Peter Stack

Acted with almost maniacal force by Jaffrey, Mary is at once fascinating and despicable.

Intimate, heartfelt and wickedly funny, it's a movie whose impact lingers.

A feeble excuse for a movie.

The balance between action and mysticism in The Empire Strikes Back provides fascinating energy. It's as if the kids are given one set of delights, the bravado of battles and elaborate warships zooming through exotic space, and adults are given another, a layered explanation of what it all means in the grand scheme of things. [Special Edition]

Mostly it seems forced, pat and didactic.

Though its sentiment may be lost on the very young, the movie is strictly two-hanky fare.

For golden retriever lovers, "Fluke" is a must-see. For everyone else, wait for the video.

A vital, sexy and touching movie that goes to the heart of what human caring is all about.

It isn't terrible. It's far from a milestone in Japanese animation, and not an especially memorable entertainment. Yet it doesn't try to be either of those things.

The dolphins are charming, which is at least 50 percent of the concept of the film. The flip side is the film's predictability and shallow characters. Audiences may walk away feeling that they got a pleasant dose of cinematic Dramamine, but that it takes a long time and is a little tedious en route.

Solondz ("Fear, Anxiety and Depression") is almost unrelenting in his quirky fixation with the adolescent outsider and he pursues visions of everyday human injury nearly to the point of caricature. But he stops just short, and this amusingly twisted film mixes humor and heart-tugging sadness with a disturbing vitality.

One of the great portraits of artists fighting, even with murderous rage, to reach the sublime.

Like a coffee-table book, it looks inviting and teases you with sumptuous photography but leaves you cold.

Though far from memorable, it's a moderately charming number calculated to radiate a certain Father's Day glow. [17 Jun 1994, p.C3]

Bordello of Blood easily could have been called "Bore- dello of Blood." This gory vampire spoof is remarkably free of jolts, hardly registering as a fright film, with a series of weak special effects involving many globs of guts...The big themes in this lackluster second feature under the "Tales From the Crypt" banner are sex and religion. Both are presented with painfully sophomoric irreverence.

Sgt. Bilko's attempts at loose-cannon nuttiness sometimes go astray, but under Jonathan Lynn's direction, the film manages to keep a lively balance between the dumbed-down antics of Bilko's platoon of young motor- pool hustlers, to whom he is mentor, and the more nuanced satire of dimwit military brass.

Fortunately, the people save Operation Dumbo Drop, and it's their determinedly good-natured performances that keep the film moving through several well-paced misadventures.

The result is a lovely wash of humanity, served with affection.

The least they could have done with the sequel Candyman : Farewell to the Flesh is make it scary. How they managed to give us a killer with a bloody hook going around eviscerating people and have him come off as mild as a butterfly is boggling.

A little abhorrent yet strangely appealing. I found it arty and pretentious, but still couldn't turn my eyes away from its almost hypnotic coolness and fascinating psychological horrors. [23 Sept 1988]

The rat problem happens only on the graveyard shift, accounting for the title of Stephen King's all-time worst movie -- and he's got a lot of them. [27 Oct 1990, p.C3]