Rita Kempley

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]

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.

A documentary as compelling as the best whodunit.

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

Cameron and company have made a sequel that is gripping and vital. The 2 1/2 hours fly by with this brave company, our imaginations sucked into the screen as if by a black hole. [18 July 1986, p.N31]

Ruthless People is a divine comedy, thanks in large part to bombastic Bette Midler, who's no longer down and out in Beverly Hills but chained to a bedstead in Santa Monica. She's an explosive bundle of kvetch and kitsch, the spark in this madcap kidnap caper. Practiced parodists Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker of Airplane direct, but this is no parody. It's a comedy of errors that makes no mistakes. Sophisticated, silly, sexy, it has assorted storylines as solidly linked as cartoon sausages and a pace that's lickety-split. Dale Launer debuts with this terrific screenplay, which builds and builds a reckless, raunchy crescendo of laughs. [27 June 1986, p.29]

Hopkins and Thompson's downright marvelous duet is supported by a host of deft players, and the detailed re-creation of this small universe is in all ways remarkable.

Like the eloquent, darkly funny dialogue, the film's characters, setting and cadences draw us into its world, with all its terrors and tenderness. What emerges is a masterpiece of Southern storytelling that draws a sharp line between good and evil.

Grand enough in scale to carry its many Biblical and mythological references, Blade Runner never feels heavy or pretentious -- only more and more engrossing with each viewing. It helps, too, that it works as pure entertainment.

Aladdin is a magic carpet ride, a flight aboard a supersonic little Persian steered by all the wishes that ever were. Disney quite simply has outdone itself with this marvelous adaptation of the ancient fairy tale.

The Little Shop of Horrors is a thoroughly original adaptation, if that's possible. With its toe-tapping cadences, its class cast and its king-sized cabbage, it's destined to become a classic of camp comedy. It's vege-magic.

Vincent & Theo is more than art appreciation, it is a treasure in its own right, unframed and arcing in the projector's light.

Hope and Glory is so enjoyable you want it to be a 16-part mini-series. When it's over, you sit staring at the credits, as you would the last page of a good book, wishing for another chapter.

More than just one of the best movies so far this year, it is a revolution in young-adult entertainment.

The Fabulous Baker Boys is like a beloved movie from the glory days of Hollywood. It transports you. It's an American rhapsody.

A magnificent melodrama that draws both tears and laughter from the everyday give-and-take of seemingly ordinary souls.

Delicious with foreboding, a masterly suspense thriller that toys with our anticipation like a well-fed cat.

This engrossing mystery-comedy peeks through the keyholes of the rich and infamous in a manner both droll and delicious.

It is a wacky, happy, daring, darkly comic tale of parenting outside the law. It celebrates the middle-of-the-road dreams of decidedly off-center folks. It's a bundle of joy.

With its spectacular scenery, stupefying effects and epic scope, is a dream come true.

An instant slapstick classic from Disney and Steven Spielberg. Already, it's a hare's breadth away from legend. [22 June 1988]

Enormously entertaining and surprisingly touching.

Riveting.

What "Raising Arizona" was to baby lust, "Barton Fink" is to writer's block -- a rapturously funny, strangely bittersweet, moderately horrifying and, yes, truly apt description of the condition and its symptoms.

One of the smartest, most inventive movies in memory, it manages to be as endearing as it is provocative.

This spooky film's ostensible subject—an environmental illness known as multiple chemical sensitivity—is merely a starting place for this mesmerizing horror movie, feminist tract and medical mystery.

A great big beautiful valentine of a movie, an intoxicating romantic comedy set beneath the biggest, brightest Christmas moon you ever saw. It's a monster moon, a Moby Dick of a moon, whose radiance fills the winter sky and every cranny of this joyous love story.

A tour de force so haunting that other films can't exorcise the memory of its radiant cast, exquisite craftsmanship or complex system of metaphors. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a movie.

A deliciously mordant French spine-tingler.

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."

Profoundly affecting.

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.

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.

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

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]

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

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

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.

The Paper perfectly captures the hubbub of the nation's newsrooms.

The most powerful study of the Vietnam era since "Apocalypse Now"...Roland Joffe's direction is gripping, unflagging, if sometimes ragged. But the flaws strengthen the film, give it a more realistic edge, which truly reflects the time and captures the joy of forgiveness and friendship refound. [18 Jan 1985, p.25]

X marks the G-spot perhaps, for this is an orgiastic comedy of terrors and errors.

A spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change -- and surely Spike Lee's most universally appealing film.

Joyous redemptive romantic comedy.

Hoskins and costar Cathy Tyson of the Royal Shakespeare Company are an electric couple, with their disparate colors and shapes. She's class; he's crass. Their turbulent teamwork is augmented with sure supporting performances by Michael Caine, as the flesh-peddling villain Mortwell; and British comedian Robbie Coltrane, as George's teddy bear of a best friend, Thomas. [18 July 1986, p.31]

It's a deliciously dishy comedy, but like sushi an acquired taste.

It spins its wheels in a giddy sort of way, then puts the pedal to the mettle, lays rubber and fairly takes wing.

Gripping, troubling and deftly acted.

Apollo 13 is humanized by Hanks's reassuring portrait in courage, by Harris's nicotine-stained fingers and Quinlan's lacquered French twist.

The latest furiously paced, perversely entertaining "Pulp Fiction" for puppies.

Zemeckis, an undisputed master of film technology, shows off an equal aptitude for vivid storytelling.

There's so much to see and imagine, so many twists left to ponder in such a complicated and multi-layered tale. The temptation -- and some of the fun -- is to analyze Down By Law to death, to chew on it. Hyper-intellectualizing aside, it's pure pleasure for comedy connoisseurs.

It's a movie that walks on air.

