Rita Kempley

A hip, hilarious new animated feature.

A brainy, superbly acted buddy movie.

The real story lies beneath the surface of this superbly acted, strangely moving film.

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

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]

It's an incredible show of flexibility on Tavernier's part, as improvisational and exploratory as the be-bop itself. "Round" is living sound, as "Sunday" was canvas come to life.

Oliver & Company, the directorial debut of veteran animator George Scribner, is Mouse Factory magic with edge. It's the claws ce'le`bre.

Never mind that Best Intentions, which was filmed both as a six-part TV miniseries and a three-hour movie, is occasionally uneven and sometimes confusing. It remains a rare August pleasure, a film for grown-up audiences that challenges and enriches.

It crackles with comedy, but it's no space cartoon, nor self-lampoon. It's a happy, heartfelt chapter that reunites the original cast with the original TV format, shying away from the cold and epic scale of the preceding movie adventures.

The usual complement of classy Brits and a host of Indian extras add the final touches to this vastly enjoyable, sprawling entertainment. Lean truly catches the sunset over the British Empire. [18 Jan 1985, p.25]

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.

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.

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

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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

[A] wacky but eminently watchable kitsch-mobile.

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.

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]

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 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.

It's a literate though strained uplifter.

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.

And you will laugh till your ribs ache -- not because director Chris Columbus of the "Home Alone" movies has a gift for farce, which he does, but because Williams is to funny what the Energizer Bunny is to batteries. He keeps going and going and going.

With its droll underpinnings, Robocop does for cyborgs and Detroit what "Blade Runner" did for androids and L.A.

Roberts and Richard Gere costar in this bubbly scamper, which goes to the head like champagne -- the cheap, sweet kind that leaves you with a throbbing head. And yet this monstrously derivative romance is great giddy fun.

007's latest, The Living Daylights, a snazzy spy thriller, is all the more alluring for its new conservatism. It's right up there with the early Bonds, though not in the league with Goldfinger. But oh, what a difference.

Poltergeist proves closets are full of skeletons and scurrying ids. Hooper and company arouse childhood fears, teasing away adult defenses, making us hunker in our seats as the kids dive under the "Star Wars" sheets. It gives us the jeebies, third stage, without letting up, but spiritually, it's uplifting. [4 June 1982, p.13]

Lethal Weapon, that BMW of buddy movies, spawns Lethal Weapon 2, a blacktop-blistering bad-guy-getter that's nearly twice as much fun.

A steely neo-noir thriller with a nasty comic veneer.

Oh, there's no doubt about it, Clark is manipulating his audience right down to those "Jingle Bells," but only an unreformed Scrooge would hate him for it. "A Christmas Story" is a joy to the world, right down to the moment Mom slips downstairs to unplug the tree lights.

Forget the heavy stuff. This monkey shines.

Broadway Danny Rose mixes the old, bitter Allen with the new, mellowed Allen, still a great comedy writer and comedian but now a better story-teller and better actor. He seems to plan films in orderly progressions, so they'll fit right into retrospectives without any shuffling. [27 Jan 1984, p.19]

Target isn't a suspenseful spy movie, but it makes up for its shortcomings with its genuine good- heartedness.

As for Billy Bob, they all steal the money, but he steals the show.

You have the right to remain silent. But if you do, call 911 -- your funny bone is busted. [2 Dec 1988]

A noble project, directed by Disney veterans and performed by superb actors like John Hurt and Freddie Jones. It is a carefully wrought and thoroughly enjoyable film based on the "Chronicles of Prydain" by Lloyd Alexander, the American Tolkien. [26 July 1985, p.23]

Cuaron approaches the film not as a fairy tale for children, but a work of magic realism. And perhaps best of all, he doesn't talk down to young folks, in the audience or in the cast. The performances are as natural as skinned knees and missing teeth.

Part cop caper, part coo-fest, it is a feel-good movie, a jolly little button-pusher about a street-smart cop who brings law and order to a classroom full of unruly but adorable youngsters.

Mann, who's best known for such urban crime dramas as "Vice" and "Manhunter," is equally at home whether the chase concerns a cigarette boat or a birch-bark canoe. He brings the same flair pairing action and style to The Last of the Mohicans, an attempt to resurrect and redefine the American hero.

Subtle, sensitive and every bit as swoony as a Barbara Cartland bodice-ripper, James Ivory's superb screen translation of E.M. Forster's Maurice.

The suspense drama is based on real-life military monkey tests, and it's as unabashedly political as "Silkwood" and unashamedly sentimental as "Lassie Come Home." Yet it remains taut and resists the temptation to paint the villains too broadly.

The key to success: The audience must really like both characters and believe that they deserve a fairy-tale ending. That's definitely the case in this nicely acted love story.

An ingratiating West German "Heaven Can Wait." (Review of Original Release)

This ensemble comedy, with its fine cast and clever writing, has more mass appeal than the conventional coming-of-age caper. The plot, though scattered, is tried and runs true. [8 Feb 1985, p.23]

Consistently absorbing family saga is primarily a safari of the soul.

