Richard Schickel

No wonder adolescents have taken Repo Man for their own. Lifting its hood is like peering into a teen-ager's mind: miswired and noisy, Repo Man is capable of fast starts and amazing cornering. [4 Feb 1985]

An elegantly polished little film.

Brideshead Revisited is untaxing, pleasant enough to watch. But I'm still waiting to be seriously discomfited by it.

So even when they don’t achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens’ rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl.

A smart live-and-let-live parable.

An edgy exploration of role playing and sexual choice in a climate where all options are acceptable.

In Washington's finely shaded performance he's a low-pressure system, illuminated by distant flashes of lightning.

There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They will, if they have any sense, simply cherish it.

As rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house.

This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations — not fully realized — to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him.

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

A brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism.

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face.

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.

Yet despite all that boring talk, Dead Again is a hit, the late-blooming rose of a movie summer that was mostly mulch. [23 Sept 1991, p.73]

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.

It twists it, shakes it and stands it on its ear. But as before, the film's technical brilliance is the least of its appeals. Satirically acute, intricately structured and deftly paced, it is at heart stout, good and untainted by easy sentiment.

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.

One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole - faking it -could love.

All in all, Nurse Betty is a wonderful movie, unpredictably alive to the fact that the American citizenry is a lot stranger than we like to admit.

The director's stylistic self-denial serves to keep one's attention fastened where it belongs: on a persuasive, if perhaps debatable vision of Gandhi's spirit, and on the remarkable actor who has caught its light in all its seasons.

There is some elemental human desire -- lately largely denied at the cinema -- to see pretty people in handsome landscapes assuaging our need for epic romance. On that level, Australia delivers with real panache.

If sometimes this loose and anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities - generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither smug nor sentimental.

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

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.

Maybe this documentary is a bit too enthralled by her, but she emerges from it a game girl, a gay activist and a curiously sympathetic figure.

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.

Gere and Molina are themselves terrific as the con men.