Pauline Kael

The film's mixture of parody, cynicism, and song and dance is perhaps a little sour; though the numbers are exhilarating and the movie is really much more fun that the wildly overrated On the Town, it doesn't sell exuberance in that big, toothy way, and it was a box office failure.

The movie is part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.

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 picture might have been a pop classic if it had stayed near the level of impudence that it reaches at its best. But about midway as Eddie has a crisis of confidence, and when Eddie locks his jaw and sets forth to become a purified man of integrity, the joy goes out of Newman's performance, which (despite the efforts of a lot of good actors) is the only life in the movie, except for a brief, startling performance by the 25-year-old black actor Forest Whitaker as a pool shark called Amos.

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.

This Australia film - the pictorial re-creation of a late-Victorian novel - shows considerable charm and craft, though it's essentially taxidermy.

The film isn't just about the widow -- it's about family, community, America, and Christian love. But Benton's gentle, nostalgic presentation muffles this. His craftsmanship is like an armor built up around his refusal to outrage or offend anyone; it's an encrusted gentility.

A competent (often overrated) thriller by John Huston about a group of crooks who plan a jewel robbery and how their characters determine the results.

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.

Naive yet powerful.

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).

The chemistry is great, but the plot and tone are wobbly.

A thin but well-shot suspense melodrama, kept from collapsing by the suggestiveness and intensity that the director, Jacques Tourneur, pours on.

The film is rather misshapen, particularly in the sections featuring William Holden, and the action that detonates the explosive finish isn't quite clear. However, Alec Guinness is compelling as the English Colonel Nicholson.

There's a total absence of personal obsession - even moviemaking obsession - in the way Crichton works; he never excites us emotionally or imaginatively, but the film has a satisfying, tame luxuriousness, like a super episode of "Masterpiece Theater."

Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman's not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. There is, however, great intensity in many of the images.

The pictures seems dogged and methodical, though it is graced with a beautiful performance by Kotto.

Within its own terms the picture is sensitive and very well done, but it's also tiresomely fraudulent -- an idealization of a safe, shuttered existence, the good life according to M-G-M.

There's so much going on you can't take your eyes off it, but none of it means anything.

It's a pity the film, directed by Fred Wilcox, didn't lift some of Shakespeare's dialogue: it's hard to believe you're in the heavens when the diction of the hero (Leslie Nielsen) and his spaceshipmates flattens you down to Kansas.

The elements are all there, and Mitchum, looking appropriately square-headed, tries hard and has some good scenes. But you get the impression that the dialogue is moving faster than the action.

We don't get enough understanding of Stroud to become involved in how he is transformed over the years.

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.

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

Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It's far from a bad movie, but it doesn't quite click together, either. The director doesn't shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.

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.

Dershowitz's life-enhancing scenes are flatulent, and they're dishonest: the movie seems to be putting us down for enjoying the scandal satire it's dishing up. [19 Nov 1990]

The picture strains for seriousness now and then, but even when it makes a fool of itself it's still funny.