Rita Kempley

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.

A trashy Japanese production with special guest Raymond Burr. [27 Sep 1985, p.25]

There are films as lovely, but none lovelier.

The ballplayers themselves are a well-drawn, enjoyably kooky bunch, but it's absolutely impossible to believe that they would accept Billy's leadership. (If you believe this premise, then you probably believe Marge Schott doesn't look like a Saint Bernard.) And of all the child actors in the movie, the scrawny 13-year-old star shows the least presence.

The story's tired, as are the main characters.

What with these pictorial pollutants, he loses sight of plot. "Someone" suffers somewhat from Scott's blind spot, but it's still a reasonably enjoyable romantic thriller with "Platoon's" Tom Berenger on his best behavior.

An utterly pointless remake of Sam Peckinpah's hair-raising road movie. Updated and dumbed down, this anemic variation on the bloodier 1972 original is primarily an opportunity for those vast legions of Baldwin-Basinger voyeurs. You know who you are.

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.

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

An uncompromising, emotionally draining drama that presents the urbanization of New Zealand's Maori as a cultural disaster, one that is mirrored in the shards of a shattering marriage. This explosive first film by director Lee Tamahori focuses on the transformation of a battered wife, but its story is fueled by the machismo of the disenfranchised Maori male.

Overlong and repetitious, the film doesn't live up to the high expectations set by its charming opening scene, but the musical numbers, which often feature the original wigs and trashy Ikettes gear, are handily directed by Brian Gibson of the HBO movie The Josephine Baker Story. The mitigating factor is that Bassett overcomes the limitations of the role to become more than a punching bag.

Though a thematically ambitious and deftly acted thriller, the film is also shockingly coldblooded and not a little reactionary.

Bawdy, bratty and burp-riddled, it's a predictably idiotic follow-up...God help me, I laughed and slapped my thighs.

In the end, Like Water for Chocolate is an overwrought potboiler that punishes Tita for her sexual freedom.

The story isn’t bright enough or grand enough to contain all of Roberts’s star power.

Blake Edwards directs this unfunny farce, a banal boozer's comedy that relies on the comedic e'clat of Basinger: basically, Barbie doing standup. Meanwhile leading man Bruce Willis is all buttoned-down and leashed.

Those who do go with the fantasy are probably hopeless romantics.

A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth.

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

Recalls those corny Warner Bros. movies about Dead End Kids.

Riddled with labor rhetoric, this coal-dusted tragedy wavers between well-acted propaganda and historical burlesque. Rambo's reactionism seems almost subtle by contrast.

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]

It's like Rambo's "First Blood," with an action hero in dog tags who doesn't talk much.

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.

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.

Darkman, as unnerving as a gargoyle, is a classic nightmare, elegant and sumptuous, everything "Batman" should have been. But we're numbed after a while, as we are by the grotesquerie of the nightly news. Then again, maybe that's Raimi's intention. His work is beautiful in its scary way, and never only skin deep.

A bittersweet duet convincingly, if unexcitingly, performed by Baye and Lopez.

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