Sheila Benson

The most shamelessly manipulative movie since they shot the dog in "The Biscuit Eater."

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is as fine a film as it is a brutally disturbing one.

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

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]

It would seem impossible that anyone looking into the heart and the clear intent of the film would fail to see Scorsese's passion for his subject. And if our world is becoming so dangerously constricted that we're forbidden even to look, that is something we should all worry about. [12 Aug 1988, 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]

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]

You can leave Days of Thunder feeling positively chafed. That clanking noise, however, comes from Robert Towne's tinny story and its malnourished characters. [27 Jun 1990, p.1]

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.

Strangely enough, Married to the Mob, which may prove to be Demme's long-overdue passport to mass audience adulation, may tickle everyone but die-hard Demme fans. [19 Aug 1988]

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.

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

Unfortunately, to fit what are seen to be the particular requirements of its director/co-star Burt Reynolds, Stick has been rendered jokey, flaccid and, the worst crime of all, deadly slow. All this in spite of the fact that Leonard was the original screenwriter. [26 Apr 1985, p.6]

Jagged Edge is really something. It vanishes from the memory like an old grocery list, yet while you’re in it you’re caught. Shocked, intrigued, confused, unnerved and finally snapped right back in your seat with fright, but held all the way.

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]

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.

Ron Howard reaches real maturity here, as he pulls together the script's tendency to skitter between sociology and sitcom, making it into one perceptive, delicious whole. [2 Aug 1989, p.1]

This is grim and witless storytelling, and what makes it so depressing is that it hasn't improved by so much as a chemical trace since the days of the first "Rocky."

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.

Almost any movie with Molly Ringwald at its centerpiece has a built-in plus to it. The wonder about For Keeps is that not even Ringwald's customary glow and bedrock believability make a smidgen of difference. Muddled it is and muddled it remains.

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.

The summer's uncorseted, unqualified delight. [14 July 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

Intelligent, complex and enthralling, Presumed Innocent is one of those rare films where all the players seem to be in a state of grace, where the working of the machinery never shows and after it's over, one runs and reruns its intricacies with a profound sense of satisfaction.

Weir's orchestrated The Mosquito Coast's action to match Fox's progressive mental state, from rage to explosion to squalls and finally to hurricane velocity; however, the film leaves us not with an apotheosis, but exhaustion. [26 Nov 1986]

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.

A virtually irresistible film. [21 March 1986, p.1]

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.

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.

An utterly pleasant surprise...Lordy, is it tenderly acted, with an unyielding spine of honesty to all its characters.

A bracingly outrageous portrait of the playwright, his free-ranging life and remarkably constricted times. It is directed by Stephen Frears and stunningly well played by Gary Oldman, that slight chameleon who was Sid in Sid and Nancy; by Vanessa Redgrave, as Orton's agent and confidante, Peggy Ramsey, and by Alfred Molina as the lugubrious zombie Halliwell.

Demme finds haunting overtones in the somewhat old-hat situations of E. Max Frye's first screenplay. Something Wild also has three first-class performances: by Daniels, who seems to have resources that his earlier roles never touched; by electrifying newcomer Ray Liotta, and by Griffith as the maddening, mysterious Lulu. [6 Nov 1986]

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.

Jean de Florette is like good peasant bread: honest, chewy, unsurprising and heavily satisfying.

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

Jessica Lange plays the scrappy '60s singer with sweet ferocity.

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]

In a superb cast of mostly unknowns -- with the exception of Matthew Modine and Dorain Harewood -- D'Onofrio, who put on 60 pounds for this pivotal role, and Ermey are exceptional. [26 June 1987]

Hopkins' insinuating performance puts him right up there with the screen's great bogymen. [13 February 1991, Calendar, p.F-1}

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.

The shiveringly memorable Smooth Talk may be the first film to get adolescence in America right, down to the last, delicate seismographic tremor. What it knows about the age will scare adults to death, because these film makers remember , as clearly as Joyce Carol Oates did when she wrote the short story from which “Smooth Talk” was made.

