Pauline Kael

Everything in this movie is fudged ever so humanistically, in a perfuctory, low-pressure way. And the picture has its effectiveness: people are crying at it. Of course they're crying at it - it's a piece of wet kitsch. [6 Feb 1989]

Hal Ashby has the deftness to keep us conscious of the whirring pleasures of the carnal-farce structure and yet to give it free play. This was the most virtuoso example of sophisticated, kaleidoscopic face that American moviemakers had yet come up with; frivolous and funny, it carries a sense of heedless activity, of a craze of dissatisfaction.

A pedagogical tone, reminiscent of the 30s, is maintained throughout much of the movie: these strikers are always teaching each other little constructive lessons, and their dialogue is blown up to the rank of folk wisdom.

The dialogue is often painfully hip-cute, but the actors manage to be funny anyway.

Susan Sarandon does inspired double-takes - just letting her beautiful dark eyes pop.

The script, by James Toback, is a grandiloquent, egocentric novel written as a film; it spells everything out, and the director Karel Reisz's literal-minded, proficient style calls attention to how airless and schematic it is.

Uneven and it has unresolved areas, but it also has a 60s charge to it.

The Oscar Wilde story has its compelling gimmick and its cheap thrills, and despite the failings of Albert Lewin as writer and director, he has an appetite for decadence and plushy decor.

Mel Ferrer smiles his narcissistic, masochistic smiles as the crippled puppeteer who can speak his love to the 16-year-old orphan girl Lili (Leslie Caron) only through his marionettes. Canon is much too good for him, but the movie doesn't know it.

Starts smart and ends dumb. [24 Aug 1987, p.79]

The action simply doesn't have the exhilarating, leaping precision that Spielberg gave us in the past... The joyous sureness is missing. [12 June 1989]

It's like visual rock, and it's bursting with energy. The action runs from night until dawn, and most of it is in crisp, bright Day-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There's a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.

The picture, written and directed by James Bridges, tries to be thoughtful and provocative, but it has nothing to say.

The message appears to be that the spirit of M-G-M in the 40s still lives in the hearts and jokes of homosexuals.

As a moviemaker, [Pryor's] a novice presenting us with clumps of unformed experience. It isn't even raw; the juice has been drained away.

The salesmen's scams are entertaining, but their spritzing is too tame, and the action is prolonged with limp, wavering scenes. Levinson wants to be on the humane side of every issue, The best work is done by the supporting players.

Jodorowsky plays with symbols and ideas and enigmas so promiscuously that the confusion may be mistaken for depth.

Close to perfection--one of the most beautifully acted and paced romantic comedies ever made in this country.

The cinematography is very ordinary, and most of the staging is uninspired, but Lange has real authority, and the performance holds you emotionally. People cry at this movie though it sin't sentimental - it's an honest tearjerker.

If audiences enjoy the movie, it's largely because of the elderly actors and the affection that the young director, Ron Howard, shows for them.

Sydney Pollack's directing is efficient and the film is moderately entertaining, but it leaves no residue. Except for the intensity of Newman's sly, compact performance...and the marvelously inventive acting of Melinda Dillon.

This isn't much of a movie but it manages to be funny a good part of the time anyway.

The dance numbers are funny, amazing, and beautiful all at once; several of them are just about perfection. And though some of the dialogue scenes are awkwardly paced and almost static, they still have a rapt, gripping quality.

The forced snappiness of the exchanges suggests two woodpeckers clicking at each other's heads. Irritability provides the rhythm in Neil Simon's universe.

Not bad, but not quite top-grade Bond. A little too much under-water war-ballet.

Richard Brooks, who adapted the novel by Judith Rossner and directed, has laid a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax. He's lost the erotic, pulpy morbidity that made the novel a compulsive read.

Though it has few dimensions it has pace and "entertainment value."

An honest failure. This United Artists big-budget musical film, directed by Martin Scorsese, suffers from too many conflicting intentions.

Although Shirley MacLaine tries hard, it's obvious that her dancing isn't up to the demands of the role. It's a disaster, but zoom-happy Fosse's choreographic conceptions are intensely dramatic, and the movie has some of the best dancing in American musicals of the period.

Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance as Sarah Woodruff, the romantic mystery woman of John Fowles' novel, but she isn't mysterious. We're not fascinated by Sarah; she's so distanced from us that all we can do is observe how meticulous Streep -- and everything else about the movie -- is.

It's too long for its one-note jokes, and often too obvious to be really funny. But it's agreeable in tone, though as it goes on, the gags don't have any particular connection with the touching, maddening Indian character that Sellers plays so wickedly well.

The script has first-rate, hardheaded, precise, sometimes funny dialogue, but it errs in bringing this girl too much to the center. Dramatically, the film lacks snap; there isn't enough tension in the way Max destroys his freedom, and so the story drags--it seems to have nowhere to go but down.

A mixed-up and over-loaded American spy thriller by Alfred Hitchcok, with the unengaging Robert Cummings in the lead and an unappealing cast, featuring Priscilla Lane and Otto Kruger. Nothing holds together, but there are still enough scary sequences to make the picture entertaining.

Kasdan has eliminated all the conflicting interests and the psychological impediments to a happy marriage, leaving the physical separation as the only obstacle. There's nothing left for the movie to be about except how the hero and the heroine can conquer space. (And at the end, the pictured fudges even this.)

