Richard Schickel

Essentially a liberal soap opera.

One of this movie's implications--and it's a common enough one these days--is that sensitivity is a quality impossible to find in straight guys. [20 April 1998]

But in shaping their tale for the screen, shouldn't he have honored their courage--and, yes, inventiveness--with something other than cliches?

Yes, Burt Reynolds has some dirty, lively moments as a crooked, sex-starved Congressman. But the crazy, nothing-to-lose anarchy of people living below the margin and beyond the fringe is not within Bergman's fastidious reach.

Funny in its deplorable way.

Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are glorious comic actresses, while Joan Plowright provides a firm, touching moral center to the film. They almost make you forget Cher's totally out-of-it work as a disapproved-of American and carry the film to its destiny, which is one of inoffensive inconsequence, prettily staged. [24 May 1999, p.88]

What saves this movie from hopeless sentimentality is Meryl Streep's subtle performance.

Finally, though, Traffic, for all its earnestness, does not work. It leaves one feeling restless and dissatisfied.

What Willis proves in Die Hard is that it is not one you can ease through, especially if your preparation runs more to body building than to character building. [July 25, 1988]

The movie and everyone in it remain, under Ivan Reitman's determinedly casual direction, very loosely organized. They amble agreeably, but not necessarily hilariously, from one special-effects sequence to the next. These are not better, worse or even different from the original's trick work, and their lack of punctuating surprise is the film's largest problem, especially at the shamelessly repetitive climax. [26 June 1989, p.89]

The result is tiresome and tone-deaf and a disappointing comeback for Bogdanovich.

The Farrellys need to remember this: Sappiness is easy, comedy is hard.

Yet in the end the self-conscious importance of the film produces a rather queasy feeling, for really this story is no more than a crude exploitation — decked out with our latest scientific finery — of what amounts to a penny dreadful fantasy. If you stop and think about it, even if there were a nest of Nazis hiding out in South America, most of them would be pushing 80 by now, and quite incapable of the exertions required by this farflung, not to mention farfetched plot.

Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy.

A movie that may be just a bit too pleased with its own artful bleakness.

Something more surprising might have been made of this odd couple, but Van Sant, emptily employing the realist manner of his early films, is goodwill hunting in all the wrong places.

Bewitched means to be a civilized entertainment, which occasionally it is. But the gentility of this antique sitcom cannot be recaptured at this late date.

In short, The Karate Kid presents the smallest imaginable variations on three well-tested formulas for movie success. Robert Mark Kamen's script is developed with maddening predictability, and John G. Avildsen's direction is literal and ambling. Films like this are what the PG rating is supposed to be all about.

It's because of AnnaSophia Robb's performance...I don't think you'll see a more fascinating and nuanced performance at the movies this year.

Mostly, the new film reminds us that swell production design is no substitute for a fresh, simple and startling idea.

Pakula seems overawed by the book's critical and popular success. Whatever its other virtues, Presumed Innocent was basically a page turner; the movie is a slow burner.

A hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson ...would like it to be.

It's all so predictable. And you begin to wonder, as you so often do at the movies these days, why did they bother? And more to the point, why should we bother? [15 June 1998, p.72]

Grace is not as tightly wound as the best of its breed, but it is a genial way to pass the time.

Aiming, perhaps, for a neat double helix of black humor and prankishness, they've ended up with a pretty ugly granny knot.

On your already groaning Shakespeare for Teens video shelf, stack this one above "10 Things I Hate About You" (a.k.a. "The Taming of the Shrew") and quite a bit below "Romeo + Juliet."

Julie Taymor's inventiveness has diminished to a kind of strained cuteness. Everything that makes an artist an artist -- the obsessions, the egotism -- is ignored in favor of upbeat movie conventions.

Inept works like Good, which remains, like most such works, on the anecdotal fringe of the problem.

Dispassionate, curiously lifeless, lacking the energy of either youthful commitment or a deeply engaged re-examination of the past.

There are pain and honor in this performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it.

What is missing from the movie is any attempt to discover a cinematic language that compares with the language of the novel. Where the book jumped, the movie plods; where the novelist came upon his themes in the course of rich exploration, the movie marches up and confronts them with all the subtlety of a morning-talk-show host. It is hard to recall any recent movie, of whatever literary lineage, that is as dully literal and unadventurous as this one.

A fine--but not entirely uninteresting—mess. [2 Jun 1997, p. 74]

Starsky & Hutch has moments of hilarity a little greater than you might expect of a movie that is just out for a lazy good time.

