Sheila Benson

Sidewalk Stories is a bold and utterly enchanting creation, and its appearance is a signal to watch the multifaceted Lane closely. [09 Nov 1989, p.F1]

It's Nolte's boldest, most spellbinding performance; his subtleties in playing this Irish-American monster who believes himself on the front line of "us against them" are profound. [27 Apr 1990, p.F1]

Arachnophobia manages to be genuinely frightening without being '80s-style revolting. Marshall has gauged his pattern of frights and laughs carefully, to let the audience giggle at its own jumpiness, and his cast, which includes a sprinkling of the best-known American character actors, is a clue to his affection for the form. [18 July 1990, p.F1]

With the same painstaking care that made John Bryson’s “Evil Angels,” the book on which the film is based, incontrovertible, Schepisi builds his mosaic with Australian faces and voices crisscrossing every social class and occupation.

Romantic and preposterous all at once, it's actually a funny, endearing fable about courage, love and faith...So endearing that the flatness about its last few minutes manages not to sink the picture. [9 March 1990, p.C1]

Ghostbusters II doesn't seem to be pushing as hard as its predecessor, which of course makes it even more fun. There's an old-shoeishness to the proceedings; even Murray's owlish put-downs seem a little less snide-they're almost affectionate, if that's not too outrageous a word in this context. [16 Jun 1989, p.1]

If plausibility isn't at the very top of your list of requirements in a courtroom thriller, and if dashingly assured performances are, you can have a cheerfully good time at Suspect. [22 Oct 1987, p.1]

3 Men and a Cradle is a perfectly pleasant little piffle; watching it with an audience you'll probably hear, as I did, that soft cooing sound people make at the sight of a really adorable baby. This picture won't rot your brain or lead your children into nasty habits. It's just French pablum.

There is the music, however, great dollops of '50s songs, and it lifts the movie when the dialogue and the earnest-but-uninspired direction keeps it earthbound.

The film is on the lean side in matters of story and depth of characters. Its strengths are its pure, ingratiating sweetness, its insider’s view of cross-cultural romance and its eye-popping picture of a thoroughly Westernized Tokyo that has rushed to embrace every worst idea America ever exported--and added a few of its own: sing-along caraoke videos and love hotels, which are a little like the Madonna Inn on a franchise scale.

This is the most cheerfully preposterous film of a jaw-dropping summer, which is not to say it's not fun, it's simply orchestrated Looney Tunes.

The movie’s tone is light, absurd; its sharper comments lie a little below the waterline.

For all its genuinely funny moments and its mix of outrageousness and insights, Down and Out remains curiously unsatisfying in the way it resolves the Nolte character.

If "Back to the Future" made you bored and querulous, then the tumbling inventiveness in its sequel may come as a pleasant surprise. Of course, if you were among the 92% of the world who loved the ride in Dr. Emmett Brown's diabolical DeLorean back in 1985, then Part II is your oyster. [22 Nov 1989, p.F1]

Like a sensational party the night before, Big Business may not bear the closest scrutiny in the cold light of day, but it gives an irresistible glow at the time. And when it gets on a roll, it's a movie with more wit to its lines and a more pungent array of them than much of the mishmash that has passed as Bette Midler's Greatest Movie Hits. [10 Jun 1988, p.1]

There is no denying the craft of either Martin or Candy, however, and since they are the film, it will undoubtedly find its audience faster than any one of us can get from New York to Chicago.

Whatever his film's contrivances as it builds, with this closing, Joffe has made a permanent contribution to our national insomnia. [20 Oct 1989, p.F1]

Gilliam never aims down, his films zing in somewhere at the Mensa level of reference, but he seems confident that we will catch the wit of his visual quotations and so we do. Like a film making Catherine wheel, he throws off an immoderate art history display; he plunders past film styles with a free hand to make a point. [5 Mar 1989, p.23]

Working Girls, well photographed by Judy Irola (Northern Lights) will keep you brooding about its issues for days afterward--something of a tribute to its air of unquestioned reality.

