Pat Graham

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.