Rita Kempley

Compromising Positions has its problems, especially Julia's weak performance. But it's often on target, exposing the mechanics of the heroine's marriage, the woman herself and her languorous community where two patrol cars respond to a call about graffiti. [6 Sept 1985, p.23]

The experience overall is like laughing down a gun barrel, a little bit tiring, a lot sick and maybe far too perverse for less jaded moviegoers.

It would be cornier if it weren't so well acted by Nunn, Bening and 12-year-old Allen.

An enchanting, staggeringly beautiful epic at sea, is poetry in motion.

It is a wonderfully wacko work, sparked with Cook's oomph, Dunaway's cackle and the superstar power of the sensational Slater. What a face! As long as people prevail over effects, Supergirl glitters, she glows. [23 Nov 1984, p.27]

Tender, touching and downright delightful.

As fascinating as it is frightful. But despite all the occult patter and tony trimmings, Angel Heart is bogus -- only the bogeyman again.

Adapted from Valerie Martin's psychosexual novel, this maudlin film transforms the legend of Jekyll and Hyde into a talky romantic love triangle. [23 Feb 1996]

As disturbing and densely beautiful as its opening image, a lofty forest that dwarfs the gangsters as they laugh over their kill.

Eating Raoul is an American film that's good enough to be European. [05 Nov 1982, p.19]

Barkin's succulence and De Niro's showboating lend sizzle and ferocity to the proceedings, but the film draws its poignancy from 18-year-old DiCaprio's performance.

A deliciously mordant French spine-tingler.

It is a triumph for director Ron Howard, underwater photographer Jordan Klein, the writers and even the guy who made Hannah's latex tail (Robert Short). And it's surely the stairway to superstardom for costar John Candy and the lovely leading nyad. Splash, a departure for struggling Disney Studio, is as irresistible as the siren's song. [09 Mar 1984, p.23]

Yaphet Kotto, as L.A.P.D. Detective Harry Lowes, and Larry Hankin, as his partner, pull the bench out from under the rest of the players. Show-stealing is their only crime -- they add the necessary guts and good humor to bring the Star Chamber down to earth. [5 Aug 1983, p.17]

It's rambunctiously entertaining, a loop-de-loopy bumper car ride through a firecracker sky, all bright lights, sonic booms and impossible heroics.

You can hear the silence, the palpable quiet in director Randa Haines' skillful adaptation of stage's "Children of a Lesser God." The polemic drama of deaf rights translates into a heart-pounding love story -- the most passionately performed since "Officer and a Gentleman."

Like the director, the cast seems to have burrowed into the material, made all the more wrenchingly realistic by Dogme precepts.

Profoundly affecting.

The picture seems muted, the flower's petals a little brown at the edges.

While the plot is thin and there's little action till the big blow some 60 minutes into the film, a volcano offers a greater variety of thrills than your basic cyclone ever could.

Director Harold Ramis, who managed to stop time in the sunny comic masterpiece "Groundhog Day," tries a different tack in this lesser though nonetheless hilarious caper.

This first film from Sesame Street is this summer's sweetest surprise, a wholly good-natured children's comedy with enough wit and whimsy left over to win parents' hearts, too. Like the TV series, it's not violent, not threatening and not to be missed. [02 Aug 1985, p.23]

Filmed in the mock-documentary style pioneered by acknowledged mentor Robert Altman, it does for baby-kissing phonies what This Is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal poseurs.

It practically celebrates convenience of plot, over-the-top acting and follow-the-footprints dialogue, but mostly it is a salute to sequins and sashay. With just a hint of sarcasm.

Astute and entertaining documentary.

A Dry White Season is political cinema so deeply felt it attains a moral grace. A bitter medicine, a painful reminder, it grieves for South Africa as it recounts the atrocities of apartheid. Yes, it is a story already told on a grander scale, but never with such fervor.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock isn't really a movie, it's a happy reunion. The Enterprise is 18 years older and the crew members look like Gray Panthers in space. It may be old stuff, but it's still the right stuff up there. [8 June 1984, p.23]

Most of the time Creepshow works.

South Central covers some of the same ground as Boyz N the Hood, but certainly there's nothing wrong with reiterating its positive message for black sons and fathers.

After one scummy role after another, Rourke finally stops taking himself so seriously. Instead of the usual Neanderthal, he treats us to a sensitive, likable blob with a sense of humor.

Diane Keaton's kooky sensibilities as a director are ideally suited to the sweet madness of Unstrung Heroes.

An uplifting, superbly acted and intelligent family drama.

Blue Thunder hovers just this side of trash and the other side of credibility, but it propels a willing audience into adrenaline heaven.