But seductive as his surfaces are, Forman's tack doesn't hold for long. His changes have muted a great tale of betrayal by intelligence and he has blunted the malign inevitability of Laclos' story. [17 Nov 1989]

Martin Sheen, in his directing debut, shows enormous empathy for his actors, each of whom emerges as a fully rounded character. [15 Mar 1991, p.F20]

Blithe, reasonably witty, with as many story twists as a Riviera roadway, its greatest assets are its glorious look and Michael Caine, his hair full of Dippety-Doo, his heart full of larceny. [14 Dec 1988, p.1]

You can be absorbed by Black Widow, fascinated and intrigued by it--and you can capitulate entirely while watching the seductive interplay of these two actresses--but Black Widow never really gets you by the throat. It’s sleek where it should be dangerous.

For all its lack of suspense, "Gardens of Stone's" intelligence and its unsimple characters make it a notable attempt to deal with that war. [08 May 1987]

A lovingly assembled cast in a brilliantly detailed production, with special notice to Vilmos Zsigmond's haunting cinematography, which seems somehow to have captured the light as it was, pre-smog. [10 Aug 1990]

The plot line may fray at times, especially with Fisher's dizzyingly quick segue from magazine reporter to Geraldo Rivera-like television muckraker. But Schatzberg anchors his story with enough pungently observed details of New York--its lofts, chic editorial offices, in restaurants and sad and tawdry street scenes--and with enough marvelous actors, in big roles and small, to give his story real bite.

If sex, lies, and videotape hinted at Spader's fascination, Bad Influence confirms it; he is one of a handful of startling young American actors whose range has barely begun to be tapped.

It's cruel, funny, knowing, never less than biting and occasionally brilliant. [05 May 1989]

In retrospect, there are gaps in the story, a crucial lack of parallelism about the murders, one interview in which Rourke makes amazing leaps of knowledge from we-don't-know where. But the performance that fuels it all, Rourke's unfolding portrayal of a man on a spiraling slide downward toward a truth he doesn't want to learn, may be enough to carry us beyond quibbles. [06 Mar 1987, p.C1]

If ever a movie needed a modest, straight-ahead style to its telling, it's this one. And while James Foley's direction (and strong, iconoclastic casting) has resulted in a handful of indelible performances, he can't get out of his own way when it comes to how he tells his story.

The problem with Lean on Me is a stripped-down script with no room left in it for complexities, and revved-up direction that makes it move anyway.

You can't roll monstrous boulders straight at audiences any more and have a whole theater-full duck and gasp with fright--and pleasure. We may be plumb gasped out. And although Harrison Ford is still in top form and the movie is truly fun in patches, it's a genre on the wane. [24 May 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

Narrow Margin is nothing if not a hard-edge train thriller and to swathe it in so much atmospheric murk that audiences are going to suspect the premature arrival of cataracts seems counterproductive, at the very least.

Although it, too, is gorgeous to look at, this skeletal thriller is as direct and spare as its Mennonites. [08 Feb 1985]

These and wickedly funny backstage snapshots of moviemaking are the good times of Postcards, but even they can't hide its emotional starvation. [12 Sep 1990, p.1]

John Irvin has a nice eye for irony and for the larger- (and funnier-) than-life trappings of the genre. He doesn't have enormous opportunities to exercise this bent, since Raw Deal is constructed like a serial bomb: It goes off roughly every 12 1/2 minutes, littering the landscape with corpses. But you can detect an adult hand at work here, which could never be said for Cobra's arrogant and inept childishness.

The January Man is nothing to seek out if you want airtight logic. What it offers is charm, blather, the dazzlement of writing and performance that wear thin well before the final, credulity-straining quarter.

Possibly because Stone empathizes so enormously with co-writer Kovic, who came back from Vietnam at the age of 21 paralyzed from the chest down, the director has lost the specificity that made "Platoon" so electrifying. In its place he uses bombast, overkill, bullying. His scenes, and their ironic juxtapositioning, explode like land mines. [20 Dec 1989, p.1]

For all its mosaic of nice details, Silverado is still a faintly hollow creation-constructed, not torn from the heart. For a generation of kids to whom the Western is a new adventure, there probably will be action and distraction enough to dazzle. Those who need to be deeply stirred by this redoubtable form will still have to wait: Silverado is good but not great. [10 Jul 1985, p.1]

The animal photography is what gives Benji the Hunted its greatest appeal for both children and their parents, but the film makers' notion of wild animal behavior is peculiarly suburban and misleading.

