Paul Attanasio

If the style of the film matches the story, that doesn't make it any easier to look at -- it's just too bleak, and in the end, you'd rather see "Ivanhoe." Annaud never finds the right rhythm for the movie, and it's sluggishly paced, even as palimpsests go.

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]

Shocking and relentless, the movie pioneers an unholy border between Rembrandt and pornography, finding a transcendent unity in the abasements and attainments of man.

Tavernier has created an extraordinary portrait of an artist quite simply because he's so intimate with it -- because he's such an extraordinary artist himself.

The script of Three Amigos (Martin's collaborators were producer Lorne Michaels and singer Randy Newman) plays like it was slapped together by a few friends with a tape recorder enjoying a charming weekend at the beach. You can't tell one amigo from another, the gags are silly (a "singing bush") and far between, the dialogue full of inane wordplay. Sample: "We could take a walk and you could kiss me on the veranda." "The lips would be fine."

Mishima tries to make sense of both its subject's life and his work, and ends up illuminating neither.

Aliens is a wow, a sci-fi war movie that gets you in its grip very early, and never lets go. In its "fasten your seat belt" storytelling, it invites comparisons to "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but Aliens, the work of writer-director James Cameron and his wife, producer Gale Anne Hurd, goes beyond such films in the darkness of its reality and the depth of its emotion. It doesn't get any better than this. [18 July 1986, p.D1]

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.

A slickly made, shoot-'em-up sci-fi fantasia, it stands for the proposition that, inside the most staid local theater, there is a drive-in yearning to be free. [29 Oct 1984, p.B4]

Little Drummer Girl is the most trenchant, chilling vision of the psychological fallout of spying since Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation.

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.

Technically brilliant though short on narrative, The Black Cauldron is a painless, old-fashioned way to take out the kids, and a triumph for the animation department at the Disney studio, where it has been in development for almost a dozen years.

Solarbabies is a hilariously bad movie that doesn't make much sense and isn't much good when it does. Director Alan Johnson has stolen most of his visual ideas from Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner") and George Miller ("The Road Warrior"), and he hasn't the slightest idea how to direct actors. That said, the movie has its campy pleasures.

Overheated and recklessly violent.

To appreciate Children of a Lesser God, you only have to imagine how it could have patronized the deaf by celebrating their pluck, or become a heartwarming tale of little people who solve their big problems. That's exactly what it isn't, and that's quite an achievement.

She's Gotta Have It is Spike Lee's impressive first feature, discursive, jazzy, vibrant with sex and funny as heck. [22 Aug 1986, p.D1]

The screenplay, by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby, is just one long passage of exposition: someone blows up or dries up or whatever, you wonder why that's happening, and then someone explains it. This they call suspense. [25 June 1985, p.C8]

Trouble in Mind is something of a jumble, but never less than an intriguing one. It's an off-center romance, as unnerving as a half-remembered nightmare. [25 Apr 1986, p.D1]

Lean never brings the characters' motivations or emotions to life, so they just seem like props gathered together to make a point about imperialism. [18 Jan 1985, p.C1]

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]

From the first frames of The Color of Money, you feel, almost physically, the presence of a man singularly obsessed with the romance of movies. In this movie, Martin Scorsese enters a new period in an already extraordinary career. It would be hard to exaggerate the complex pleasure and wonderment that The Color of Money conveys.

For such a low-budget movie, Nightmare on Elm Street is extraordinarily polished. The script is consistently witty, the camera work (by cinematographer Jacques Haitkin) crisp and expressive.

My Beautiful Laundrette is quirky and fresh and ambitious and pretty much everything a movie should be, except good.

That's the problem with The Sure Thing. All the good lines are given to Cusack -- he's always "on," narrating his own life in the revved-up spiel of a sports announcer. For Cusack's Gib, life is performance -- his long quill of a nose even seems to look for his audience's ticklish spots. But why would he bother with Alison? Screenwriters Steven L. Bloom and Jonathan Roberts have sketched her as an annoying scold, leaving Zuniga little to do but bray disapproval at everything. [4 Mar 1985, p.B3]

The only thing that is sustained in Sid and Nancy is a tone of clinical disinterest that leaves you asking why Cox would want to make a movie about them. By the end, you know more about Sid and Nancy than you care to, and about Alex Cox, quite a bit less than you'd like.