Smart and funny, touching and unabashedly sensual... the sweet sleeper of a hot season. [21 Aug 1987]

Terence Davies' mesmerizing memory film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, becomes its own kind of poetry: taut, referential, inward, brilliant. Although it is set among the unremarkable flats of Liverpool, the place is stamped by Davies' profoundly original vision and sounds; its framing is painterly and deliberate. And just as you think you have its moves all doped out, a scene of such shocking beauty flashes before you that it takes your breath away.

Stunningly, ponderously bad.

But of all the film's choices, the best was Weaver. She's its white-hot core, given fine, irascible dialogue to come blazing out of that patrician mouth, and the chance to look, for a moment, like a space-dusted Sleeping Beauty in her hyper-sleep casket.

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.

A spare, smart, seductive piece of real movie making with (almost) every loophole covered, a superlative cast and enough tension to keep us all hyperventilating for hours.

Dense, satisfying, feverishly inventive and a technical marvel… But--animation aside--the treasure of the piece is Hoskins' pungent, visceral comic performance. [22 June 1988]

The crushing assault that Road House delivers to fun at the movies is enough to send you crawling out of the theater on hands and knees, bloody and bowed. [19 May 1989, p.C1]

No Way Out's greatest prize is Costner, a leading man at last: fiercely good, intelligent, appreciatively sensual in a performance balanced perfectly between action and introspection. It's a movie that lends itself to more than one sitting, and when you go back, armed with full understanding, Costner's work seems even better than the first time, richer, more complex and many layered.

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.

In a season not noted for adult diversions, Mona Lisa could hardly be more welcome: a glorious, heart-shaped box of bittersweet chocolates for the grown-ups in the house.

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

Watching the strength of [Nair]'s vision and her craft, balanced by the empathy shown in all her work so far--her earlier documentaries as well--there is every reason to believe that “Salaam Bombay!” marks the opening of an extraordinary career.

Stand By Me is the summer's great gift, a compassionate, perfectly performed look at the real heart of youth. It stands, sweet and strong, ribald, outrageous and funny, like its heroes themselves--a bit gamy around the edges, perhaps, but pure and fine clear through. It's one of those treasures absolutely not to be missed.

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.

From its first romantic encounter, as two pairs of eyes lock across a crowded room, to its last tremulous one, "Crossing Delancey" is unqualified pleasure, bound on every side by love. [31 Aug 1988]

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.

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

Year of the Dragon has an arrogant, electric energy that dares you to look away from the screen for an instant. Do so and you miss a furious piece of action that has bubbled up, seemingly out of nowhere.

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

You go to Peggy Sue Got Married expecting '60s nostalgia, "a blast from the past," Buddy Holly and lime-green leisure suits. You get all that, but nothing prepares you for the rush of real emotion the film generates, for its poignance, its reassurance or its high of pure pleasure.

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?

One Red Shoe has trying moments (the sewer-man joke; the awful fate of Belushi’s character), but the rest of it whirls by as summer comedy ought to, and rarely does.

Dick Tracy is brash, irresistible fun. Warren Beatty's vision of a comic strip on film comes in paint box-bright colors with nicely irreverent dialogue, a gaggle of crisp performances and one with million-dollar moxie. [10 Jun 1990, p.3]

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

The actors, many of whom are part of a loose Mike Leigh stock company, are miraculously deft at erasing that line between performing and being.

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

In the air Memphis Belle is unstoppable, giving us--earthbound and safe--a clear-eyed look at the nuts and bolts of bravery.

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 production is as clean and effective as Red October herself; there's not one dial or glowing radar screen too many; the underwater hits and near-misses are clearly choreographed and the undersea intensity is captured perfectly by Jan De Bont's camera work. [2 Mar 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

GoodFellas is "Raging Bull" squared. [20 September 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

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

All and all, it adds up to a delightful, unpretentious movie, hands down the richest work Whoopi Goldberg has done on the screen.

Joyous, daft and hauntingly original, True Stories is Byrne's magical mystery tour of Texas: an introduction to the imaginary town of Virgil and its faintly surreal folks.

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.

