, has everything going for it a bad movie needs to be dismissed with a quip. But this is too ugly to be funny about. [23 Nov 1990]

At no time is Urban Cowboy especially well-directed - Bridges, director of The China Syndrome and The Paper Chase, has yet to learn where to put a camera and when to move it. But the performances are so fresh, the dialogue so prickly and arid, and the milieu observed with such accuracy, that one's reservations regarding the cinematography, editing and a raft of other technical matters are held in check. [07 June 1980]

The people behind Cocoon have taken many of the weariest of the cinematic cliches of the eighties and invested them with hearts and minds; from an unsightly chrysalis, a thing of beauty has been born. [21 June 1985]

This is a monument that should be visited, but it is a monument of importance only as a reminder of the thing it seeks to memorialize. Gandhi may not be a hagiographic embarrassment to its subject, but it's a waxworks movie, a victory for British reserve. [08 Dec 1982]

It's a shame that Levinson's pace is so stately and that his staid directorial choices fall short of the risky work undertaken by his actors and scriptwriter. Bugsy's life cheated his own genius; this movie cheats the genius who would embody that life. [13 Dec 1991]

There may be almost nothing about this comedy that is new; but there is almost nothing about this comedy that is not funny...Victoria/Victoria is marvellous vaudeville. [19 March 1982]

The humour is based entirely on inversion which worked in your cartoons, and even on the TV show, but it's not enough to hold up a movie, even with the helping hand provided by a disembodied hand. [22 Nov 1991]

Farrah Fawcett offers to this corrupt "entertainment" a small measure of the fresh innocence Marilyn Monroe used to bring to her movies; watching her work under these circumstances is like watching a maiden being thrown to Moloch. [22 June 1981]

The film as a whole, beautifully drawn and gracefully set into balletic motion, teaches a few welcome lessons regarding ecology and racial tolerance. [19 Nov 1988]

To report that Always will make you cry is not esthetically saying much; slicing up onions has the same effect. Leslie Halliwell's one-word summation of the forties version applies to Spielberg's update for the nineties: "icky." [26 Dec. 1989]

Overtly passionate, ebulliently funny and ideologically subtle, Like Water for Chocolate is strong drink - hot and sweet. It toasts life not as it is but as it should be. [09 Apr 1993]

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.

The Schlondorff version of The Tin Drum is never more than an intelligent reduction and simplification of an enormous and complex work of art. [26 Apr 1980]

There are lively, compelling scenes, particularly in the first hour - Raimi has an indubitable talent for camp mayhem - but the picture escalates into absurdity and the last half hour, essentially a chase sequence, is marred by suprisingly cheesy special effects. [24 Aug. 1990]

This one is a big, big disappointment. [27 July 1987]

In terms of psychology, it's an abysmal failure, too real to be symbolic, too symbolic to be realistic. [25 May 1990]

You may find yourself having more kinky fun in The Wanderers than you have had in any American movie for a long time, but when you try to grasp the meaning of what you've seen, you find yourself clutching at moonbeams. [31 Aug 1979]

With a lot more insight and a lot less hagiography, it could have been a real movie. [18 Jun 1993]

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]

It's got thrills and chills and one of the most elegantly conceived monsters in the history of movies.

A slasher movie about gay panic, a nasty piece of homophobic angst for the age of AIDs. [25 Feb 1986]

Buffy The Vampire Slayer should be a mess, but it's not. It's a mini-comic triumph, and although it's technically a teen movie, it's in the tiny genre of sophisticated, darkly funny teen films such as Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. [4 Aug 1992, p.C1]

Miss Johnson may not be an actress, but her lack of emotional resources and her bland ingenuousness conspire to give the manipulative, sentimental, unconvincing conceit of Ice Castles a naive force that occasionally approaches the simple pleasures of Rocky. [29 Jan 1979]

The gamble of casting Misses Tomlin and Fonda in what would seem to be the wrong roles (Violet is the strong, efficient, hard-edged secretary; Judy the frilly, "feminine," inexperienced employee) pays off handsomely, especially with Miss Tomlin. When she is handed a memo by a senior secretary and smilingly snarls, "Thanks, Roz, I know just where to stick it," her line reading is worth the price of admission. The pneumatic Miss Parton sings the theme song with greater confidence than she brings to her acting: she is a sweet little thing, but she's no thespian. [20 Dec 1980]

Kilmer is an improvement on Robert Hays of Airplane], but both gents perform with the facility you'd expect from a random sampling of Gentlemen's Quarterly models; like any svelte clotheshorse, Kilmer is good-looking yet self-effacing and he doesn't seem in the least perturbed that his wardrobe upstages him.[25 June 1984]

It is probably silly and certainly counterproductive to reject what Cry Freedom is merely because of what it is not. If it is not a great political film, it is an honorable attempt to add to political debate; if it is not a definitive biography of a great man, it does contain a mesmerizing incarnation of Biko in the person of U.S. actor Denzel Washington. [06 Nov 1987]

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]

Rosen has not so much adapted Watership Down as he has intelligently condensed it, and compensated for the simplifications with pleasures books can't provide. [20 Jan 1979]