Don Bluth (An American Tail) has gone to the trouble of differentiating between the species, of being careful of the scale of one in relation to another and of giving very little children a sort of primer of dinosaur lore.

The pace of the direction and-especially-of the screenplay by playwright-television writer John Kostmayer-begins to crawl, weighing down everything. [06 Apr 1990]

Everyone who grew up with the full range of the Oz books is deeply in Murch's debt. However, the framework surrounding Return to Oz is dark and, I suspect, terribly frightening for very young children. [21 Jun 1985, p.1]

Willow is a perfectly agreeable tale of magic, little people, heroic warriors, babies among the bulrushes and a wicked queen who must be overthrown lest the world be engulfed in evil. If it evaporates from memory with the airiness of a bubble bath, at least it leaves a friendly glow and a sense of a magical world lovingly evoked. [20 May 1988, p. c1]

When flights of fancy like this work, and they do for about half of this newest Pee-wee Herman adventure, you have a world seductive enough to snare adults right alongside their kids. With his co-writer George McGrath and director Randal Kleiser, Paul Reubens (Pee-wee's alter ego) has kept the magic going far longer than you might have believed possible. [22 Jul 1988, p.1]

Chocolat is a film of some subtlety. It has good, even memorable moments to it, and it’s beautiful looking. It is very, very, very French, which may or may not be your cup of chocolat. It is also a suffocatingly precious film, enough to try the patience of an oyster, and one that primly refuses to detonate the mounting numbers of erotic situations it sets up.

Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues about a talented jazz trumpet player willing to sacrifice every relationship to his music, is by turns seductive, engaging and, finally, maddening.

For all its real achievements, including a stomach-clutching re-creation of the Soviet invasion of Prague, and for all its uncoy acknowledgment of the power of sexuality, the film ultimately adds up to the unbearable heaviness of movie-making.

Running Scared's razor-crisp editing (by James Mitchell) shows that you can combine mayhem and laughs. But the action becomes huge, cartoony, out of scale, crushing the warmth Crystal and Hines have built up. And the movie is too long by about 15 minutes, a deadly thought for a comedy.

Heart may be what the movie needs most, but a bit of clarity wouldn't hurt either. Even here in gangsterland, where random characters are cherished and non sequiturs are considered wisecracks, there is a difference between complications and impenetrability, and this plot is a bloody thicket.. [5 Oct 1990, Calendar, p.F-10]

It's the feeling of Grodin as the muttering, dutiful cement in this family unit that holds the movie together -- for as long as it can be said to be held. [09 May 1986, p.14]

Blaze is hugely enjoyable, with fluid, sensual camera work by Haskell Wexler and Ruth Myer's cheerfully outrageous costumes that savor every inch of Davidovich. There's a real feeling about Long's henchmen, Gailard Sartain in particular, as the aide who hates what Blaze is doing to the boss' chances, but grudgingly comes to admire her spirit. But Blaze is also puzzling. It peaks too soon, and having teased us with these legendary characters, it goes almost prim when it comes to seeing them in action.

For all its supernatural vein, Lady in White has an engaging, Hardy Boys feeling about it and, in Lukas Haas, probably the screen's most irresistible performer this side of Kermit the Frog. And every ounce of Master Haas' adorability will be put to the test, because Lady in White is also a virtual junkyard of mismatched ideas and elements, thrown up on the screen in a friendly, haphazard fashion. [22 Apr 1988, p.8]

Written with his trademark artfulness, nicely acted and gorgeously pretty, Tequlia Sunrise finally blows away into slick unsubstantiality. [2 Dec 1988, p.1]

Skim the pleasantly diverting surface of Absolute Beginners and you can easily forget that there is nothing contained beneath. [18 Apr 1986, p.C6]

Unfortunately, what director Joanou makes of all these promising elements is thudding pretentiousness.