Mellow, beautiful, rich and brimming with love, "Hannah" is the best Woody Allen yet and, quite simply, a great film. [7 February 1986, Calendar, p.6-1]

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]

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]

The humor of Down by Law is marginally easier to describe than Stranger Than Paradise, but only because, by now, we have a small idea of Jarmusch's style. It's still a kind of humor that evaporates as you try to explain it. Also eluding description is the beauty, the street poetry and the precision of the images caught by Jarmusch and his cameraman, the great Robby Muller, whose black-and-white photography illuminated the early films of Wim Wenders. They have created a dream New Orleans, more succinct and more haunting than the city itself, and Lurie has set it to music.

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.

A love of the world of movies permeates the first-class, crackling excitement of F/X, giving a rare dimension to this thriller.

Eventually the film's suspense underpinnings take over its personal story, yet that tension Quaid and Barkin generate still holds.

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.

Cocoon is a sly and salty bit of wish fulfillment that, by its tremendous close, has its entire audience wishing along with it. The combined energy it generates is probably enough to raise the Titanic.

Working Girl is the sparkling success that it is because of the sheer irresistibility of Melanie Griffith. [21 Dec 1988, Calendar, p.6-1]

Laced with medieval magic, it has stalwart knights and tremulously fine ladies, heavy-hoofed horses who might have clattered straight out of German fairy tales and broadswords so heavy you or I could never heft them. Most of all, it is a bold, beautiful, marvelous vision.

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'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]

Such nourishing comedy. It satisfies every hunger, especially the irrational ones that seem to hit hardest at holidays: hunger for impetuous romance and for the reassuring warmth of family, for reckless abandon, and for knowing who we are and what we want. [16 Dec 1987]

Material this risky has to be done brilliantly or not at all. "Tootsie" pulled off its gender switch because of its compassion for the discoveries that a man made in a woman's role. "Blazing Saddles" used blazing wit to attack the myths of racism, at full throttle. Though it may have had honest intentions, Soul Man is a mess, at almost every level. Steve Miner's direction stabs at farce, misses; makes a desperate dive at comedy, misses, and settles for sitcom sentimentality. Carol Black, the screenwriter, has a quick, good ear when she's skewering trendy yuppies, but the rest of her satire is mortifyingly callow. And what is set into motion has neither wit nor compassion. [24 Oct 1986, p.C6]

Stoltz is simply amazing in the variety, the humor and the absolute lack of self-pity with which he draws Rocky, whose spirit soars so far beyond his body.

In a wicked mess of unmatched water shots and dreadful interior airplane sequences, the characters outlined in little blue halos, the performances range from the mortifying to the merely immemorable. Against all odds, Lance Guest and Karen Young manage to be warm and credible. Podgy but game, Michael Caine, bravely attempts mouth-to-mouth resusitation on a role which is little more than anecdotes strung together. It is not his finest hour.

Director James Foley and his co-screenwriter Robert Redlin have pulled Thompson's story out of film noir shadows and set it unflinchingly in the desert's orange-red glare.

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.

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.

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]

It’s a raw, explosively funny, elemental tragicomedy about the pure willfulness of love...Basinger is the movie’s revelation. She makes May a jumpy, juicy, full-tilt, sensuous creature. Scrubbing in exasperation at the tendrils of hair that cloud her face, clamping herself to Eddie’s leg like a blond barnacle, she has her own funny side too, but what you remember most is May’s longing, so deep it’s torn her up inside.

Hollywood Shuffle is boisterous, out-at-the elbows movie making, an uneven series of skits, really, rather than a consistent whole. But there are wonderful comic moments here, alongside ones that droop from having gone on too long. And pervading the film is an unquenchable air--of optimism, even of community, which uses comedy to address some grievous inequities.

Crossroads needs a leap of faith to swallow it whole, to buy its Faust-like premise of a musician's pact with the devil played against the realism of a contemporary road movie, but director Walter Hill lays out reasons enough to make us want to make that leap.

