Richard Schickel

It is hard to imagine anyone, with the possible exception of preadolescent males, who will not, in the end turn on to Turning Point.

A scant hour and a half long, padded with clips from earlier Rocky pictures, adding nothing to his mythic, let alone human dimensions, it lacks even the primitive suspense and crude capacity to release underdog emotions that permitted its predecessors to conquer one's better judgment.

Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity. And those little guys from far away are a hoot. [30 Dec 1996]

The filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious.

This isn't just a thrill ride; it's a rocket into the thrilling past, when directors could scare you with how much emotion they packed into a movie.

On the basically farcical level where it chooses to stay, it is a funny and likable movie

This moving tribute to a handful of candles flickering in the darkness has the power to summon us--one prays--to our better selves.

The new boys know how to create wonderful transformations in a character's expression with a deft stroke or two, and they have mastered the deliciously parodistic plasticity required by the movements of their ever twisting-turning-tumbling creatures. Their pastoral scenes still glow with the old Disney sweetness, and the ones of foreboding glower with the old relish for the grotesque. They satisfy an older viewer's nostalgic feeling for his childhood's delight while fulfilling the younger crowd's need for a kind of magic the movies too rarely even try to provide of late. It is never too early to learn that animation is still the best special effect.

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.

Maybe kids will like the movie; their lust for dinolore appears to be insatiable. But the rest of us will yearn for Robin Williams' giddy goofing in "Aladdin."

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.

But it is the style with which this wild farce is developed that sustains our horrified interest and keeps us laughing as the darkness gathers around Barbara and Oliver. [11 Dec 1989]

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.

Given a budget that encourages their kinesthetic skills, the filmmakers tend to go on a bit, but it's mostly a kind of quick, glancing hipness that's being indulged here.

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.

That metaphor is pitch-perfect, but the film works a little too hard at proving the vileness of beauty pageants.

This is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations.

Bening gives a remarkable performance, proposing the intriguing possibility that a kept woman can also be a liberated woman. In any case, she shares her fears and vulnerability only in a few private moments with the camera, never with the besotted Bugsy. But good as she and everyone else in Bugsy is (mention must be made of Harvey Keitel, Elliott Gould and Ben Kingsley as assorted thugs and mugs), the picture belongs, in every sense of the word, to Beatty.

Kevin Spacey (gives) a truly great performance.

A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.

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.

If Shakespeare's poetry enters the mind through the ear, Kurosawa's enters it through the eye. But the imagery is of comparable quality, at once awesome in its power, delicate in its irony and, finally, for all the violence of the events it recounts, eerily serene in the sureness with which it achieves its effects.

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.

Remain open to fantasies but not be consumed by them. These are good lessons for a would-be director. They are good lessons for everybody. And no recent movie has taught them with more patient sweetness. [Feb. 5, 1990]