The script (John Farris's adaptation of his novel) is cheap gothic espionage occultism involving two superior beings--spiritual twins (Andrew Stevens and Amy Irving) who have met only telepathically. But the film is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world; no Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many "classic" sequences.

You'd think that if anybody could film Sam Shepard's 1983 play and keep it metaphorical and rowdy and sexually charged it would be the intuitive Robert Altman, but the material seems to congeal on the screen, and congealed rambunctiousness is not a pretty sight.

The move may seem insipid to people who want something substantial, but there's a special delight about the timing of actors who make fools of themselves as personably and airily as Dudley Moore and Amy Irving do here.

The picture doesn't come together and much of it is cluttered, squawky, and eerily unfunny. But there are lovely moments --especially when Olive is loping along or singing, and when she and Popeye are gazing adoringly at the foundling Swee'Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt).

Most of the power of this scrupulously honest memorial isn't in the talk; it's in the terror and the foreignness - the far-from-home-ness - of the imagery. Directed by John Irvin, the film has great decency; it joins together terror and thoughtfulness.

It operates on darlingness and the kitsch of innocence. The almost pornographic dislocation, which is the source of the film's possible appeal as a novelty, is never acknowledged, but the camera lingers on a gangster's pudgy, infantile fingers or a femme fatale's soft little belly pushing out of her tight stain dress, and it roves over the pubescent figures in the chorus line.

This suave, amusing spy melodrama is directed with so sure a touch that the suspense is charged with wit; it's one of the three or four best things Hitchcock ever did.

Doris Day is at her friendliest and most likable as the tomboy heroine of this big, bouncy Western musical about Jane's romance with Wild Bill Hickok.

This came late in the series but it's still fairly cheerful.

It takes place in the TV land of predictability -- that plain of dowdy realism where a boy finds his manhood by developing the courage to stick to his principles and stand up to his father.

It's an idiosyncratic film, it's cuckoo--an old man's film (partly directed from a wheelchair)--but it's very likable.

The director, John Schlesinger, opts for so much frazzled corss-cutting that there isn't the clarity needed for suspense. The only emotion one is likely to fell is revulsion at the brutality and general unpleasantness.

At almost every point where we might expect a little ping of surprise or mystery, Donner lets us down. It's a limp and dreary movie.

Not as stirring a piece of mythology as the Errol Flynn version (The Adventures of Robin Hood), but a robust, handsome production; made in England, it's a Disney film that doesn't look or sound like one. (That is a compliment.)

Talky and stiff, the film never finds the passionate tone that it needs.

The film holds you, in a suffocating way. Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It's all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don't care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination.

Walter Hill has a dazzling competence as an action director; he uses the locale for its paranoia-inducing strangeness (it suggests Vietnam), and he uses the men to demonstrate what he thinks it takes to survive. Its limitation is that there's nothing underneath the characters' macho masks.

The jokes get rather desperate, but there are enough wildly sophomoric ones to keep this pop stunt fairly amusing until about midway. It would have made a terrific short.

This slapstick adventure comedy is in the commercial genre of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it's a simpler, more likable entertainment than Raiders; it doesn't leave you feeling exhausted.

A sour, visually ugly comedy from director Billy Wilder and his co-writer, I. A. L. Diamond, which gets worse as it goes along -- more cynical and more sanctimonious.

Mariel Hemmingway tries hard as Dorothy, but she's all wrong for the part - she's simply not a bunny type. Fosse must believe that he can make art out of anything - that he doesn't need a writer to create characters, that he can just take the idea of a pimp murdering a pinup and give it such razzle-dazzle that it will shake people to the marrow. He uses his whole pack of tricks - flashbacks, interviews, shock cuts, the works - to keep the audience in a state of dread. He piles up such an accumulation of sordid scenes that the movie is nauseated by itself.

Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.

Very bad...Davis throws her weight around but comes through in only a few scenes.

Tennyson wrote Enoch Arden in 1864, and the movies have been making versions of it ever since D.W. Griffith did it in 1908 (and again in 1911). This one is the most famous and the funniest.

Bad fun. This sophisticated variant of the LA. cops-and-coke-and-art-world thrillers has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused.

In spite of his problem of sentiment, it's a happy, unpretentious farce.

The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's vision.

Hardly even a shadow; Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Asta go through their paces for the fourth time, but the jauntiness is gone.

The picture starts out in the confident Capra manner, but with a darker tone; by the end, you feel puzzled and cheated.

It's a detached, opaque, affectionless movie; since it doesn't regard the young prostitutes as human, there's no horror in their dehumanization--only frigid sensationalism.

As Octopussy, the beautiful amazon Maud Adams is disappointingly warm and maternal - she's rather mooshy.

Sydney Pollack doesn't have a knack for action pulp; he gets some tension going in this expensive spy thriller, but there's no real fun in it.

Frank Sinatra’s performance is pure gold, but the director, Otto Preminger, goes for sensationalism; the film is effective, but in a garish, hyperbolic, and dated way.

The third in the series, and without any new ideas except a bad one: still airily casual, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are now the parents of a baby boy.

Tight, clever thriller.

Someone at Universal had the brainstorm of redoing the 1925 silent Lon Chaney horror picture and taking advantage of the fact that it was set in an opera house to make it not only a sound picture but a high-toned musical. The result is this flaccid, sedate version.

In the film's second half, Hudson twists the story into knots in order to deliver his "statement" that apes are more civilized than people; the movie simply loses its mind, and dribbles to a pathetically indecisive conclusion.

This stylized movie of ideas is a lean, impressive piece of work.

Based on a script condensed from Robert Bolt's scripts for two projected films about the 1789 mutiny, this misshapen movie doesn't work as an epic -- it doesn't have the scope or the emotional surge of epic storytelling. It's certainly not boring, though.

The director, Sidney J. Furie, brings the film energy and he keeps the gags and the sentiment coming.

Tacky low-budget picture about a scientist whose carelessness gets him into a tragic pickle.

Ritt takes his time in building the atmosphere and introducing the people, and lets an image stay on the screen until we take it in. The movie is impressive yet lifeless.

The message is not very different from that of Hello, Dolly! or Mame, but Harold's flaccid asexuality (he's like a sickly infant, a limp, earthbound Peter Pan) and Maude's advanced stage of pixiness give that message a special freaky quality. And the film has been made with considerable wit and skill.

A space epic with a horse-and-buggy script. It's dull out there in space, though not as depressing as listening to the astronauts' wives back home. John Sturges directed, in his sleep

The directing, by Brian De palma, is canny and smooth, but this musty genre calls for fresh jokes and sharp, colorful personalities, and that's not what he's working with.

The film's chief distinction is Julie Christie; she's extraordinary--petulant, sullen, and very beautiful.

It's a meditation on sin and saintliness. Considered a masterpiece by some, but others may find it painstakingly tedious and offensively holy.

This all-star version of an Agatha Christie antiquity promises to be a sumptuous spread, and so it is, but not as tasty as one had hoped.

It wants to be a jaunty heist-caper movie, like Topkapi, of 1964, but it's of quintessential mediocrity: not hip enough to sustain interest, not dreary enough to walk out on.

A rowdy burlesque of the Dracula movies, set in Manhattan, with dilapidated stuffed bats and a large assortment of gags; some of them are funny in a low-grade, moldy way, and some are even stupidly racist, but many are weirdly hip, with a true flaky wit.

It's a strange, elating movie with the Iceman at its emotional center; his mystical fervor takes hold. The director, Fred Schepisi, is working with a weak script, yet he and his two longtime collaborators, the composer Bruce Smeaton and the cinematographer Ian Baker, achieve that special and overwhelming fusion of the arts which great visual moviemaking can give us.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's rowdy dream of newspaper life, first produced on the stage in 1928, seems to be foolproof, and the structure still stands up in this version, directed by Billy Wilder. But something singular and marvelous has been diminished to the sloppy ordinary.

This show-business farce is the first film directed by Richard Benjamin, and it's a creaky job of moviemaking, but it has a bubbling spirit; Benjamin is crazy about actors--not a bad start for a director.

The only reason to see this hunk of twaddle is the better to savor the memory of the Carol Burnett - Harvey Korman parody, which also was shorter. Mervyn LeRoy, who directed many a big clinker, also gets the blame for this one.

The romantic star chemistry of Redford and Streisand turns a half-terrible movie into hit entertainment -- maybe even memorable entertainment.

Sean Connery manages to rise above the material; most of the rest of the cast plays in broad style, and there have rarely been so many small, sleazy performances in one movie.

The impulsiveness and raw flamboyance that make the book exciting are missing, and the cool, elegant visuals outclass the characters right from the start.

For all its bone-crunching collisions, it's almost irresistibly good-natured and funny.

A mosaic that never comes together.

Val Lewton produced, but except for a few touches, it's a mess.

There isn't a whisper of surprise in Redford's performance, and he's photographed looking like a wary, modest god, with enough backlighting and soft focus to make him incandescent even when he isn't doing a thing.

The director Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich try to make a new, more meaningful version of a 40s melodrama, but their Manhattan-set thriller bogs down in a tangle of plot.

When the bland moral rectitude takes over, the film's comedy spirit withers. But there are a lot of enjoyable things.

Hill lacks the conviction or the temperament for all this brutal buffoonishness, and he can't hold the picture together; what does is the warmth supplied by Paul Newman.

A likable first feature by the director Taylor Hackford; it has verve and snap, despite a rickety script and a sloshy finish.

This is one of the most entertaining science-fiction fantasies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Marilyn Monroe as a psychotic babysitter. She wasn't yet a box-office star, but her unformed--almost blobby--quality is very creepy, and she dominated this melodrama. In other respects, it's standard, though the New York hotel setting helps, and also the young Anne Bancroft, as a singer who works in the hotel.

A mild farce - benign but not really very funny.

A rigid faced Joan Crawford, in a role that would make sense only if played by a ravishing young beauty. She's twice too old for it, and her acting is grim and masklike.

Tuggle keeps whomping us on the skull with good-evil symbolism, but the movie has no more depth than the usual exploitation film in which pretty girls are knocked off.

The film is comatose; you're brought into it only by the camera tricks or the special-effects horrors, or, perhaps, the nude scenes.

This Bond thriller-the sixth, and set mainly in Switzerland-introduces a new Bond, George Lazenby, who's quite a dull fellow, and the script, by Richard Maibaum, isn't much, either, but the movie is exciting, anyway.

Hal Ashby directed this intuitive yet amorphous movie, which falls apart when he resorts to melodramatic crosscutting.

