Pauline Kael

What gives this trash a life, what makes it entertaining is clearly that the director, Norman Jewison, and some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on a silly, shallow script used the chance to have a good time with it.

Though taken from a pulp best-seller, by Stephen King, the movie isn't the scary fun one might hope for from a virtuoso technician like Kubrick. It has a promising opening sequence, and there is some spectacular use of the Steadicam, but Kubrick isn't interested in the people on the screen as individuals. They are his archetypes, and he's using them to make a metaphysical statement about the timelessness of evil. He's telling us that man is a murderer through eternity. Kubrick's involvement in technology distances us from his meaning, though, and while we're watching the film it just doesn't seem to make sense.

Shot in grainy black and white, the material is rather unformed. It's dim and larval, like Danny. Allen leaves us in the uncomfortable position of waiting for laugh lines and character developments that aren't there. The picture has a curdled, Diane Arbus bleakness, but it also has some good fast talk and some push. Allen plugs up the holes with gags that still get laughs; he remembers to pull the old Frank Capra, cutrate Dickens strings, and he keeps things moving along.

It's a beautifully made gothic-romantic classic, with many memorable scenes.

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

Byrne is trying for something large scale: a postmodern Nashville. Byrne sets up the material for satirical sequences, yet he doesn't give it a subversive spin. His unacknowledged satire is like a souffle that was never meant to rise.

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

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.

As the teen-age small-town girl looking for excitement who joins up with a carnival that's traveling through, Jodie Foster has a marvelous sexy bravado. The dialogue, from Thomas Baum's screenplay, is often colorful, but the picture is heavy.

The attraction of the movie is its friendly, light tone, its affectlessness, and its total lack of humanity. [6 Aug 1984, p.72]

The film was infused with an elegiac sense of American failure, and it had a psychedelic pull to 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.

Altman gracefully kisses off the private-eye form in soft, mellow color and volatile images; the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality). Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance.

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.

Whatever the omissions, the mutilations, the mistakes, this is very likely the most exciting and most alive production of Hamlet you will ever see on the screen.

Once again, a "daring" Hollywood movie exposes social tensions--touches a nerve--and then pours on the sweet nothings. But along the melodramatic way, there are some startling episodes (and one first-rate bit of racial interchange), and recordings by Bix Beiderbecke, Stan Kenton, Bill Holman, and others set quite a pace.

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.

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

While other B-budget horror producers were still using gorillas, haunted houses, and disembodied arms, Lewton and the director, Jacques Tourneur, employed suggestion, creepy sound effects, and inventive camera angles, leaving everything to the viewers' fear-filled imagination.

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

Chaplin's sentimental and high-minded view of theatre and himself.

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

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.

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.

A major film by one of the great film artists.

The title is accurate: this is a crudely powerful prison picture.

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]

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.