Pat Graham

A few too many moralistic foreshadowings, but most of the time Cox's situations and characters develop on their own eloquently entropic terms.

I suppose the constant repetition is necessary (Matlin's character only communicates through sign language), but it points up the film/play's willingness to sacrifice situational truth for didactic accessibility.

Gordon still hasn't mastered the simplest filmmaking techniques. The gross-out sliminess and sexual acting out are supposed to provide a purgative release, but all Gordon does is gawk at the excess for what seems like forever: his voyeurism is too unpleasant for casual entertainment, too mild to constitute a pornographic vision.

Peter Weir's 1986 adaptation of Paul Theroux's best-selling novel is literally that - an adaptation without much character of its own.

Director Joe Roth (Streets of Gold) seems content with recycling the negative charms of the '84 original and hoping that nobody will notice or care. Roth's no stranger to coarse enthusiasms (he produced the amiably crass Bachelor Party, as energetic as it was inept), but this one's on automatic pilot all the way.

Prince's narcissism was easier to take than than that of his contemporaries Sylvester Stallone or Rob Lowe: he didn't regard the rest of the world as an insult to his estimable self.

This 1987 film doesn't quite leave its slasher antecedents behind, but the styling is never less than assured, and Ruben knows how to put bland, unruffled surfaces to sinister Hitchcockian uses.

Away, away with all of you and your sorry master, director Alan Johnson, whose every prospect for future employment in this darkling realm of TV pilot failure must be waning by the hour.

There's a brooding, agonized quality to the violence that almost seems subversive, as if Verhoeven were both appalled and fascinated by his complicity in the toxic action rot.

Timothy Dalton stars as the 1987 model James Bond in this 15th entry in the series, with the usual assortment of dope smugglers, KGB operatives, and criminal psychos providing a few anxious moments at the welcoming party. Expect the expected.

Director Arthur Hiller (Love Story, Silver Streak) just puts his apolitical head down and digs into the mess without worrying about style or sense.

At times a bit too precious, especially inside the young navigator's spacecraft, but the warm regard for character, as well as for our often-inhospitable planetary home, makes for a reasonably good time.

Cecil B. De Mille in anachronistic decline, though a few critics insist it’s his most personal film.

Gene Kelly directed, a long way from Terpsichore apparently, though not, alas, from the Thanksgiving turkey.

Gordon’s remarkable as the emotionally disarranged, psychologically disintegrating jazzman, and when the little Frenchman calls him a genius, you suddenly realize what that overused term implies: not moral worthiness or superior personhood but a giftedness beyond accounting that hardly belongs to character at all.

The character interactions are strong, especially for this depleted genre, and Hill's tight, efficient styling recovers a lot of lost formal ground: his framing and crosscutting are as sharp as ever, and the bloodbath finale is, improbably, a model of intelligent restraint, the classicist's answer to Peckinpah baroque.

It's grave, lumbering, arrhythmic, and bloated, an emotional hogwallow of catchpenny insights and easy sentimentality...In short, a real bagful.

Huyck's direction is resolutely uninvolved—every shot of every arrhythmically paced scene cries out for instant anonymity—and only Jeffrey Jones's sardonic scenery chewing as an archetypally deranged scientist keeps things marginally watchable. Lea Thompson is completely out of her element as Howard's sexpot girlfriend (though graduated, thankfully, from the treacly virginality of SpaceCamp), and as for the guy(s) in the duck suit . . . well, he/they deserve our condolences and prayers.

Shelley Winters won an Oscar for being her own unbearable self (as Hartman's nagging mother) and Guy Green (The Magus) directed with eyes on the noble Kleenex box and visions of Stanley Kramer running through his noggin.

Not to raise anyone’s hopes too high, but Gene Wilder has finally made a film you can watch without wanting to exit before it’s over.

Plenty of strikes against this--moronic story line, obligatory animal mugging, more "awwwww" opportunities than any film since 3 Men and a Cradle--but it's still one of the most accomplished pulp fantasies in a while...When everything finally comes together, it works wonderfully well.

Some scuzzily noirish moments, thanks to Robby Müller's slick black-and-white cinematography, but once the deadbeat trio get thrown into their cell, the film comes to a virtual halt: it's minimalism reinforcing minimalism, with none of the subtle counterpoint between movement and stasis, environmental opening out and psychological shrinking in, that gave Stranger its small energetic charge.

Director Joe Camp, the inspirational hand behind the Benji series, shows some remarkable logistic skills in setting up his scenes, and the wilderness photography is never less than impressive, but there ought to be more to harmless entertainment than following wagging tails across the screen. Some formidable displays of technique here, but the treacly anthropomorphism makes it all seem trivial and wasted.

Dismal SF deep think that gave birth to an equally dismal string of sequels and TV spin-offs.

