Paul Attanasio

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]

Toward the beginning of Turk 182!, Terry the fireman (Robert Urich) brays, "Gimme annudda beeah, Hoolie." Audiences should understand that this is their cue to leave the theater. In the movie's condescending populism, The People are enshrined, The System is scorned. And The People say: phooey. [16 Feb 1985, p.C6]

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

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.

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

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

An extraordinarily sensual movie with its own silly integrity.

Brighton Beach Memoirs (written by Neil Simon from his hit play) is a regularly funny and at times affecting movie that captures, if not always successfully, the kind of back-and-forth of any ordinary family. And what makes it most powerful, perhaps, is the knowledge that the family is, at least in part, drawn from Simon's own.

Some sort of combination of a teen-age Bewitched and a Police Academy for department stores.

The movie, in short, rides on a revenge plot and a beauty-and-the-beast subplot, and there's some nice photography and production design; screen writer L.M. Kit Carson lends some Texas texture and funny lines. But mostly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is straight blood and guts. [23 Aug 1986, p.D11]

Here is a Neil Simon movie with all of his banality, but none of his humor -- a sort of "The Nod Couple." [30 March 1985, p.G3]

Can contemporary romance be this flat?

John Frankenheimer has directed 52 Pick-Up in a style so devoid of nuance, the movie almost watches itself. From the crosscutting between Scheider and Ann-Margret that opens the film (an exchange of glances so portentous you think an earthquake is about to hit Los Angeles) to the way every emotion is underlined with tight close-ups, 52 Pick-Up is so aggressively explicit that it might have been made for an audience of trained apes.

Before it turns slack and sentimental, Power, Sidney Lumet's foray into the world of political consultants, crackles with a kind of moral static. Lumet lets you enjoy the pleasures of sleaze all the while he's shocking you with it -- the movie feels like a joy buzzer. And for a while, at least, you think this is exactly the acidulous, pell-mell satire you've been waiting for.

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.

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.

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.

How maddening Dune is! As you would expect from visionary director David Lynch, it is a movie of often staggering visual power, the most ambitious science fiction film since "2001"; it's also stupefyingly dull and disorderly. Dune doesn't get going till fully two hours have elapsed, so only the most patient will wait for the images to build to their crescendo. Lax in its storytelling, Dune gives us sublimity unmoored.

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.

This kind of macho bantering quickly wears thin, too -- I guess it's not surprising that men who spend most of their time with other men would lard their conversation with taunts of homosexuality and allusions to male gonads, but it's not particularly interesting either. And as a storyteller, Carabatsos is no better than a competent hack. The plot is schematic, the characters are cliche's.

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]

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

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

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.

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.

The Razor's Edge gives us the quintessential '80s sensibility, Bill Murray, indulging a nostalgia for the '60s masquerading as the '20s. An adaptation of the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, this longtime pet project of Murray's will only disappoint his many fans.

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

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.