If you are a science-fiction fan (and I am), Enemy Mine is a fun diversion, maintaining a precarious balance between laughable and melodramatic. But you do get the feeling they had hoped for an earth-shaking metaphor. [27 Dec 1985, p.21]

Simple fare, a feel-good movie that re-creates a time and place with gentle humor and a reminder that the Aussies have the right stuff, too.

Despite these lapses in decorum, Jane makes an impressive Tudor "Romeo and Juliet," full of pomp and circumstance. [7 Feb 1986, p.N19]

If you've got the time, we've got the brew--lite, zany and slightly intoxicating...It's a loosely constructed movie, rough and raw, but good for more than a few laughs. After you blow away the foam and discount the wandering, nonessential storyline, you'll find a playful, punful little film with salutes to Steven Spielberg and other recent favorite filmmakers. Sound good? Then this, bud, is for you.

Down in the Delta is as savory as a slowly stirred gumbo, a heartfelt saga of family and forgiveness directed by America's best-loved living poet, Maya Angelou. The spices are plentiful and the taste complex, but there's nothing fancy about this cultural icon's down-home cooking. [25 Dec 1998, p.C01]

It's not always on target, but there's a spontaneity to the direction of Roger Spottiswoode of "Underfire," a loose, imaginative and screwy style. What holds it all together is the fine friendship between the two teammates, forged in the games men play, sapped by time, then rejuvenated in sweat and sport. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]

It's a good ride, briskly paced, well played and vividly photographed by Caleb Deschanel.

Allen, the schlemiel, has humiliated himself and hurt his family, disillusioned his fans and become a case in point for the GOP, but he has also hit upon an issue that is universally applicable, the stuff of Oprah Winfrey shows and the trend punditry of newsmagazines.

A happy, scenic, sumptuous film. [12 Apr 1995, p.25]

A precursor of The Wild Bunch, it is an expertly directed, personally felt film.

An intriguing, visually startling murder mystery that showcases the virtuosity of Samuel L. Jackson.

All the performances are exceptional.

Coppola, who both wrote and directed this entertaining adaptation, follows the well-thumbed scenario, but with the help of his winning cast he disguises the absence of invention.

It's like a chick flick for men--and the women who love them, sniff-sniff.

Doubtless better than it deserves to be, thanks to Fraser, whose Costner-esque dash serves as an antidote to the dated material. Director Robert Mandel, best known for the flashy techno-thriller "F/X," brings a surprisingly sensitive touch to this earnest story of intolerance. Meant to serve as a "Gentleman's Agreement" for the '90s, it's actually got much more in common with "The Outsiders" or even "Pretty in Pink." The moral is the same whether you're a greaser, a tomboy, a gentile or a Jew. You've got to be you.

Director Joe Johnston, a veteran of Industrial Light and Magic, brings a wry Rube Goldberg approach to his first-ever feature. The sets are definitely plastic, but that slightly homemade look is refreshing in the hardware movie decade.

Though the Oscar-nominated documentary captures the fight and the fighters, it also explores Ali's role in reintroducing black Americans to their African culture.

Wickedly clever.

The movie is not only a better version of the book, it's a work unto itself.

For all its commonplace ingredients, Miami Blues is uncommonly entertaining, thanks in large part to Ward, Baldwin and Leigh, who give gutty, energetic performances

Ramis...does extract every last yuk from this lively clash of id and superego, this spoofy buddies' odyssey from underworld to Prozac nation.

Along with witty, appropriately rough-hewn repartee and genuine poignancy, writer Simon Beaufoy manages to sustain suspense to the last gyration.

You seldom leave a theater walking on air, much less float all through a movie. But the joyous Bend It Like Beckham never lets you down.

An entertaining tangle of pop aesthetic and comic book myth that occasionally bogs down, but manages to be ingratiating for all its defects.

Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss star in this hilarious brain-teaser about a patient who suffers acute separation anxiety when his psychiatrist goes on vacation.

A film that gets in your face and stays there, it ultimately subverts all that effort with its improbably upbeat conclusion. Still, the performances are technically knockouts, the kind that leave your underbelly churning.

The story holds a potential for sap that is mostly unfulfilled thanks to Beresford's stately approach, the stars' better judgment and the protagonists' sharp wits. Admirably, Driving Miss Daisy takes the road less traveled.

Sexy and 70ish, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas strut their stuff as grey foxes in the giddy, gag-happy gangster spoof for golden-agers, Tough Guys. These rough-and-tumblers seem to be drinking from that fountain of youth the seniors sought in "Cocoon."

Hilarious ... It's dishy, but not swishy.

Barbra Streisand's lovely adaptation of Pat Conroy's bestseller echoes the novel's seductive cadences, the cries of summer gulls, the slapping of the Atlantic on the South Carolina shores. An emotionally satisfying film, The Prince of Tides loses some of the stuff readers hold dear, but the pull of the sea, its saltiness too, lingers. As a story of rebirth through self-exploration, it seems ideally suited to this season of illumination.

War is hellishly entertaining, especially in Behind Enemy Lines, a 21-gun salute to the commitment and preparedness of the U.S. military.

It isn't wildly imaginative, but its subjects are novel enough in their own right. They're a little bit country and a little bit Rachmaninoff.

Though lovely to behold, this film isn't meant to send you home with a song in your heart.