I was surprised at how not-bad it is. It may fall into the category of youth-exploitation movies, but it isn't assaultive, and it's certainly likable. [1 Nov 1982, p.146]

The picture is scrappily edited, and the director seems willing to do almost anything for an immediate effect. It's only in the best scenes that satire and sultriness work together.

(Fisk) gives us flowing, expressive images that linger in the memory. What also lingers in the memory are some of the performances Fisk gets: Spacek in particular, who seems grown up, and Roberts, who is unexpectedly simple and open.

It all looks fussed over. Parker simply doesn't have the gift of making evil seductive, and he edits like a flasher.

A larger, slower, duller version of the spy thrillers [Hitchcock] made in the 30s.

Probably the most consistently entertaining of the Bond packages up to the time - not as startling as parts of "Goldfinger" but much superior to "Thunderball."

A Hitchcock stinker, set in Australia in the early 19th century (though shot in England).

Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.

There ins't a gleam of good sense anywhere in this picture.

An overblown version of James Hilton's tearstained little gold mine of a book, with songs where they are not needed (and Leslie Bricusse's songs are never needed), yet there's still charm in the story, and Peter O'Toole gives a romantic performance of great distinction as the schoolmaster whose life is transformed by the Cinderella touch of an actress, played now by Petula Clark.

The movie is a romantic adventure fantasy--colossal, silly, touching, a marvelous Classics Comics movie (and for the whole family).

Tracy and Hepburn, but not a comedy, and not good, either.

The film's nostalgic fixation on the ambiance of the war years seems to exclude any real interest in the lives of the women workers; this feminist fairy tale sees the characters as precursors of the women's movement of the 60s and 70s rather than as people.

This rabble-rousing movie appeals to a deep-seated belief in simple, swift, Biblical justice; the visceral impact of the film makes one know how crowds must feel when they're being swayed by demagogues.

This Gene Kelly-Frank Sinatra musical has an abundance of energy and spirit, and you may feel it could be wonderful if it weren't so stupidly wholesome.

The director, Blake Edwards, sets up promising slapstick situations, and then the payoffs are out of step (and worse, repeated); after the first half hour or so, the film loses momentum.

100% pure-plastic adolescent male fantasy.

This thriller doesn't offer the pleasures of style, but it does its job. It catches you in a vise - it's scary, and when it's over you feel a little shaken.

The only sanity here is in some of the acting. Rourke does a fine, competent job, but the movie is stolen clear away by Morgan Freeman and Forest Whitaker as antagonists -- a tough minded veteran police detective and a warm, idealistic prison doctor.

Gavin Lambert summed it up: An all-star concentration-camp drama, with special guest-victim appearances.

A combination of raw pulp and gooey kitsch.

Robert Wise, who made this expensive version of the Michael Crichton novel, having chosen a fanatically realistic documentary style, has failed to solve the dramatic problems in the original story. The suspense is strong, but not pleasurable.

Mainly it's full of sort-of-funny and trying-to-be-funny ideas. The director Elliot Silverstein's spoofy tone is ineptitude, coyly disguised.

Lightning didn't strike three times; the movie is lumbering... I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation, and it's too amorphous to damage our feelings about the first two. [1 Jan 1991]

The scenes inside the Institute have a chill, spectral beauty, yet the spookiness doesn't explode. The movie seems a little too cultivated, too cautious.

This whole production is a mixture of wizardry and ineptitude; the picture has enjoyable moments but it's as uncertain of itself as the title indicates.

Screenwriter Oliver Stone and the director, Alan Parker, have subjected their Billy (Brad Davis) to the most photogenic sadomasochistic brutalization that they could dream up. The film is like a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin. It rushes from torment to torment, treating Billy's ordeals hyponotically in soft colors -- muted squalor -- with a disco beat in the background.

The script goes from one formula to the next, and it reworks the pranks of generations of male service comedies, but the director, Howard Zieff, refurbishes the stale material with smart small touches, and Goldie Hawn has such infectious frothy charm that she manages to get laughs out of ancient routines about a tenderfoot going through the rigors of basic training.

You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing.

When Attenborough starts crosscutting from the escape to Woods' flashback memories (with bursts of choral music), the movie is dumbfounding. It looks as if Attenborough staged scenes and then didn't know what to do with them, so he stuck them in by having the escaping Woods think back. An every time Biko appears in a flashback our interest quickens; this man with fire in his eyes commands the screen -- Denzel Washington is the star by right of talent.

Some of the whimsey in this message operetta is hard to take, but, considering the moldering ponderousness of the whole project, the young Francis Ford Coppola did his best to keep things moving in a carefree, relaxing way.

Sentimental, without being convincing for an instant.

The movie is fatally perfunctory about emotion, atmosphere, suspense. But if the overall effect is disappointing, from moment to moment the details are never less than engaging, and are often knobby and funny.

Unimaginative Bond picture that is often noisy when it means to be exciting.

You look at the screen even though there's nothing to occupy your mind--the way you sometimes sit in front of the TV, numbly, because you can't rouse yourself for the effort it takes to go to bed.

So klunky and poorly paced, and so loaded with sanctimonious moral lessons, that even the George and Ira Gershwin score doesn't save it.

The script and conception are so maudlin and degrading that Cagney's high dedication becomes somewhat oppressive.