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]

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]

A clear-eyed vision. Authentic as an Edward Curtis photograph, lyrical as a George Catlin oil or a Karl Bodmer landscape, this is a film with a pure ring to it. It's impossible to call it anything but epic [9 Nov 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Stylistically, the film is a dream. But in every case, the style has a reason. [12 Aug 1988]

It's hard to believe that the group who came up with the hard, clean edges of "Top Gun," sleek and unfeeling though it may have been, could make a picture as crude, as muddled, as destructo-Derbyish as this one. If Beverly Hills Cop II is its opening salvo, this is going to be a long, smoggy summer. [20 May 1987]

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]

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

What boggles the mind is how this bit of navel lint could have seemed even remotely funny to anyone at any stage along its way. Even as a low moment in high concept, it is inconceivable that someone would undertake to make this into a film.

As salty and sexy and unhousebroken a movie as you could hope to find.

A film that understands childhood-to-adolescence as few films do, with dark and loving affection. [12 July 1987]

In spite of a sturdy cast and dazzling production design, Highlander is stultifyingly, jaw-droppingly, achingly awful.[11 Mar 1986, p.5]

In Memories of Me, nothing goes unsaid; its banalities are triumphant, its maudlin flourishes build to maudlin crescendos.

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]

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]

There is energy and inventiveness enough here to stamp it as one of the year's most interesting films. Although it's virtually impossible to look at anyone else when Newman commands a scene, and although each man is exploring his character at completely different depths, Cruise is at least willing to extend himself; he gives the sense of a young actor who is working to grow. Add the edgy, indolent Mastrantonio and you have an electrifying unholy trio. The picture is, however, in the pocket of the old pro, who is still, in Fast Eddie's own words, some piece of work.

[Stone] succeeds with an immediacy that is frightening. War movies of the past, even the greatest ones, seem like crane shots by comparison; Platoon is at ground zero.

From the script and novel of Leonard Gardner, this insider's portrait of the real world of the ring is a great tragicomedy: The bitterly funny, pugnacious banter between young alcoholic Oma (Susan Tyrrell) and Tully provides the humor; the lives of the fighters, whose hopes reach only to the next day, are its tragedy. [01 Apr 1988, p.29]

Somehow, Hoffman makes all this hypnotically interesting, and, through impeccable timing, sometimes terribly funny--a sweet humor which never betrays Raymond's unalterable character. [16 Dec 1988]

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]

Depardieu and MacDowell seem to share an uncommon honesty and generosity of spirit. So as the sexual tension between their characters grows, their scenes together are charmingly open and uncompetitive. The sense is that if these two ever become lovers, it will be because they have first become friends. On that startling note, in today's climate of explicit, loveless love, the film floats to its heady conclusion. [11 Jan 1991, p.6]

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.

The astonishing thing about Raising Arizona is how it can move so fast, be so loud, and ramain so relentlessly boring at the same time. [20 Mar 1987]

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]

These characters need rescuing from screenwriter Colin Welland’s view of life in middle-class America as oppressively banal. By the time he gets finished sketching in the deadening of the American family, you may feel like beating Hackman to the front door...Twice in a Lifetime is a dreary masquerade of a serious movie.

It is certainly elegant looking , but 15 minutes into the action the thrill is gone and director Bruce Beresford seems to have no clue as to how to find it.

To say the film is the treasure of the year would be to bad-mouth it in this disastrous season. Prizzi's Honor would be the vastly original centerpiece of a great year. It's a rich, dense character comedy in which Huston, working from a screenplay Richard Condon and Janet Roach adapted from Condon's novel, cocks a playful but unblinking eye at love, family loyalty and the togetherness of a happy marriage--Sicilian style.

Drugstore Cowboy, an electrifying movie without one misstep or one conventional moment. [11 Oct 1989]

There isn't a scintilla of surprise to any of it, and arm wrestling as a sport isn't really much fun to watch unless it's the match in The Fly. The only diversion is keeping track of the shameless advertising plugs that dot the film, like toadstools after a rain. It's not quite reason enough to go out to a movie, however.

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.

8 Million Ways to Die is a ponderous, convoluted improbability, with more inexplicable actions and situations than "The Big Sleep," which is the last time those two films will ever be mentioned in the same sentence.

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]

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.

