Richard Schickel

Without question, the best crime movie of the year--and one of the best movies of any sort now playing.

Airplane! is a splendidly tacky, totally tasteless, completely insignificant flight, a gooney bird of a movie that looks as if it could never get off the ground and then surprises and delights with its free-spirited aerobatics.

It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth.

Elegantly made, romantically doomy, curiously affecting movie.

Very moving film.

The Freshman is no small thing. Well, actually, it is a small thing. But to a moviegoer deafened by and reeling from the rolling barrage laid down by the early summer's big box-office guns, the determined modesty, the unsprung affability of Andrew Bergman's comedy are precisely what make it treasurable.

A rich, intricate and very gripping movie.

Hudson painstakingly makes an obscure corner of history reverberate in a nearly mythic way. It is lovely work. And like old snapshots of forgotten people from another time, strangely evocative and moving.

Audiences whose expectations do not exceed their grasp will find it a much more comfortable vehicle for escape than any that McQueen & Co. discover on location.

The movie has two virtues essential to good pop thrillers. First, it plugs uncomplicatedly into lurking anxieties -- in this case the ones we brush aside when we daily surrender ourselves to mass transit in a world where the loonies are everywhere. Second, it is executed with panache and utter conviction.

Beautiful Girls is always in touch with reality but never drowned in it. [19 February 1996, p.64]

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

A performance like De Niro's, in a well-made entertainment like Midnight Run, is cheap at any price. And capable of restoring the audience's faith in the form. [25 July 1988]

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.

Wry humor and even a certain sexiness break through the reserve of a rueful, realistic, but finally emotionally rewarding film.

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.

What plot it has is borrowed, improbably, from Henry IV, and whenever anyone manages to speak an entire paragraph, it is usually a Shakespearean paraphrase. But this is a desperate imposition on an essentially inert film. [28 Oct 1991]

Can one recommend this unblinking film to the average moviegoer, out for a good time? Only in this way: if James and his crew can spend years with these blighted souls, surely you can spend two hours with them, exploring compassion's outer limits.

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.

The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from.

At times the joints in the movie's carpentry are strained, at times the mood swings jarring. [16 Oct 1989, p. 82]

There's something old-fashioned and dauntless about the way the film pushes past our initial resistance to its setting and subject matter, past pain, past defeat, to make this point. Because it rejects easy victories, this may be one of the few inspirational movies that could actually inspire someone, somewhere, sometime.

This may be hard ground for the audience that loves to cheer the lump out of its throat at the end of a movie. But for actors, it is the high ground. There is a ferocity in Cruise's flakiness that he has not previously had a chance to tap. That, in turn, gives Newman something to grapple with. There is a sort of contained rage in his work that he has never found before, and it carries him beyond the bounds of image, the movie beyond the bounds of genre.

Nunez's film neither floats like a butterfly nor stings like a bee. It just drones on.

The result is a laff riot. Well, all right, a laff scuffle -- a picture that isn't quite as funny as it might be, but is as funny as it needs to be.

If the people responsible for A League of Their Own had tried just a little harder to avoid easy laughs and easy sentiment, they might have made something like a great movie. As it is, they have made a good movie, amiable and ingratiating.

Altogether wondrous.

The Coens have deliberately cut themselves off from their best subject. Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry.