Paul Attanasio

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.