The rich visuals seem at odds with the spartan content of the screenplay, with skating nuns like penguins on a frozen pond, cows lowing, pigeons flapping, statues weeping, novices in white gowns splayed like crucifixes on the stone cold floor. We're left with these images when we should be left pondering the cosmos, shortchanged by the saints and the scientists alike, denied our just epiphany. [27 Sept 1985, p.25]

Amadeus isn't meant to be a biography of the composer's life, but a bawdy, black fantasy, a fiction based on a few curious facts. [21 Sep 1984, p.23]

The potential for hokum is there, but Duvall and co-star James Earl Jones capably avoid the sticky pitfalls of Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton's sugar-cured script.

Lethal Weapon opens with a shot of Mel Gibson in his birthday suit and just gets better. Likewise we meet costar Danny Glover in the bathtub, fêted by his family on his 50th birthday. This endearing double exposure introduces us to the vulnerabilities of these superduper heroes, an odd couple of cops who mature into friends as they quell crime.

Not since "Ghostbusters" have the spirits been so uplifting. [30 Mar 1988]

Room With a View, with its genteel cliches and its mouth-puckering social commentary, will absolutely please. It is a gorgeous, glimmering film adaptation of E.M. Forster's sweetest novel, an affectionate study of a party of English gone globetrotting, their Baedekers held close like talismans. [4 Apr 1986, p.29]

The French originals are always much breezier, the characters more genuine and the actors subtler even if the situations are just as silly.

Happily, Pfeiffer and Clooney, now officially a movie star, not only click, they send off sparks.

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens' earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996's "Fargo."

Preposterous, predictable, but excessively entertaining, this frenzied thriller draws both story and characters from such action classics as "The Fugitive," "Die Hard," "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Silence of the Lambs."

Though its attitudes are decidedly French, this intelligent film goes a long way toward explaining America's obsession with Martha Stewart Living, fake designer labels and TV talk show makeovers.

Proud to be junk food, but it still tackles the serious subjects of illiteracy, teen-age pregnancy and young adult alcoholism. [22 July 1987]

Adam Sandler is surprisingly likable as Robbie, a struggling musician who is left at the altar early in this modest romantic comedy.

Like the original, Wings 2 is endearing, even if it is a spiritual muddle.

Basically, it's Tootsie reincarnated, an off-the- wall comedy for everybody who still doesn't know what to make of Boy George. [21 Sep 1984, p.23]

Local Hero is as gentle as Capra corn and as magical as the Misty Isles. An insightful, international commentary -- badly named, but beautifully drawn -- takes us roaming in the gloaming and questing among stars. [01 Apr 1983, p.19]

The performances make up for the sloppy history in the film, and it's a good-hearted and diverting story. [21 Dec 1984, p.29]

McGregor, the movie's most engaging performer, is convincing enough to sell the mutual attraction. The "Trainspotting" star is usually playing some kind of freak, and this is a nice stretch for him.

Crouse is stiff and Hutton's a bit sappy, but Lone's performance would melt an iceberg's heart. Despite a rubbery forehead and crude make-up work, Lone is convincing. With grunts, moans, howls and mime, he presents a stoic, depressed, trapped human being. [13 Apr 1984, p.21]

Though slow and overlong, the movie is at least scenic family fare. This easily understood yarn should appeal primarily to boys who still think girls are yucky.

A precise and elegant piece. [8 Apr 1988, p.D1]

Bill Forsyth's Being Human, an anthology about the hesitant ascent of man, is a whimsically offbeat, stubbornly upbeat tour of man's progress as seen through the eyes of five guys named Hector. [06 May 1994]

With it's many knotty connections and complex exposition, the movie is definitely something of a muddle, but for that matter so are most conspiracy theories.

This is hardly your same old trough of slop. Babe nonetheless prevails, demonstrating once again "how a kind and steady heart can heal a sorry world."

Mulan may be exotic, but it's hardly a risky enterprise, what with its sentimental show tunes, wholesome morals and plucky teen heroine.

It's plenty entertaining, but the ending is disappointing, given the buildup.

[A] wacky but eminently watchable kitsch-mobile.

Profound, powerful Czech import takes a tragicomic approach to the Holocaust, though unlike Benigni's film, the movie does not sentimentalize those caught up in the Nazi dragnet.

Though shot in four weeks on a low budget, Stephen King's Children of the Corn, while not on a par with "Carrie," sure beats "Christine," "Cujo" and "Dead Zone." It's terse, tense and the sound is effective as auditory terror.

A downright entertaining combo of mystery, melodrama and action adventure.

Alice, which seems like child's play after last year's sober Crimes and Misdemeanors, finds Allen at his most optimistic and sentimental since Radio Days. His pen is not as sharp nor his wit as keen as it has been, but he has become accessible to a broader audience in this whimsical entertainment.