Angry fish travels to the Bahamas for the Christmas holidays, plotting revenge against the family of a vacationing New England widow (Lorraine Gary). Noel, noel, a charming gift idea with suggestions of inverted seasonal myth—until director Joseph Sargent swamps it all in antimythical literalism and predictable lunchtime theater.

There's no formal stylization to speak of, but this is, after all, a film about performances, and Medak simply points his camera at the actors and lets them chew away. Some of the chewers are better than others, and Harvey Keitel and Frank Langella especially, coming from opposite poles of intensity and languor, deliver the honest emotional goods.

The film rarely strays from easy likability, with Hallstrom's spare, efficient styling creating a sense of chaste northern lyric (simultaneously warm and chilly: everyone wears coats in summer) familiar from early Bergman. More unassuming mongrel than pricey pedigree, but not a bad time in all.

It's a pleasant enough diversion, in an amateurishly personal sort of way, though Townsend's frequent recycling of actors (for reasons of budget rather than laughs) makes for some odd Pirandellian confusions.

Veteran director Delmer Daves hit his stride with a series of tense, modestly budgeted westerns in the 50s... Despite an abundance of jabber, this 1957 film is often considered his best.

Pearce pads out his plot with lots of borrowed bits (notably from The 39 Steps, with Gere and Basinger as manacled fugitives), but the borrowings don't have any resonance of their own: they simply hang on the story like empty thematic husks.

Nothing quite works as it should: the rhythms are subtly off, the pace is forced, the comedy overextended . . . and the surfeit of hommages—to the Keystone Kops and Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis and all and sundry—threatens to sink it before it gets out of the starting gate. But there's something to be said for Edwards's insatiable overreaching, and at times the orchestration of pratfalls and comic pairings could hardly be more deft.

It's easy to pick this emotional bunny rabbit apart—for the sentimental bathos, the literalism, the radiating wholesomeness (everything David Lynch parodied in Blue Velvet, down to the impeccable small-town streets and flowers framed against a screaming blue sky . . . only Castle gives it to you straight, without irony)—though what's remarkable here, and altogether rare, is the artifice and polish of Castle's studio-rooted style.

Tinsel-thin seasonal folly (1945) about a newslady who has a GI hero over for Christmas dinner. Frolicsome in an artificially hearty sort of way, though it made its studio (Warners) a nice holiday bundle.

You want misery? he gives you misery—dark, drear, suppurating medieval oppressiveness; monotony? he gives you that too, lots and lots of monotony; subhuman grotesquerie and primitive superstition? not to worry: this guy didn't direct Quest for Fire for nothing.

It's not easy keeping track of all the contradictory tensions, and the film seems forever on the verge of spinning totally out of control, though whose control—Hunter's? Elmes's? anyone's?—it's hard to say. Still, it's more a success than a failure, if only because the confusions are so protean.

The snickering humor that percolated through the Coens' debut, Blood Simple, is the whole show here, and it's damn near hysterical.

The whole film seems ideologically forced and out of place, an attempt to resurrect the retentive virtues of Ford and Hawks without the cultural context that gave them expressive strength.

Bolt's moralizing ironies (as leaden here as in A Man for All Seasons and assorted David Lean scenarios) are enough to sink a thousand war canoes, and Joffe doesn't help things along with his patronizing vision of native innocence: the Indians only exist to be sentimentalized—as angels, victims, and amiable rehab projects for enterprising Christians.

As the silver-tongued romantic with the impossible nose load, Martin affects a sincerity that reminds you of Danny Kaye—funny enough, i guess, but I like the smarmy original a good deal more.

Richard Fleischer’s professional efficiency tarts up a bit with dated 60s flashiness (multiple images, etc) and semidocumentary pretense in this 1968 feature about Boston sex murderer Albert De Salvo (Tony Curtis), brought to justice at last by police inspector Henry Fonda.

The film slips occasionally into 80s action-itis and can't resist a few conventional friendship lessons, but most of the time it's fresh, funny, and surprising.

Nobody knows how to speak, but they sure know how to apply makeup. [17 June 2010, p.63]

Sam Wood, the El Supremo of Hollywood hackdom, squired this one to glory.

They must've been working overtime on the Xerox machines at New World Pictures, since this 1986 women-behind-bars exploitation spoof sounds like a literal remake of 1983's Chained Heat (which was itself a remake of a remake of a remake).

It's an interesting experiment Cronenberg's attempted, if ultimately in the wrong direction.

There aren't any flesh-and-blood characters here, only superimposed attitudes: it's almost like reading a rape-crisis textbook, with every lesson italicized.

The plot is standard fantasy-adventure pulp, though director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Explorers) has so many screwball things going on in it that the comedy all but overwhelms the formulaic line of action.

Made-for-TV eyewash for disheartened Bears fans to drown their sorrows in.