You don't quite believe that a smart woman would spend so much time on such a dumb mission.

It renders passion dispassionate and turns murder into a kind of fashion statement, something we observe without really caring about.

They have fussed with Sabrina, but they have not really engaged it. They have not found the little twinges of pain, the awkward stumbles into vulnerability, that animate the best comedies, and the best love stories too. Wilder's film had a few of them--enough to ensure that the movie and its audience did not feel totally manipulated.

As a director, Eastwood is not as good as he seems to think he is. As an actor, he is probably better than he allows himself to be. Meanwhile, the best you can say for High Plains Drifter is that the title is a low pun. Rarely are humble westerns permitted to drift around on such a highfalutin plane. That, however, is small comfort as this cold, gory and overthought movie unfolds.

Indeed, viewers who arrive at the movie five minutes late and leave five minutes early will avoid the setup and payoff for the preposterous twist that spoils this lively, intelligent remake of 1948's The Big Clock.

A pretty but utterly misleading picture in which cheap sentiment is used to supply easy, false resolutions to agonizing issues.

The film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life.

Adapted from one of the intricately plotted, well-characterized Martin Beck policiers by the Swedish team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, it loses a great deal in the translation from Stockholm to San Francisco's Dirty Harry country. Gloomy authenticity, for one thing; pace and a genuine sense of puzzlement, for others.

The film finally collapses under the burden of implausibility.

There is more to the intertwined stories of Murrow and McCarthy than this simpleminded, rhetorically driven movie begins to encompass.

Ultimately the script's often sharp social satire is drowned out by the noise and confusion.

Better luck next time, Owen.

Will the movie end in an orgy of sentiment? Why do we bother to ask?

What makes The Good Girl worthwhile is its performances. All the actors play their entrapment with a weirdly convicted blankness. That's especially true of Aniston.

Director Pellington's touch is light and flickering, and his actors are solid and persuasive. If you let yourself go with The Mothman Prophecies, it is -- in its lumpen, serious way -- sort of fun.

You're entitled to ask for more than that in a comedy, but these days you're often obliged to settle for a lot less.

We forgive Bridget the movie its obvious flaws because of its equally inescapable charm.

Their film is not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors.

Anyone grownup enough to gain legal admission to the movie (it is rated R) will probably find himself either reduced to guffaws or wishing he had stayed home looking at his poster of Nastassia Kinski wearing a snake.

Ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts.

When our sympathies shift to [Cameron Diaz's Kimmy], the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering.

These stories, alas, are utterly predictable. Still, Samuel L. Jackson breaks through the crust of cliches as an expert called in to verify the instrument's provenance, and violinist Joshua Bell plays and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts John Corigliano's score ravishingly.

Our response to the ape's doom, once touched by authentic tragedy, is now marked by relief that this wretchedly excessive movie is finally over.

Well acted and, within its limited terms, well made, Gallipoli represents a failure of nerve as well as design.

The result is a well-tooled machine chugging coldly along a twisting road to nowhere.

Dark, detailed and only really gets going when the gunplay starts.

Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso."

There's something refreshing about its utterly unembarrassed embrace of the familiar. The director, George Tillman Jr., either doesn't notice or doesn't give a hoot about the way Scott Marshall Smith's script piles up cliches.

This time, though, the creative group has neglected to build to the kind of giddy, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink climax that made Airplane! such a memorable exercise in anarchy. Top Secret! plays more like a pillow fight in a summer-camp cabin, an agreeable way to pass the time after lights-out, but one that just peters out when everyone gets tired of breaking the rules.

For all the menace of its techno-prattle, its implicit boosts for humanism and its swell production design, the picture is finally a bore. Sci-fi was more powerful when its special effects were cheap and crude, its ideas simple but potently stated.

Diverting without being fully absorbing, this is a film best appreciated as an exercise in--shall we say it?--Primal Gere. [15 Apr 1996, p.100]

I'll stipulate that in Austen's time spinsterhood was a fate to be strenuously avoided. And being a woman writer was by no means an easy path either. Yet, she embraced it, and the immortal results more than justify a hard choice this film never really explores.

A watchable film, but it -- and its star -- might have done so much more.

Thin, gulpy, awkward, it stands before us, artlessly begging sympathy but betraying its creator's worst weakness. [9 Mar 1987, p.86]

If there is a hero in the new film, it is Donald Sutherland, who gives an energetic, intelligent, emotionally rangy performance as the public health officer working on the case. There is nothing wrong, either, with Brooke Adams as his colleague and lover. But, sadly, they can not compensate for all the other mistakes in a film that lingers too long and too soberly over material that, as the original showed, must be quickly, even superficially handled, if it is to be accepted at all.