Racing With the Moon is the second directorial effort for Richard Benjamin, whose first film was the ribald My Favorite Year. He tries and overwhelmingly succeeds at masterminding a more dramatic style. Slowly paced, it's nonetheless a film on track for patient, compassionate viewers. [23 Mar 1984, p.23]

The brothers, who have always seemed fond of their characters, have never taken quite so overt a stand for life's simple joys.

In the hands of director Julie Dash and photographer Arthur Jafa, this nonlinear film becomes visual poetry, a wedding of imagery and rhythm that connects oral tradition with the music video. It is an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's spirit.

The caper isn't as passionate as the title suggests—in fact, it's facile—but Ryan and Kevin Kline, as her attractive opposite, are irresistible together.

A duet between Daniel and Miyagi, a boy without a father and a father without a son. The duet is the soul of the film, but it also has heart. The paths to enlightenment are many; The Karate Kid is surely one of these. [22 June 1984, p.23]

Veteran Arthur Hiller, who directed Peter Falk and Alan Arkin in The In-Laws and Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in Silver Streak, proves equally adept at managing a female odd couple.

This wonderfully acted romance brings the touching fantasy "Truly, Madly, Deeply" to mind.

Director Jonathan Demme has nailed one with this playful, but dangerous, gangster farce.

A hilarious new addition to the wonderfully warped Generation X-Files.

All canapes and haute bourgeoisie, it is a smart comedy of conversation, like "My Dinner With Andre" but with eight place settings.

A captivating comic allegory about daring to be different in the face of conformity.

Grounded in a good cause but never puffed up or preachy, the father-daughter drama transcends the issues.

It is a gripping adult drama, as erotically violent as it is intellectually satisfying. [9 Nov 1984, p.27]

With its foibles and quirks, it's something like a Sam Shepard play by way of the Black Forest.

A case of art imitating the electorate, it's a comedy that rides in on Clinton's coattails, bringing with it a landslide of laughs.

Michael Apted (who was due for a hit film) directed this fiery film, brilliantly layered scene-on-scene without a wasted frame. The odd camera angles presage the evil that will infect the happy home and put us on an eye-level with the boys whose spats gradually disappear as the two come to rely on each other. [26 Oct 1984, p.21]

A documentary as compelling as the best whodunit.

Michael Keaton's the live wire and Henry Winkler's the deadbeat in director Ron Howard's new hit, Night Shift, a whorifying undertaking that solicits its laughs by pairing the quick and the dead.

A decidedly medieval enterprise, darker in text and tone than a Gothic cathedral by the light of the moon.

It's a literate though strained uplifter.

Zucker, who collaborated with his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams on such comedies as "Airplane!" and "Ruthless People," is working solo here. And aside from a flat patch midway through, he delivers as faithfully as Domino's pizza. In the limbo of comedy, few can go lower than Zucker without visibly straining. And the movie has a message: "Love is like the ozone layer; you never miss it until it's gone."

A fleecy romantic caper with a dusting of feminism, the picture is basically a one-joke movie successfully nursed by director Ivan Reitman.

The chatty, romantic roundelay takes a lighthearted look at the misadventures of six in the city.

It's not the monotonous, neurotic's ego trip you'd imagine, but a karate-chop crawl against a rising tide of complacency.

A flurry of stunts, close shaves and deeds of desperate daring, it easily transcends its television origins to become a stylish pacemaker-buster.

The movie is as insistently bubbly as the Bradys themselves, but it does run out of carbonation before the end. "Bunch" fans won't mind a bit, while others will be amused by the juxtaposition of the family's wholesome idyll with the harsher realities of life in the '90s, as evidenced by "Roseanne," "Married ... With Children" and "Grace Under Fire." [17 Feb 1995, p.F01]

The trouble is that the picture is far from over when suddenly we find ourselves watching another movie -- a punishing, overly complex melodrama in which the Gingerbread Man receives his comeuppance.

Sometimes the material's rather too gruesome for a family-oriented film, but as one HVTV intern says to the Devil, "It isn't the blood that bothers me, so much as the lack of subtext."

Merchant and Ivory have regathered many of the cast and crew from their earlier films to work on this reproduction to exquisite effect.

Bewitching.

Not just another youth movie, but a deft dramatization of a Joyce Carol Oates story adapted by a couple of documentary filmmakers in their feature debut.

Just isn't as fresh, focused or uniformly funny as "Waiting for Guffman."

Showcases its cast's athleticism and Ping's kinetic high-wire artistry. But unlike similar Western-made fare, it doesn't take itself seriously.

This is screenwriter Richard LaGravenese's directorial debut and now that he's in charge, he finally has his chance to give dialogue and character their due.