Innocuous musical version of A Christmas Carol, starring Albert Finney looking glum. The Leslie Bricusse music is so forgettable that your mind flushes it away while you're hearing it.

The chemistry of pop vulgarization is all-powerful here; factually, this life of Billie Holiday is a fraud, but emotionally it delivers.

Directed by James Fargo, this third in the series doesn't have the savvy to be as sadistic as its predecessors; it's just limp.

Broadly played, in the 50s telegraphing-every-thought comic style.

The movie could be every errant husband's self-justifying fantasy. (And the way Burstyn overacts, a man would have to be a saint to have stayed with her so long.) Directed by Bud Yorkin, from a script by Colin Welland, the picture is like a sermon on the therapeutic value of adultery, divorce, and remarriage, given by a minister who learned all he knows from watching TV.

An aggressively silly head-horror movie, the result of the misalliance of two wildly different hyperbolic talents-the director Ken Russell and the writer Paddy Chayefsky.

The movie is a form of hysterical, rabble-rousing pulp, yet it isn't involving; it doesn't have the propulsion of good pulp storytelling.

The tone is too playful, too bright. Is the heiress herself meant to be a treasure? Is she meant to be charmingly klutzy? You can't tell.

The three actresses put so much faith in their roles that they carry the movie, triumphantly. They take the play's borderline pathos about heartbreakingly screwed-up lives--it's a mixture of looniness and lyricism--and give it real vitality.

There are lapses in the continuity, and the picture is pushed toward a ready-made, theatre-of-the-absurd melodrama--the kind of instant fantasy that filled One From the Heart.

The movie is never plain boring, but its comic pathos and Southern-gothic cuteness can grate on you.

Shallow, but the gimmick is appealing, and Woodward's showmanship is very likable.

This is an impersonal and rather junky piece of moviemaking. It's packed with torture scenes, and it bangs away at you. And every time there's a possibility of a dramatic climax - a chance to engage the audience emotionally with something awesome - the director Richard Marquand trashes it.

Tomlin confirms herself as a star whenever she gets the material, and Dolly Parton's dolliness is very winning, but it's easy to forget that Jane Fonda is around - she seems to get lost in the woodwork. The director, Colin Higgins, is a young fossil who sets up flaccid, hand-me-down gags as if they were hilarious, and damned if the audience doesn't laugh.

A methodical, pointlessly grueling movie.

Eastwood's gun power makes him the hero of a totally nihilistic dream world. Ted Post's direction is mediocre; the script by John Milius and Michael Cimino is cheaply effective.

This one is really only for Trekkies; others are likely to find it tolerable but yawny.

It's a candied Mean Streets, evenly and impersonally directed by Stuart Rosenberg. It has no temperament -- it doesn't even have any get-up-and-go. But Patrick supplies colorful "ethnic" dialogue, and the actors run with it.

Low-budget sci-fi, from an often amusing suspense script by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith, directed by Paul Bartel in his ingratiatingly tacky, sophomoric manner. Bartel seems to have an instinctive kinky comic-book style; the picture rips along, and there's a flip craziness about it - it's an ideal drive-in movie.

Too bad that the director, George Cukor, doesn't have a little more feeling for the loony baroque; the story is treated much too soberly.

Standard gory imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt.

Probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter; the film needed a writer who would fill in what's missing--Pinter's art is the art of taking away.

Fairly consistently funny.

Whatever oddball charm and silliness the first Rocky had is long gone. Rocky III starts with the hyped climax of II and then just keeps going on that level; it's packaged hysteria. This picture is primitive, but it's also shrewd and empty and inept.

An inflated sci-fi action-horror film...[Cameron] does it in an energetic, systematic, relentless way, with an action dicretor's gusto, and a shortage of imagination. The imagery has a fair amount of graphic power, but there's too much claustrophobic blue-green darkness.

This Anglo-American production doesn't go in for romance or comedy; it sticks to suspense, and it's really good at what it does (except for a rather tacky escape by air).

Peckinpah's poetic, corkscrew vision of the modern world, claustrophobically exciting.

I found Tourist hell to sit through. [23 Jan 1989]

It's all plot, and the plot is all holes; it's not just that it doesn't add up right - most of the episodes don't quite make sense. About all that carries the movie along is the functional - and occasionally smooth, bright - dialogue.

As obsequiously respectful as if it had been made about living monarchs who might reward the producer with a command performance. Viewers are put in the position of celebrity-lovers eager to partake of the home life of the dullest of the Czars.

Hill attempted to stylize gangster characters and conventions, and although he succeeded in the action sequences, which have a near-abstract visual power, the stylized characters, with their uninflected personalities, flatten the movie out.

The picture is swill, but it isn't a cheat; it's an entertaining marathon of Grade-A destruction effects, with B-picture stock characters spinning through it.

A crisp, tough-minded action film about an international group of mercenaries who stage a coup in a small, decaying West African country run by an Idi Amin-Papa Doc-style despot. The casting of Christopher Walken as Shannon, the leader of the group, gives the film the fuse it needs.

The director, Hector Babenco, treats William Kennedy's Albany novel, set in 1938, as a joyless classic; the movie has no momentum--the running time (144 minutes) is like a death sentence.

How the West Was Lost would be a more appropriate title for this dud epic, since, as conceived by the writer, James R. Webb, the pioneers seem to dimwitted bunglers who can't do anything right.