A tract, a dry rerun of Cry Freedom, with none of that film's visual sweep (whatever else its faults) and with nothing new to tell us. It's filled with obvious, earnest performances--Marlon Brando's ironic and subtle one is the only exception--and unresonant writing.

Everything that might have set Sleeping With the Enemy apart and made it memorable--textured central characters, psychological depth or a shred of believability--has been swept aside in the rush to make the movie a luxury item, sleekly gorgeous, blankly watchable, not unlike its star Julia Roberts.

But you know students. Some rotten Emperor’s New Clothier among them would be bound to point out that “Revolution” is utterly and fatally devoid of a story on which to hang its breathtaking pictures. And they’d have a point.

For a story about sexual awakening and discovery, Desert Hearts is a taut, fatally careful movie with no looseness--and no abandon--to it and no feeling for detail that would let these characters really live.

Unfortunately, style needs a little substance to keep it from careening around looking empty, and the story of Blue Steel is lofty, implausible twaddle that sinks whatever ideas Bigelow hoped to investigate.

For all its good intentions, for the thrillingly staged moments in the film's first quarter-for all the sweeping movement of thousands of people streaming through the streets of Shanghai-and for all its not-inconsiderable craft, the film's grave problem is a lack of central heating: We don't have a single character to warm up to.

Even with Arthur Penn as its director, and ingenious casting, it is, sad to say, mainly for connoisseurs of the car chase, European style

Not even Seth's elegance and worldly warmth, nor his short speech about the virtues of his country's culture, is enough to give balance to the film's nearly two-hour portrayal of harassment, inequality and suppression. [11 Jan 1991, p.F1]

The cast is fine; Alda’s casts invariably are, but this collection has only stick figures to play.

An intermittently funny if unsteady mixture of first-rate Brooks Angst, and set-ups that never quite pay off. [22 Mar 1991, p.F6]

There's more length than depth to Labyrinth. The Baryshnikov staging of "The Nutcracker" has more to tell about a girl on the edge of young womanhood, with more poignancy and a more palpable sense of transition, than all the technical wizardry Henson and crew have offered so lavishly-and without a single pop song, either. [26 Jun 1986, p.1]

Cry Freedom is not a great movie -- it's an earnest, clunky, awkward one without a fluid sense of story and with its most charismatic figure, the martyred black South African activist, Bantu Stephen Biko, gone before the film's 2 hours and 35 minutes are half over. [06 Nov 1987, p.1]

Did you miss "Pretty in Pink," with the glowing Molly Ringwald? No problem. Some Kind of Wonderful, which has the same director -- Howard Deutch -- also has the same story... The real complaint, however, is that Hughes has absolutely nothing new to report -- no fresh perspectives, no gratefully received maturity, nothing added or depleted. [27 Feb 1987]

Even illuminated by the unsparing performances of Jack Nicholson as Francis and Meryl Streep as Helen, his companion of nine years and another soul stumbling away from grace, the film becomes becalmed and confusing; it lacks the novel's great unwavering trajectory. [18 Dec 1987, p.1]

Natty Gann may have been created with the thought of giving young women a heroine to admire. Perhaps, to return to Places in the Heart, the difference is between a film written out of a personal need to tell a particular story and one created as a "property," full of sure-fire elements that have worked in the past: a kid, a dog, a missing parent. The real missing element is heart. [11 Oct 1985, p.1]

Yes, it is splendid that anyone would take on so formidable a project as Eco’s 500-page chambered nautilus of a novel. Yes, this certainly feels like a 14th-Century Italian abbey, bleak, drafty and forbidding. Yes, it looks like it too--the 14th-Century as cast by Federico Fellini, every face a grotesque. But no, sad to say, it isn’t a perfectly marvelous film.

By the time their jaw-dropping story is over, you may feel you have traveled every inch of their journey with them, a downward spiral all the way. What you still may not understand is what really made Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) do what they did, or, more importantly, what made director John Schlesinger feel their story was worth telling.

This time out, Spielberg has chosen to put an antic disposition on, and with the single exception of casting, his almost every decision has been disastrous. He has prettified or coarsened; he has made comic scenes broadly slapstick and tiptoed over the story's crucial relationship. The result, alas, is the film purpled.