Choose Me holds up the mirror, not only to its own characters, but to the conundrums of '80s life.

As directed by Rob Reiner, Stand by Me has a quality of seriousness, and of relaxation, that you hardly ever see in movies made about kids. It's at its best when its characters are just hanging out, razzing each other, feeling the summertime -- when it's like "Diner" for 12-year-olds. [22 Aug 1986, p.D1]

The Killing Fields is the best movie about journalism since "All the President's Men," re-creating with an understated ease the atmosphere of the poolside bonhomie of the correspondents, the mechanics of getting and filing a story, and the moral quandaries of a reporter's professional detachment.

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America has the mind of a dazzling art film and the soul of a TV mini-series.

Lucas is about as likable as this kind of movie ever gets.At the heart of Lucas is an interesting idea -- a Woody Allen movie for kids, with a bespectacled, nerdy hero -- that never gets developed. Still, director David Seltzer has kept it low-key, sweet and personal -- it's like a nice "Afterschool Special."

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.

Not since the heyday of Frank Capra, perhaps, has there been a movie that so seamlessly combines screwball comedy with get-out-your-handkerchiefs heart. Peggy Sue Got Married isn't about solving life's problems, it's about accepting them, in a world where love doesn't conquer all, but conquers enough. And in the hands of director Francis Coppola, that message makes what could have been merely a delightful lark about time travel into something much more.

A gory and gorgeous cop thriller -- you'll forgive it almost anything, so full is your eye with the beauties of its design and photography, and your ear with its supercool electronic music. For all its faults, it's one of the most sensually thrilling movies of the year.

Without a story or, for that matter, any theme but a kind of aimless nostalgia, you peel and peel away at it only to find, in the end, nothing.

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

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).

A delightful and frequently funny cartoon feature based on the characters of the Sherlock Holmes series. [07 July 1986, p.B8]

Re-Animator is splatter heaven. Based on the sci-fi novel by H.P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator's gore is exceeded only by its wit. Not since the heyday of Roger Corman, perhaps, have filmmakers had so much fun with an exploitation movie.

This new western is less than a success for Eastwood, who directs as well as stars. It's Eastwood riding on earnestness, and running on empty. [28 June 1995, p.D1]

The movie's smarmy condescension toward the Bushmen, how dainty and gentle and unknowable they are, is not at all foreign to the old American image of lovable blacks who were granted some sort of emotional superiority as a sop for the horrors they suffered. This kind of thing might spell liberalism in South Africa, but here it just leaves you reaching for your Rolaids. [05 Nov 1984, p.C6]

It takes a director with a true genius for disaster to put together SCTV veterans John Candy and Eugene Levy, the fine character actors Kenneth McMillan and Robert Loggia and the delicious new comic actress Meg Ryan and come up with a movie without a single laugh in it. Indeed, who but Mark Lester could have pulled it off? Lester's idea of directing is to turn up the music and wreck a lot of cars -- this isn't a movie, it's a Volvo ad.

Chong breathes some occasional life into Soul Man, as does Arye Gross, who displays a rich variety of comic attitudes as Mark's roommate. What surrounds them, though, is a black comedy with so little gumption, it ends up a vague shade of gray, composed of a collection of cheap jokes excused by smug platitudes about race -- in short, a movie called Soul Man whose soul, it seems, is quite lost.

Down and Out suggests the kind of conflict of values that the fish-out-of-water story depends on: wealthy Dave is a workaholic, but Jerry doesn't want to work; Dave is a striver, but Jerry's given up. But the idea is never really pursued.

Fabulously acted and written with zing and zong, it's one of the few enjoyable movies of the summer.

In Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a great deal of engine noise and clanking iron is drowned out by the audience's resounding ho-hum. It's comic books in a Cuisinart, all costumes and cute monikers and no story, a sort of case history of just what's wrong with sequelitis. [10 July 1985]

Some of director Alan Parker's compositions here are striking, expressionistic shots of dark shapes silhouetted against the blue light streaming through the asylum window. Then again, they're all the same -- after two hours, you're bored by them.

Desperately Seeking Susan is just a woman's version of The Woman in Red, where Gene Wilder chased Kelly Le Brock because she was great looking and rich and he had the middle-class blues. The only difference is that Wilder felt guilty about it.