It is very tiresome peering through the gloom trying to catch a glimpse of something interesting, then having to avert one's eyes when it turns out to be just another brutally tormented body.

Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point.

Nolan's effort is not dishonorable, but what it needs, and doesn't have, is a Joker in the deck--some antic human antimatter to give it the giddy lift of perversity that a bunch of impersonal explosions, no matter how well managed, can't supply.

Rain Man's restraint is, finally, rather like Raymond's gabble. It discourages connections, keeping you out instead of drawing you in. [19 Dec 1998]

There are a reserve and a realism in Huston's work that make her very modest film more affecting than you might expect.

There's a great story here, but Tucci's literate, civilized, wistful movie lacks savage impulse and refuses to show how mutual exploitation led to minor tragedy.

Still, somewhat shame-faced I have to admit that at some point in the film I began to hear a subversive voice whispering in my ear, and what it was saying was, "Could you blink a little faster, pal?"

This film, based on a true story, transcends its handsomeness to present a subtle portrait of a woman's growing consciousness.

This material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard.

A lot of the gags are pretty good. It's not that Star Wars is less worthy of satire than horse opera or gothic horror. It's not that Mel Brooks has lost his cunning, though he does need a freedom of speech not to be found under a PG rating. What's missing is that zany old gang of his. There is simply nobody like them on this trip. [13 July 1987, p.68]

Christie has already won prizes for the knowing weariness of her performance, and Flynn Boyle probably deserves some for her ferociously stated frustrations. But their clarity can't quite cut through the thickness of the film's air or compensate for the wooziness it induces.

There is no point in retelling this tale if you are going to be stuffy about it.

One has to admit that enormous moviemaking skill goes into the creation of pictures like The Incredible Hulk. The sheer craft directors such as Leterrier lavish on them is awesome to me. I can't imagine how they orchestrate -- or even remember -- all the little pieces of film they require to build their big set pieces. That thought, however, is nearly always followed by this question: Why do they bother?

The net result of this mighty effort is perhaps predictable: near total inconsequence.

I think Gonzo, which is wonderfully rich in historical footage, needs some skeptics, some voices suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Thompson was part of the problem, not the solution, when America flirted briefly with revolution (or was it merely anarchy?), leaving consequences that continue to resonate today -- and not always to our advantage.

The best you can say for this version of Charlie's Angels is that it retains a sort of chipper, eerie good nature as it wastes the studio's money and our time.

There's something about her (Nair) Vanity Fair that doesn't quite work. There is no depth beneath its bright surfaces, no potent emotional undercurrents.

The story is achingly familiar, and though Stallone has a certain power, he is certainly not the subtlest actor to crawl out from under Marlon's overcoat. But the picture goes most wrong in the conceit it employs to lift Rocky out of the clubs and into the big arena for his title challenge.

Hearts sinking, we are obliged to endure much pseudo-serious gabble as we head toward another painfully predictable triumph of the human spirit. There must be some better way of hunting our--and Oscar's--goodwill. [Dec. 1,1997]

The Santa Clause presents us with an Anti-Claus, Tim Allen of Home Improvement, hard-edged, discomfitingly frenetic and spritzing cheerless one-liners.

What saves it, aside from good performances by Burt Reynolds and a thundering herd of supporting grotesques, is, of all things, a tough, tiny nut of valid social criticism.

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.

The movie F.I.S.T. stands for nearly 2½ hours of almost unmitigated boredom—a misfired would-be proletarian epic with Sylvester Stallone misplaying the Jimmy Hoffa part with a self-confidence that borders on the sublime.

This wisp of a movie turns out to be more thoughtfully affecting than many a more high-flying film.

The film comes uncomfortably close to risible. But it also achieves moments of real power. It's worth a wary look before it attains midnight cult-movie status.

This is, alas, one weary ride--77 minutes that sometimes feel like that many hours.

Gibson is a primitive all right, but so were Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, and somehow we survived their idiocies.

It doesn't work. It is just a mess -- though the sound track, full of Dylan songs is, of course, good to hear. But it is not better than the track on Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary of two years ago.

Maurice (pronounced Morris) is all high-mindedness and good taste. It has no emotional tension or - heaven forfend - strong expression of frustration or need.

Faithful both to the novel's plot and to its higher aspirations. This is not an entirely good thing. On the other hand -- and somewhat surprisingly -- it is not an entirely bad thing.