Pat Graham

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.

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.

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 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.

On the whole there's not a lot of flesh on these cynically haphazard bones.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.