Here's a science fiction movie where the special effects are in the background. And the effect is, well, rather special.

From the opening shot, an endless, unmotivated dolly move up a corridor that conveys no information, establishes neither theme nor setting and serves no other purpose, you know that you are in the presence of true film ineptitude, which only deepens as The Decline of the American Empire continues.

Sayles is no storyteller; despite the verve of its language, The Brother From Another Planet eventually sags of its own weight.

The Legend of Billie Jean is trashily manipulative and utterly preposterous, so much so that, until the end (when it begins to sour on you), it's a thoroughly enjoyable hoot. Add a splendid cast and good air conditioning, and it's a perfectly mindless way to spend a muggy summer evening.

The movie is adapted from David Mamet's play, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," but it bears little relation to it -- screen writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue nod to Mamet's structure, appropriate a couple of monologues and take off on their own. They and the director, Ed Zwick, could have done a better job of opening the play up -- outside life rarely intrudes on this foursome, as it needn't in the theater, but must in movies. [2 July 1986, p.D1]

What makes Black Widow special is the fun Rafelson has with it. All the different ways of dying -- from empty scuba tanks to a penicillin allergy to something called Ondine's curse -- become not just plot points but a tapestry of black comedy.

This jokey horror movie, adapted in part from King's short stories, is composed of three brief tales, the perfect form for him. Instead of having to create characters and a story, King simply has to come up with a gimmick and a punch line -- and on to the next.

A lewd, gory, twisty-turny murder mystery swirling around Hollywood's porn industry, Body Double finds Brian De Palma at the zenith of his cinematic virtuosity. The movie has been carefully calculated to offend almost everyone -- and probably will. But, like Hitchcock, De Palma makes the audience's reaction his real subject; Body Double is about the dark longings deep inside us.

Salvador, Oliver Stone's drama based on the recent strife in that country, has an irresistible brassiness, a swing-at-the-moon quality -- it's big and loud and bold, all primary colors, and it has more energy than any 10 films this year. [4 Apr 1986, p.D1]

In the way it deemphasizes its script and consciously undercuts its star, Cotton Club adventurously questions the formulas of Hollywood; its success in doing so without a hint of boredom or pretension augurs a whole new way of making movies. It's the most entertaining art film of the year, the kind of movie you can't help smiling along with.

Everything about this movie is backwards -- where Lindsey was fascinated by the way political and cultural themes were engrafted on what was essentially just a scam, Schlesinger starts with an idea of an era, then contends that his characters were the products of it. Instead of a story, there's just a lot of footage of the falcon flying around, toting his subjective camera, and, like the audience, at the end of its tether.

Volunteers is a collection of one-liners, mostly good, wrapped around an undeveloped story, generally dull. Despite its frequent glimmers of intelligence, it's an unsatisfactory comedy that yawns to a close.

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

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]

The movie stands simply as an artful adaptation, and not an altogether engaging one. The repeated scenes of the rallying mob, chanting and howling at Big Brother on the screen, soon grow tiresome; like everything about 1984, they seem redundant.

This is an astonishingly polished and nuanced first film. It deserves to be celebrated, not quibbled with.

A playful, artfully made horror movie that shows there's life in Norman Bates yet, and death, too. [04 July 1986, p.C1]

True Stories is united not by narrative, but by Byrne's sensibility, and this is where it descends from being a boring piece of whimsy into something reprehensible.

The Journey of Natty Gann shows how skillful filmmaking can take something that's almost unendurably hokey and make it charming. Beautifully photographed and designed, evocatively scored, it's a pleasantly archaic family entertainment in the Disney tradition. [18 Jan 1986, p.G1]

The Boys Next Door is just another exploitation movie about murderous nuts -- exactly what you wouldn't expect from Penelope Spheeris, the director of "Suburbia." [12 Nov 1985, p.B11]

It's the kind of undigested vision that might have come from the kids themselves. [15 Feb 1985, p.B1]

Young Sherlock Holmes is the latest product off the Spielberg assembly line (he's the executive producer) and bears its machine-marks. For all that, though, it's a perfectly agreeable family entertainment, a craftsmanlike fantasia on Conan Doyle.

Thrumming with the electric rapport between Jessica Lange and Ed Harris (and screen writer Robert Getchell's sparky dialogue), the movie's darn near irresistible.