Honorable, instructive, courageous: Fat Man and Little Boy, the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., is admirable in every respect save one - it's a lousy movie. [20 Oct 1989]

Teenmeister John Hughes, begatter of Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, has permitted Planes, Trains and Automobiles to be promoted as his first "adult" feature, but it's actually a re-run of a movie he wrote in 1983, National Lampoon's Vacation, another primitive cartoon for the kinds of adults who find Neil Simon too sophisticated. [27 Nov 1987]

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]

This happy daydream contains Coppola's most assured work since "Apocalypse Now;" save for its modesty, it is in no way inferior to his masterpiece, "The Godfather" Saga. [12 Aug 1988]

Rocky V, for all its faults, is not awful. It is inferior to the charmingly naive, Cinderella-in-sweat-pants opener of 14 years ago, but it's far superior to every other overdetermined installment. [21 Nov 1990, p.C1]

Deja vu's too kind a term to describe what happens in the latest chapter in the lives of the characters created so long ago in print by Peter Benchley and brought to life - and, eventually, to death - on screen by Steven Spielberg. [22 July 1987]

Perhaps it is Stallone's candor with respect to his commerciality that is the key to the success of both Rockys - they're not trying to con you behind your back. Right out in front, they are unpretentiously calculated, manipulative, unbelievable, faux naif, sentimental. And irresistible. Stallone's stitched-together innocence hides its seams. [16 June 1979]

ROB REINER'S debut as a feature film director with the mock "rockumentary" This Is Spinal Tap was as invigorating as his second film, The Sure Thing, is depressing: not since Michael Cimino followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven's Gate has there been such a dramatic comedown. [1 Mar 1985]

There must be a musical somewhere in the musty vaults of movie history as bad as The Pirate Movie, but I'm at a loss to recall it - speaking comparatively, this unclean thing imparts to Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu the delicacy and charm of a moment with Fred Astaire. It makes you long for The Blue Lagoon. It encourages you to baste yourself in that masterpiece of oily ennui, Summer Lovers. It makes an evening with Kate Smith look good; hell, it makes an evening with Margaret Trudeau look good. [9 Aug 1982]

It must be said that the closing sequence, in which Arthur meets the misbegotten Mordred on an orange battlefield illuminated by a shield-sized red sun, is an epic, Oedipal masterpiece of authentic mythic power, a sequence so strong it shakes the torpor from one's shoulders and induces regret that the rest of the saga has been so juvenile, so lifeless and so lacking poetry or Shakespearean sweep. [11 April 1981]

Every Which Way But Loose is a fists-out-and-up Burt Reynolds movie without Burt Reynolds. I never thought I'd miss the Beverly Hills good ol' boy so much. [22 Dec 1978]

If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]

As torpedoes shoot through the seas and depth charges pass by, carrying their whining cargo of destruction, Das Boot brings the presence of death to within a whisper of the eardrum.

The treatment of the Sioux is not only sympathetic, it's ethnographically exact. Neither Noble Savages nor Red Injuns, the natives in Dances With Wolves are differentiated human beings about to undergo cultural genocide.

Sharply written by Billy Crystal and ably directed by Henry Winkler, Memories of Me turns out to be an enjoyably sentimental surprise - what it has going for it that the psychodramatic versions don't is a sense of humor, but it covers the same serious issues with a similar amount of depth. [07 Oct 1988]

Silly, moronically entertaining horror film. [25 June 1985]

In Drowning by Numbers, there is a strange character called Smut, a precocious boy genius fascinated by sex and obsessed with death: his avocation is the compulsive cataloguing of dead animals. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover feels as if it could been made by that child. [31 March 1990]

Much less painful than a walk in the summer heat, but not quite as pleasant as a swim in a cool pool. [15 Aug 1984]

Rocky III, unlike its twin predecessors, is a charmlessly manipulative movie. The magic is kaput. [28 May 1982]

Not a masterpiece, but it's not negligible either. [14 Aug 1992]

It's so much like Home Alone, it's the unofficial sequel, Home Alone II: Out on His Own. Career Opportunities shows us what happens when the Macaulay Culkin character grows up. It's not a pretty sight. [1 Apr 1991]

Highlander's flashy style is the cinematic equivalent of a Las Vegas chorus line: always kicking. Without Lambert, who displays an unexpected comic talent along with intensely photogenic passive-aggressive eyes, and Roxanne Hart, whose knowledgeable portrayal of a New York detective is undercut by the symphony of screams extracted from her toward the end, and Connery, who wears a pearl-drop earring and is supposed to be Spanish but still has the burr and brio of James Bond, Highlander would be little more than an everlasting video; it's not much more than that, as it is. [10 Mar 1986, p.C9]

Despite an inspired central section involving Robin Williams as the King of the Moon and Valentina Cortese as his Queen, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a near-disaster of Ishtarish proportions. [11 Mar 1989, p.C3]

Waters uses the tawdry in satirical celebration of itself - he's the red satin tassled plush pillow of filmmaking. [17 Sep 1981]

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]