The picture is so cautious about not offending anyone that it doesn't rise to the level of satire, or even spoof.

The movie is slight and vapid, with the consistency of watery jello...It isn't about teenagers – it's actually closer to being a pre-teen's idea of what it will be like to be a teenager. [7 Apr 1996, p.91]

Plenty of shrewd commercial calculation went into concocting the right sugar coating for this story of an 11-year-old girl's painful maturation, but chemistry seems right. Laurice Elehwany's script neatly handles a number of details but on larger matters falls into predictable patterns.

The best that can be said about this jumbled scrapbook of Joan Crawford's life from her middle years to the end is that it doesn't seem to get in the way of its star, Faye Dunaway, who gives a startling, ferocious performance.

Sam Peckinpah directed in imitation of Sam Peckinpah; it's a mechanical job, embellished with a vivacious, erotic subplot involving Al Lettieri and Sally Struthers.

This is a child's idea of satire - imitations, with a funny hat and a leer...There isn't a whisper of suspense, and there are few earned laughs; all Brooks does is let us know he has seen some of the same movies we have.

In movies like this one, Poitier's self-inflicted stereotype of goodness cancels out his acting.

It's pleasant to see these two in a picture where they're not carrying all the sins of mankind of their shoulders, but they've gone too far in the opposite direction--they're not carrying anything.

Nothing more than an inept thriller.

In a long career of giving pleasure, this is one of the few occasions when (Rogers) failed; it isn't her worst acting but there's nothing in the soggy material to release the distinctive Ginger Rogers sense of fun.

Sloppy, clumsy Hitchcock thriller. Brian Moore is credited with the original screenplay, but probably his friends don't mention it.

A funky, buoyant farce. The picture doesn't have the dirt or meanness or malice to make you explode with laughter, but it's consistently enjoyable.

[Ridley Scott] draws you into a dull, sensual daydreaminess, but after watching Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers for a while, you look around for the stars. With so much buildup - so much terror-tinged atmosphere - you expect actors with some verve, and you wonder why the script doesn't sneak in a few jokes. (Has a good thriller ever been this solemn? Or this simple?)

Almost amusing in a harmlessly, pleasantly stupid way.

Linus Pauling was quoted as saying, "It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world." The greatest ability of the director, Stanley Kramer, may have been for eliciting fatuous endorsements from eminent people.

The first three-quarters of an hour...is junkily entertaining. but when they're on the road in the South, Willie turns into a curmudgeonly guardian angel, the boy starts learning lessons about life, and the picture is contemptible.

With Arthur hiller in charge, much of the dialogue turns into squawking, and the movie is flattened out and rackety, with Midler doing her damnedest to pump sass and energy into it.

A glitter sci-fi adventure fantasy that balances the indestructible James Bond with an indestructible cartoon adversary, Jaws (Richard Kiel), who is a great evil windup toy. This is the best of the Bonds starring the self-effacing Roger Moore.

This muckraking melodrama has considerable power and some strong performances. The script, by W.D. Richter, has offhand dialogue with a warm, funny edge.

The film was lavishly produced, with great care given to the sets and costumes and makeup, but the spirit is missing.

Simon instinctively makes things easy and palatable, and there's a penalty: it's the retrograde, pepless snooziness of the picture. You come out feeling half dead.

The film is far from being a seamless work of art, but it probably comes closer to the confused attitudes that Americans had toward the Vietnam war than any other film has come, and so its messiness seems honorable.

It's so tastefully tame that there's no supsense.

Well thought out and with a feeling for ordinary American talk, but too mechanical, too blandly sensitive, too cool to be popular; it's the sort of small-scale picture that's a drag in a theatre but shines on Home Box Office.

The 12th James Bond film goes through the motions, but not only are we tired of them, the actors are tired of them - even the machines are tired...The producers have made the mistake of deciding on a simpler, more realistic package, without dazzling sets or a big, mad super villain.

The tragedy of these two peoples, killing each other because each has just claims to the same plot of ground, is presented with efficient, impersonal evenhandedness, so that we care about neither of them.

They should never have allowed the audience so much time to think about what's going on: the short play turns into a ludicrous, lumbering horror movie.

As a wisecracking , intermittently violent lunatic, Michael Keaton electrifies this quirky farce. The film isn't the knockout it might have been if it had a few big wild routines. And yes, it's sentimental. But the sentimentality isn't overplayed, and Keaton's fast rap cauterizes much of it.

Probably nobody involved was very happy about the results; Dylan doesn't come off at all.

There's no motivating idea visible in this version, produced abroad by Hal B. Wallis, and the leaden script, by John Hale, lacks romantic spirit and dramatic sense.

The film often looks third class, and the director, Jim Abrahams, doesn't have the knack of making the details click into place. You're aware of an awful lot of mistaken-identity plot and aware of how imprecise most of it is. Yet the picture moves along, spattering the air with throwaway gags, and a minute after something misfires you're laughing out loud.

The picture doesn't have a snappy enough rhythm, and the repartee is often too slow, and the story takes a bad turn just past midway by making a melodramatic villain out of a likable character. But until then it's generally fresh, and it has a lovely soft visual quality, with unusually pleasing camera placement.

This film brings out all the weaknesses of its director, Sidney Lumet, and none of his strengths. The whole production has a stagnant atmosphere, and the big dance numbers are free-form traffic jams.