There are two Cocoons. One was directed by Ron Howard, and it has all the warmth of his comic touch, his respect for his characters, his way of plugging into the humanity of a situation. The other, a bloated special-effects extravaganza, seems to have been directed by a particularly slavish camp follower of Steven Spielberg. The two movies mix like sugar and sludge; the result is a terrific little movie ankle-chained to a gorilla. [21 June 1985, p.D1]

A conventional cop thriller leavened with a tablespoon of style and a quarter-cup of garbagey fun.

Billed as a romantic comedy, the movie is certainly funny, but it's also as darkly disturbing as any this year.

Overall, the movie is cloddishly composed, with awkward zooms and theatrical blocking. This is one of those movies where characters speak in asides to the audience; Nunn has reinvented the proscenium arch.

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]

Donner never quite gets the tone right, and the pace is positively stuporous. The horses gallop, but the film barely canters. [15 Apr 1985, p.B2]

A double fish out of water structure -- first she's the fish, then he's the fish -- but the movie doesn't go anywhere with it, mostly because the characters are such nullities.

There is plenty of dumb stuff in Wise Guys, a rambunctious comedy about two screwballs on the loose, probably more than anyone should stand for. But the doughty will stick around for its small pleasures, most of which spring from the lens of Brian De Palma. [10 May 1986, p.C4]

This is a movie about teen-agers that doesn't patronize them, which gives it a realistic, lived-in feel. [13 June 1986, p.D9]

What's left here is not so much a movie as an assault so unpleasant, it leaves you wondering what you could have done to deserve it. [27 May 1986, p.B3]

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]

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 Money Pit is Richard Benjamin's attempt to make a '30s comedy through the lens of Steven Spielberg -- there are contraptions and "smart" dialogue and, unfortunately, nothing to hold them together. [28 Mar 1986, p.D2]

An intoxicating blend of comedy, kung fu, corny romance, special effects and rock videos, it's as electrically sleepless as the New York it's set against.

A cheaply made science-fiction movie that enters the atmosphere without ever igniting.

Amateurish, emotionally fraudulent. [28 Jan 1986, p.C4]

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."

Crimes of the Heart is a well-intentioned effort, but also a deeply misguided one -- Henley's humor, while suited to the stage, disintegrates in a more literal-minded medium.

The kids are uniformly godawful, particularly the lamentably named Phoenix; their wooden line readings play in long, flat scenes that look like some 12-year-olds' school project. And talking about the movie's sense of pace is like talking about Pikes Peak's sense of pace. Explorers is a veritable jungle of thematic and story threads that are never picked up. [12 July 1985, p.D6]

The two teams, older and mostly fatter, train and play, and I trust I won't be ruining anything for you if I say there are no surprises. Screenwriter Ron Shelton has constructed a stand-up-and-cheer machine, and while the machine works, it doesn't make you feel any better about being run through it.

Robert Redford and Debra Winger are both playing against their screen personas in Legal Eagles, and together they work up a delightful brand of charisma. They don't boil, exactly -- their romance seems more like the fondness of an uncle for a favored niece -- but they do percolate, and their tender, jokey, low-key affection is what's best about the movie. [20 June 1986, p.D1]

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.

Hughes seems to be plugged into teens' view of their own teenness, and moment by moment the movie can be touchingly real. But movies are more than moments, and in the end Pretty in Pink is as fraudulent as the junk it's supposed to transcend.

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

An extraordinarily sensual movie with its own silly integrity.

It's the usual dumb stuff -- he strives, he fails, he falls in love, he strives some more, he wins. You need strong hands and a heavy set of nutcrackers to break this tedious shell, but inside there are some surprisingly sharp insights into male teen-age psychology and a marvelous performance by Matthew Modine.

The Mission is everything a movie should be -- magnificently produced, epic in scope, serious in theme -- everything, that is, but good. Hamstrung by an unworkable script, the disastrous casting of Robert De Niro and, presumably, the strain of shooting in the Colombian jungle, director Roland Joffe' has come up with an indigestible lump of sanctimony that rarely goes beyond its good intentions.

Karate Kid II doesn't give us any emotional movement in Daniel's character, or Miyagi's, or their relationship, either -- it just recapitulates them. The only character who changes in the story, in fact, is Sato, whom you couldn't care a fried fig about.