To think of a film this assured, this unified and this dizzyingly potent, you have to go back to "Blue Velvet." [22 Sept 1988]

The Jedi return to us at last, older, wiser and frankly irresistible. Of all its many qualities, Return of the Jedi is fully satisfying, it gives honest value to all the hopes of its believers. With this last of the central "Star Wars" cycle, there is the sense of the closing of a circle, of leaving behind real friends. It is accomplished with a weight and a new maturity that seem entirely fitting, yet the movie has lost none of its sense of fun; it bursts with new inventiveness. With Jedi, George Lucas may have pulled off the first triple crown of motion pictures.

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]

The comedy of Quick Change is city-dweller humor, honed to a fine edge and site-specific to New York because the Big Apple is more or less on its knees, civility-wise. All it needs is a lethally funny comedy like this to give it the coup de grace. [13 Jul 1990, p.1]

It’s an attempt at fantasy so plodding that by its end it feels as though we’d walked the 20 years back to Belushi’s past, then hacked our way out of it again.

Nothing prepares us adequately for the cool of his screenwriter, 29-year-old Hanif Kureishi, nor for the audacity, complexity and depth of his themes.

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]

Broadcast News is so diabolically clever that you rather expect it to be heartless, in the way that so much surface cleverness can be. No such thing. Heartless is the wrong word for this movie: It's insightful and understanding and marvelous fun, while giving up none of its thoughtfulness. [16 Dec 1987, p.1]

A convulsively funny affair.[15 July 1988, Calendar, p. 6-1]

The performances of Close and Silver are flawless, but it is Irons' portrait that remains behind, an enigmatic after-image… Reversal of Fortune is a delectable tour through facets of the lives of the rich and famous that Robin Leach wouldn't touch with a forked stick. [17 Oct 1990]

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.

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]

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.

A smart, generous, genuinely funny affair. Sometimes, like the camel who almost ambles away with the picture, it's longish in the tooth, but it is based on an extremely astute vision of life. [15 May 1987]

Even better than opium for avoiding pain is avoiding Shanghai Surprise itself, a movie of jaw-dropping, high-water mark dreadfulness.

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.

It's just that when a movie is this close, with so much of the sports flavor (co-producer Thom Mount is co-owner of the real Durham Bulls), you like to see it perfect. [15 June 1988]

If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, why is Sidney Lumet’s Power the sexless diatribe that it is, all high-tech visuals and no emotional grounding? Its sole juiciness comes from Gene Hackman as a raffish Southern media consultant, well-cured in bourbon and branch water. The outlandish daring of his performance is almost rave-up enough to recommend the movie. Almost.

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.

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]

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.

Without complexity to its characters, with little balance and without a hint of the personal, family or community issues involved, Colors becomes a movie that never has to ask "Why?"--a vivid, noisy shell of a film filled with eager young actors rattling along on the surface of a lethally important subject. [15 Apr 1988]

Electrifying… As writer, director and editor, [Soderbergh’s] control is mesmerizing. It's also more than a little creepy; as though Soderbergh were drawing us, a step at a time, into a warm pool where intimate secrets flowed back and forth as simply as currents of water. [4 Aug 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

Wall Street wants to be a shrewd piece of movie making, our own insider's tip, but it's tinny and thin and close to moral bankruptcy. As for its veracity, it's probably no closer to Wall Street than "The Bad and the Beautiful" was to the skills of movie making. And it's a lot less fun. [11 Dec 1987, p.1]

A beautiful, deadly serious attempt by Paul and Leonard Schrader to illuminate the life--and death--of one of Japan's most highly visible and self-propelling enigmas.

Edel’s empathy with actors--which he showed in 1981 with the harrowing heroin saga, Christiane F.--is further strengthened by the remarkable performances here.

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]

A dippy, joyous meander of a movie, more than a little messy but abundantly rewarding.

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

The Hit is something special: thoughtful, perfectly performed and carrying the clear stamp of an extremely interesting director.

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.