With Manhunter, there seems to be some danger that style has overrun content, leaving behind a vast, chic, well-cast wasteland. [15 Aug 1986]

A vintage Clint Eastwood performance--in a film so uninvolving that you barely wake up for the big battle finale.

It's strange that in this somber inspection of moral fiber and what causes it to fray, De Palma couldn't have made his hero at least as interesting as his villain, and both of them at least as complicated as they were in life.

If Perfect didn't have a germ of an idea tucked away in all its posturing silliness, it wouldn't be quite so infuriating. But it has: Superficially it's about sliding-scale morality in journalism today, a not uninteresting subject. [7 June 1985, p.C1]

But the climax of "Close Encounters" was breathtaking and the climax of The Abyss is downright embarrassing; in the light of day, its payoff effect looks like a glazed ceramic what's-it your 11-year-old made in crafts class. It's criminal. [9 Aug 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

There are individual moments to remember with affection, but the plot has miles to go before we sleep. [26 June 1987, p.1]

Unfortunately, and through no fault of Meryl Streep, there doesn't seem to be enough electricity generated out there in Africa to power a love story 2 1/2 hours long.

But honestly, Collins' vehicle is a creaky old donkey cart. [30 Aug 1989, p.C1]

The film's greatest asset is Kelly LeBrock, who is triumphant. She may represent souped-up womanhood at its most fanciful but she does so with great warmth and a sharp sense of herself.

Under Australian director George Miller ("Mad Max"), The Witches of Eastwick begins so promisingly. It has such smashing separate moments, so succulent a cast and so interesting a premise that watching it crumble into stomach-turning crudeness and "Poltergeist"-scale special effects is deeply painful.

After much time with this soggy, quarrelsome clan, your sympathies may lie entirely with the bear.

There was bite and outrageousness and a touch of the surreal to the excesses of National Lampoon's Vacation (in which Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis humanized Hughes' cartoonlike material). This was writing whose springboard might have been awful firsthand experience. European Vacation feels as though it were dreamed up to cover the rent on the beach house for the summer.

I feel just rotten about this, but I'm afraid I've outgrown James.

The movie is grisly, illogical, contradictory, borderline tasteless, riddled with plot holes--and at the same time, decently photographed, cleanly edited and crisply directed. All in all, the waste it represents--of talent, of intelligence, of fine craftsmen and of the audience’s good will--is enough to make one howl like a dog.

The imagination of the opening is a hint of what the movie might have been: a view of our world that made kids consider it from another angle--as well as a spoof of the superhero. But what are all the pleasant duck effects in the face of any of this numbing waste?

Ruben’s stylistic devices, his high angle shots and his black-and-white recountings of courtroom testimony, become just so much cinematic corpse-rouging.

It's big, cartoonish and empty, with an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced. [3 July 1985, p.Calendar 6]

Instead of real people, they've created fast-moving upscale wise guys, so thoughtless, so utterly self-absorbed that you're quite content letting them simply love themselves--they do it so well...The St. Elmo's Fire bunch, for all their wheel-spinning melodrama, is all surface--all speed and stylishness without a bit of emotional resonance beneath.

Brewster's Millions isn't bad so much as flat. And flat comedy has about the appeal of flat champagne.

You can fret at Heartburn's flimsiness, may even find it insufferably smug in its portrait of our set, but you probably won't be bored by it. And it is peopled with adults, these days enough to make you whimper in gratitude. If only these talents were in the service of something.

Sanitized for our protection and in the hands of director Adrian Lyne, 9 1/2 Weeks is a swooningly silly cautionary tale about the bad and the beautiful; a pair whose sexual tastes might have surfaced after a night of watching "Bolero" on videocassette. [21 Feb 1986, p.1]

Like Sonny’s moving pictures in his mind, Bogdanovich sees things we can’t; when we can join him--in moments of family and connectedness--Texasville is touching. Most other times it’s the darndest mess you ever saw.

The book too is cluttered and diffuse, but it still has nice, uncompromisingly rough edges to it that this film adaptation has planed away. It was an honest, painful record; it has been nudged into family-style uplift.