JFK is Stone's best and most emotional film since "Platoon."

There are films as lovely, but none lovelier.

Marshall masterfully plays our strings without becoming either melodramatic or maudlin. Like Brian De Palma's "Bonfire of the Vanities," hers is an adaptation that ends with a wake-up call, only here it's done successfully and in context.

Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants is more than his wartime memoir; it is an epitaph to innocence.

In a performance of enormous complexity and nuance, emotions seem to race across McKellen's face like hurrying clouds.

The throbbing, urgent score by Giorgio Moroder, the cat jokes and the stylish look make Cat People a purrfectly good Meow Mix. [02 Apr 1982, p.11]

Though computer-animated rather than hand-drawn, this wry, rippingly paced buddy movie is as delightful in its own way as any of Walt Disney's traditional fairy tales.

Obliged to go from lost soul to demigod, Sewell's performance is as fascinating as Proyas's mystical vision.

The Mighty Quinn is a sunny Caribbean caper as giddily seductive as a great big umbrella drink. It's sly, wry and ocean-salty, a detective story with tropical punch.

Unforgettable, especially in Pearce's startling performance.

What "The Big Chill" was to baby boomers, the inspirational sex, lies, and videotape is to the mall crowd. It's designer soul-searching, a looking glass for a generation.

Glory is a big movie for a big moment in America's hidden history. [12 Jan 1990, p.D1]

Unlike "Heathers," a satiric treatment of teen suicide, Pump Up the Volume is passionately caring. It's a howl from the heart, a relentlessly involving movie that gives a kid every reason to believe that he or she can come of age. It appreciates the pimples and pitfalls of this frightening passage, the transit commonly known as adolescence.

This rapturous romance is not only laugh-out-loud funny but demonstrates how little humankind has evolved in matters of the heart.

Written by former deejay Audrey Wells, the observant and funny script includes some wonderful scenes for the leading ladies.

The Gods Must Be Crazy is like nothing you've ever seen, a one-of-a-kind experience that's both strange and wonderful. It's most like an anthology of vintage Disney -- a wildlife narrative, a fairy tale with little people, and a love story suitable for general audiences. [02 Nov 1984, p.29]

The Sure Thing is fresh, funny, sure-fire stuff. And much of the credit for that goes to an energetic comic actor named John Cusack, who was only 17 when he made the film.

A delectable reworking of the ultimate girl's myth, a corporate Cinderella story with shades of a self-made Pygmalion.

Actress Rosanna Arquette and video vamp Madonna star in this wonderful new-wave mix-up, directed by the difficult but dynamic Susan Seidelman. Arquette is angelic as the outsider Roberta looking to get in, a quixotic New Jersey housewife kept in a yuppie palace by her husband, the hot tub man (Mark Blum).

Weird, warm, monumentally entertaining comedy.

A quirky, tender, splendidly acted fable.

Warmhearted, wonderfully witty.

It's a showcase for Nicholson in an astounding performance as the dim but lovable hit man, Charley Partanna. [14 June 1985, p.27]

A riot from start to finish, Carrey's first feature comedy is as cheerfully bawdy as it is idiotically inventive.

Francis Ford Coppola magically recreates the era, its movies and its music, in this razzle-dazzle celebration, some fact and some fiction.

We've seen it all before, most recently in "Gardens of Stone," most romantically in "An Officer and a Gentleman," but never more elegantly than here as Kubrick sustains the athletic ballet of obstacle courses and white-glove inspections for a breathtaking 40 minutes.

A dexterously balanced killer thriller by the idiosyncratic Frears, whose every scene becomes a matter of life and death.

Amelie is joie de vivre in a nougat.

Tin Men is a tale of transitions and a test of mettle, as sweet as a slow dance, as classy and cumbersome as a Coupe de Ville.

They don't come any cuter than The Adventures of Milo and Otis, a heartwarming, tail-thumping story about a curious kitten and his pug-nosed puppy pal. It's totally awwwwww-some.

Zwick gets the most out of his young cast, and you do believe that Lowe and Moore are drawn to each other against all good sense. Lowe offers the first sympathetic performance of his career. And Moore, her voice husky as burnt sugar, is sure to succeed Debra Winger as our fresh-scrubbed sex symbol. And to think that only last year, they were shallow brat-packers in "St. Elmo's Fire." [4 July 1986, p.N29]

The Brother From Another Planet is brilliant science-fiction with a social conscience. It goes to worlds where men, some of them anyway, have never gone before. And all they really ever had to do was take the A-Train. [16 Nov 1984, p.21]

Remarkable.

WarGames is a soft-sell protest -- pro- people, anti-nuclear and anti-machine -- that entertains. It peddles neither the hysterics of Jane Fonda's "China Syndrome" nor the hopelessness of "Dr. Strangelove." It's a war cry for peace that's good to the last byte. [3 June 1983, p.23]

The movie is sleek and shiny as a new bullet, reflecting Scott's patented surplus of style.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being leaves an afterimage as insistent as a flashbulb's ghost. It is a haunting, glowing thing that won't let go.

Yet much of the movie's validity stems from time and place recreated with such authenticity that you can sense the wet chill in the morning air and the new wax pungent on the old gym floor. [27 Feb 1987, Weekend, p.n29]

An engrossing and thoroughly enjoyable adaptation of the bestselling spy thriller by Frederick Forsyth.

Perceptive, powerfully acted psychodrama.

Trouble in Mind, a striking comic confection, is like nothing we've seen before: "Casablanca" meets "Blade Runner" in post-post-modern terms. [25 Apr 1986, p.27]

As a good fairy tale should, The Princess Bride teaches but never preaches. It's a lively, fun-loving, but nevertheless epic look at the nature of true love.

Nolte is not only made for the role, he's also rehearsed it in real life.