Penn is given so little to work with here that it's practically a pantomime performance. He's worth watching, even though the picture is singularly unimaginative.

Is there a piece of casting more ineffably Hollywood than Cher as a busy, weary public defender? She's all wrong for this role: her hooded, introspective face doesn't give you enough--she needs a role that lets her use her body.

Martin Ritt's big, noisy production clunks along like a disjointed play; it defeats Jones, and along the way it also inadvertently exposes the clobber-them-with-guilt tactics of the dramatist, Howard Sackler.

Hysterical twaddle.

This movie is offensive on just about every level.

Nicholson's fatuous leering performance dominates the movie, and because his prankishness also comes out in the casting and directing, the movie hasn't any stabilizing force; there's nothing to balance what he's doing--no one with a strait jacket. An actor-director who prances about the screen manically can easily fool himself into thinking that his film is jumping; Nicholson jumps, all right, but the movie is inert.

The bedgraggled plotting forces Hanks into maudlin situations, but he manages to get under some of his material and darken it.

The whole thing is so obvious that people in the audience applaud and hoot; it might be mistaken for parody if the sledgehammer-slow pacing didn't tell you that the director (Eastwood) wasn't in on the joke.

A forgettable, generally forgotten Hitchcock gothic, from a Daphne du Maurier novel, full of Cornwall shipwrecks and smuggling and murder in the time of good King George IV.

Pious muck.

It sounds promising, but Bogdanovich attempts an exercise in style, and the result is sustained clutter.

Directed by George Cukor, this movie has an unflagging pace, but it's full of scenes that don't play, and often you can't even tell what tone was hoped for. It's a tawdry self-parody.

Michael Curtiz directed this oppressive, misbegotten venture.

The whole archaic big musical circus here surrounds a Happening -- Barbra Streisand -- and it's all worth seeing in order to see her.

Woody Allen is trying to please, but his heart isn't in it, and his talent isn't either. He is so much a man of our time that his comedy seems denatured in this classy, period setting

There's nothing to look at except Gino and Jerry's mummified skits, which are directed at a deliberate and unvarying pace. Mamet piles on improbabilities in a matter-of-fact style; flatness of performance seems to be part of the point. This minimalist approach--it suggests a knowingness--takes the fun out of hokum. The result is like a Frank Capra--Damon Runyon comic fairy tale of the 30s in slow motion.

Paul Newman in a bungled attempt to recapture the Bogart private-eye world of The Big Sleep. Shelley Winters gives the picture artificial respiration for a few minutes, but it soon relapses. A private-eye movie without sophistication and style is ignominious.

This version isn't a total dud, but it's a coarser piece of slapstick, and not at all memorable.

[May] has a knack for defusing the pain without killing the joke.

Richard Thorpe directed this package, shrewdly designed to give satisfaction to the new raunchy rock generation. The story ends happily, and the movie made millions, though Presley never begins to suggest the vitality that he showed in documentary footage.

Frank Tashlin directed this attempt at a stylish comedy-thriller; it goes very wrong--there's no suspense, because we have no idea what's going on, and the spoofy, slapstick embellishments are almost painfully self-conscious.

Gangster whimsey--which is to say the very worst kind.

A tacky, lighthearted parody of crime-wave movies--camp for kiddies.

A forgettable Bogart melodrama that was already familiar when it came out; it had been synthesized from several of his hits, with Lizabeth Scott's role processed out of Mary Astor and Lauren Bacall routines.

The decor and effects in Roger Vadim's erotic comic strip are disappointing, but Jane Fonda has the skittish naughtiness of a teen-age voluptuary. She's the fresh, bouncy American girl triumphing by her innocence over a lewd, sadistic world of the future.

When Beatty and Hoffman doe their (deliberately hopeless) singing numbers, jerking like mechanical men, phrasing unmusically, going off-key, they don't have the slapstick skills for it. That's when you long for Martin and Murray, or some other comics. [1 June 1987, p.102]

It's one of those movies in which the hero has to be a man of few words because if he ever explained anything to the other characters they wouldn't get into the trouble they get into that he has to get them out of, and there wouldn't be a movie. There isn't much of one anyway.

The picture isn't terrible, just terribly dull. It feels dated, especially in the scenes that "explain" the hero and show his redemption - the banality comes down on you like drizzle.

The director, Roland Joffe, and his co-screenwriter, Bruce Robinson, took this inherently dramatic subject and got lost in it; the script is a shambles.

The picture's only claim on one's attention is in the two sequences staged by Busby Berkeley.

There's a sweet, naive feeling to the movie even when it's violent and melodramatic and atrocious, and when it's good it's good in an unorthodox, improvisatory style.

It's a slovenly piece of moviemaking and it's full of howlers. Charly may represent the unity of schlock form and schlock content -- true schlock art.

Processed schlock. This could only have been designed as a TV movie and then blown up to cheapie-epic proportions.

It's intended to be a thriller, but there's little suspense and almost no fun in this account of a schizophrenic ventriloquist.

The film has many of the ingredients of a shocking, memorable movie, but it's shallow and earnest...It's a mess, with glimmerings of talent and with Newman's near-great performance.

Probably the material was too precious and fake-lyrical to have worked in natural surroundings, either, but the way it has been done it's hopelessly stagey.

Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film has a few shocking fast cuts, but it also has scabrous elegance and a surprising amount of humor.

Too self-conscious, though; the cinematography, by Franz Planer, may sometimes evoke Balthus, but the atmosphere is heavy and lugubrious.

The film is rich in fillips--smart little taps and strokes. But after a while you start asking yourself, what is this movie about? (You're still asking when it's over.)

Peter Hyams, who directed, knows how to stage chases and fights. But he also wrote this script, which deadens everything and doesn’t even make sense.

Ugh. A murder mystery that starts from a Leslie Charteris story but never gets anyplace you'd want to go to.

It's bright and blithe, like the sound of the 60s girl groups on the track; the flimsy plot hardly matters.

Daniel Mann's direction is maybe even worse that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes script.

There are potentially funny scenes, but Bergman doesn't know how to give timing and polish to his own jokes.

This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving.

An all-star send-up of the Bond films, with multiple Bonds and multiple directors, has some laughs, but it makes one terribly conscious of wastefulness. Jokes and plots and possibilities are thrown away along with huge, extravagant sets, and famous performers go spinning by.

Though the film has its bright moments, and some weird ones, too, the first freshness is gone. Even the effects seem repetitive.

Turgidly predictable.

Sam Peckinpah's happy-go-lucky ode to the truckers on the road--a sunny, enjoyable picture.

Rambo is to the action film what Flashdance was to the musical, with one to-be-cherished difference: audiences are laughing at it.

Once you get past the clumsily antic early scenes, the moody texture can take hold of your imagination. At its best, the film is a soft Irish kiss.

A rich-meets-rich picture, and worse than one imagines. Al Pacino gives a torpid performance as a spiritually depleted Grand Prix racing-car driver who falls in love with a well-heeled free spirit (Marthe Keller), a metaphysical kook.

If you admired Bette Midler in The Rose and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, you may want to bash you head against the wall...The director, Garry Marshall, shows no feeling for the material - not even false feeling.

Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes (hectic criminal ventures and blunders toward justice) on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.

A dog of a movie about a horse.

With ideas skimmed off the top of various systems of thought, Zardoz is a glittering cultural trash pile.

Its emotional climate is too extreme to invite identification, and its characters are too single-minded in their revenge to evoke pity, terror or even much interest.

The picture teeters on the edge of parody without giving itself the relief of falling over.

It's a deluxe glorification of creative crisis, visually arresting (the dark and light contrasts are extraordinary, magical) but in some essential way conventional-minded.

This comedy has some wonderful gags and a lot of other good ideas for gags, but it was directed by Arthur Hiller, who is the opposite of a perfectionist, and it makes you feel as if you were watching television.

It's an erratic and, finally, disappointing picture (it loses its snap). Yet you keep rooting for it, because Elizabeth McGovern, as the assault victim, a cocktail waitress, has the style and resources that the other two leads lack, and the cinematography, by Gil Taylor, his a snazzy verve, and Hanson has some clever ideas, such as the way he sets up a courtroom sequence and the way he directs the almost mute psycho (the chilling, well-cast Brad Greenquist).

It's reprehensible and enjoyable, the kind of movie that makes you feel brain dead in two minutes--after which point you're ready to laugh at its mixture of trashiness, violence, and startlingly silly crude humor.

What's strange about the movie is that the best things in it aren't developed, and what Superman and the other characters do doesn't seem to have any weight. [11 July 1983, p.90]

One of the dreariest films in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy series; it has a metallic flavor.

A the start, Lemmon has vanished almost totally into his role, but soon he's so insufferably perky and boyish and obliging that you feel he deserves the puling lines that Goldberg gives him.

Script lacks satiric insolence, and the picture grinds on humorlessly. The villain Christopher Lee's fanged smile is the only attraction.

The writer-director Robert Benton is unquestionably intelligent, but he seems to have misplaced his sense of humor, and this murder mystery set in Manhattan shows almost no evidence of the nasty streak that's part of the pleasure of a good thriller, or of the manipulative skills that might give us a few tremors.

There's no denying that for many people sequences such as Bambi's birth have an enduring primal power.

There are funny moments, but they don't add up to enough.

The director, Herbert Ross, and the writer, Dean Pitchford, exhaust one bad idea after another, and build up to a letdown: you don't get the climactic dance you expect.

There's no electricity in it, no smart talk, no flair. Written and directed by George Seaton, it's bland entertainment of the old school: every stereotyped action is followed by a stereotyped reaction -- cliches commenting on cliches.

The script, by Israel Horovitz, has trim, funny lines but also terrible, overingratiating ones, and some of the most doddering, bonehead situations to be soon on the big screen in years. Directed by Arthur Hiller, the film is blotchy in just about every conceivable way.

So inept you can't even get angry; it's like the imitations of sophisticated entertainment that high-school kids put on.

One of those errors-of-science thrillers; it's an even worse error of moviemaking.

So self-conscious about its themes that nothing in the storytelling occurs naturally.

The movie is heavy on exposition, and the story isn't dramatized - it's merely acted out (and hurried through), in a series of scenes that are like illustrations. And, despite the care that has gone into the sets and costumes and the staging, the editing rhythms are limp and choppy.

The picture hasn’t been thought out in terms of movement or a visual plan. Dylan merely gives his actor friends some clues as to what he’d like them to do and they improvise, without reference to what has gone before or what will follow.