Paul Attanasio

The Wraith is essentially a wall-to-wall car chase that writer/director Mike Marvin attempts to enliven with TV commercial visuals, tough-guy dialogue and modestly inventive casting.

Romero has some fun with cackling frat-style boors in the background, all of whom get their comeuppance. But by and large, the acting is extremely flat and strident, and shot in a much more conventional style than Romero's other movies. Romero, in other words, seems bored by the whole enterprise, less interested in the story than in sausage-making. [23 July 1985, p.E2]

The movie is full of half-witted Hollywood satire (the Devil's an agent -- get it?), lame wordplay, and easy moralism about family being more important than career blah blah blah. [09 Nov 1984, p.F8]

If amusing, A Room With a View is little more than a lark, a series of skits, a two-hour tribute to the rich British eccentric.

Heckerling directs this mess with no sense of pace and less sense of where to put the camera. There are pixilated, MTV-style sequences that simply slow up the story, car chases and car crashes, and, of course, aerobicizers boinging out of their leotards. The best thing in the movie is the catchy theme from the last Vacation, which, unfortunately, hasn't the slightest thing to do with Europe.

According to the press kit, "Producer Daniel Melnick's personal stamp on films has always been to avoid the obvious, the cliche'." Uh, Dan . . . you lost your stamp.

Director Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) settles for a movie of pat moralism, a pamphleteer's parable of how drugs destroy families.

The movie has an engaging surface, but it's all surface -- it's like watching an outsize TV.

When he crushes a patrolman's head between his hands, you think you're watching a happy campesino lusty for coconut milk; when he skewers a depraved camp counselor with a knife in the temple, he is the happy barbecuer on a sunny Sunday afternoon. "Soup's on!" he might have cried. Then he tears a girl's head clean off. Well, the head probably wasn't doing her much good anyway. [6 Aug 1986, p.D10]

Tuff Turf is a youthsploitation movie that has fun with its formula, and for that, two cheers. But director Fritz Kiersch's twists promise more than they deliver -- it's just more grist for the run-of-the-mill.

Light of Day is crippled by its confused intentions, a crazy quilt of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Silent Night, Deadly Night takes off from the notion that Santa Claus is an ax murderer, but it never quite lives up to the delicious perversity of its premise. An idea this shocking has to be earned; instead, director Charles Sellier Jr. ("The Boogens") gives us another casually constructed splatter flick that has more to do with morbid arithmetic (the body count continues!) than movies.

Runaway Train isn't just bad -- it's bodaciously bad, grotesquely overblown, lurid in its emotion, big ideas on its brain. And anyone with a taste for camp will have a glorious good time. [20 Jan 1986, p.C4]

Despite handsome performances by Glenn Close, Jeff Bridges and a good supporting cast, Jagged Edge isn't a movie -- it's a director's exercise. [10 Oct 1985, p.C12]

The action sequences are cloddishly orchestrated. And for the most part, the movie simply doesn't make sense.

Subway begins as the world's greatest car stereo commercial and ends as the world's worst concert film. In between is a muzzy tale of doomed love; and when doom lowers its boom here, it feels awfully like relief. Rarely has the excitement of an opening sequence been so quickly piddled away. [22 Nov 1985, p.B7]

Such rarefied screen writing calls for the peerless talents of Arthur Hiller, a director with the comic timing of a tax auditor.

The film is deeply flawed, and sodden with sexual moralism. But amid Hollywood products pasteurized from demographics and screening groups, the idiosyncratic vision of Ken Russell is a refreshing breath of foul air.

Into the Night is billed as a comedy-thriller, but the thrills are nothing but a generalized nastiness, the comedy an uneven collection of gags. Few of the jokes have anything to do with the characters (nor, for that matter, do the characters have anything to do with the characters); and few of the thrills have anything to do with the gags.

Despite a nice performance by Dern, Smooth Talk never gets better than its good intentions. Adapted from a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, the movie is awfully short-storyish -- it meanders through its slight narrative, and the dialogue can be stilted and literary (it's meant to be read, not heard).

Despite its occasional sparkle, Invaders From Mars is an overlong movie with a tiny spirit. It plays to a certain smug superiority of an audience nurtured on junky television, and while that smugness is in some ways justified -- movies like the original "Invaders From Mars" had their obvious failings -- it's also, over the course of a feature film, more than a little annoying. The original "Invaders From Mars" did something this spoof never even comes close to -- it scared the heck out of you. That's something Hooper might try accomplishing, before he sets about sending it up.

Ruthless People has an enchanting comic premise -- everyone in the film is either an S.O.B. or wants to become one. But ultimately, the black comedy is not pursued very far -- the movie's too good-natured for its own good. And the elaborately worked-out farce structure, involving a victim who may be either kidnaped or dead, is mostly wasted on a style of humor that, by comparison, makes Buddy Hackett seem the very soul of sophistication. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Mona Lisa is consistently undercut by sentiment, whether it's the cute routines between George and his best friend, a mechanic and junkman, or the "heartwarming" stuff between George and his estranged daughter. In the end, "Mona Lisa" is another movie about the lovable little people; the movie is mushy where it should be monstrous. [16 July 1986, p.D1]

This may be catnip to a kiddie audience that, these days, would seem to know no other world. But it's hard to think much of a movie whose only point of identification with its audience is its utter superficiality. [05 Aug 1986, p.C10]

A mostly tedious, cheaply made shoot-'em-up from the always classy Dino De Laurentiis. [07 June 1986, p.D5]

Jarmusch likes to make movies that are slow and desultory and unresolved, and to beat him over the head with his vision would be unfair. In Down by Law, he's made that kind of movie, but he's worked from the outside in. He's made a Jim Jarmusch film instead of just making a film; his self-consciousness leaves you at arm's length.

Chuck Norris fans will not be disappointed by Missing in Action, a bang-bang-you're-dead exploitation flick from the Cannon Group in which the action is rarely missing. [19 Nov 1984, p.C3]

Cimino's instincts are right -- the movie is outsized, and it needs baroque dialogue; you get the sense that he'd recognize the right dialogue if he heard it. But when he actually has to come up with it, the result is a series of outrageous hooters: "I've got scar tissue on my soul"; "I carried the cross with you, in Brooklyn and in Queens."