In addition to its photography, the film's details of costuming (by "The Last Emperor's" James Acheson) and production design (by Stuart Craig of "Gandhi" and "The Mission") are ravishing. [21 Dec 1988, Calendar p.6]

When director Herbert Ross is away from his dance numbers, he lets the pace sag frightfully. A lot of good talent on both sides of the camera goes down with this PG-13-rated ship. [20 Aug 1990, p.6]

It's as engaging, as modest, as utterly American and as thrilling as the true-life story it's based on. [11 Dec 1986, Calendar, p.6-1]

Beineix is still the sumptuous stylist; it's as much a part of him as his skin and the film has its share of gorgeous dawns, haunting sunsets, rollicking pink-and blue-painted beach houses. But he is also a great storyteller, and the whole middle section of Betty Blue is an irresistible tale of crazy love on one hand and crazy friendship on the other. [07 Nov 1986, p.1]

In this stately and fairly slavish representation, directed by Richard Attenborough, what pokes through with the pain of a broken bone is how thin the material really is. [12 Dec 1985]

In a brash, beautiful, deeply American film, Kaufman has combined the resources and ingenuity of movie making with the freewheeling, damn-the-conventions style of of the New Journalism and come up with a generous, high-spirited look at the bravery and lunacy that was that era.

Searingly well-acted.

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.

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

I can't think of a current movie in which every element is in such balance: Martin seems unfettered, expansive, utterly at ease, capable of any physical feat (except possibly drinking from a wine glass without a straw). There's a tenderness to him that's magnetic. Daryl Hannah's Roxanne, an astronomer, is smart and sublimely beautiful all at once, her skin apricot-colored in this mountain sun, her face rhapsodic as she talks about muons, gluons and quarks.

A movie that draws you close to it like listeners around that glowing radio dial.

Tender, marvelously well played (by almost everyone) and thoroughly engaging. When it comes to the current sexual skirmishes between men and women, screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue (Second City alumni) know every inch of enemy territory and take no prisoners.

While Bridges is a capital stylist, "Bright Lights" needed a great deal more than style. (Real emotion, for one thing. Believability might also have been nice.) And while Fox is puppyish and charming, his character, Jamie, has to go through a real epiphany during the film's weeklong time frame and Mr. Fox is hard-pressed to suggest a two-Excedrin headache.

The most brilliantly disturbing film ever to have its roots in small-town American life. [19 September 1986, Calendar, p.6-1]

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.

You have the feeling that Pryor had aimed for a somber, almost melancholy story, redeemed only by Jo Jo's strength of will at the very last moment. (He says as much in a recent magazine interview.) But the film has been cranked up to give it the maximum laughs and, in the process, has lost its center.

Cadillac Man splutters briefly to life about two-thirds of its way through, but to sit until that moment, deafened by the movie's shrillness and embalmed by its humor, is a lot to ask of even the most amiable audience. [18 May 1990, p.F1]

James Earl Jones proves that he is probably the only actor in America who can wear the skin of a full-grown lion-jewels in its eyes, its tail in its mouth-over street clothes and not look like a damn fool. But there's not a thing he can do with this flaccid, foolish film. [29 Jun 1988, p.1]

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.

The question of grace, of nonviolence, of loyalty and faith that are the weft of The Mission are not confined to the Jesuits or to the 18th Century. In their postlude, the film makers extend these concerns to today's priests in South America, and others might include clergy in South Africa and Poland. It is the power of these questions that ultimately sweeps away reservations about the film. The Mission becomes a spectacle of conscience.[14 Nov 1986, p.C1]

The year's most pungently offbeat comedy and the most improbable love story since King Kong sighted Fay Wray.

One of the bloodiest and most beautiful reflections on atonement in the Scorsese canon... It is still one of cinema's most breathtaking films.

Cobra's pretentious emptiness, its dumbness, its two-faced morality make it a movie that begs to be laughed off.

A film of warmth, insight, humor and surprising originality… [It] isn't perfect, but when it's good, which is every moment John Cusack is on screen, it's a living joy. And when it's not-so-good--earthbound and not inventive enough--it s till almost single-handedly redeems the breed. [14 April 1989]

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]

So what was rich, journalistic and precisely observed is now overstated, under-textured and cartooned, in playwright/screenwriter Michael Cristofer’s witless screenplay. Certainly Wolfe’s canvas might lend itself to a broad approach, but broad like “Dr. Strangelove,” not broad like the Three Stooges.

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]

As directed with the heaviest of hands by newcomer Paul Flaherty from an impoverished screenplay by debuting feature writers Josh Goldstein and Jonathan Prince, it’s not likely to make fans of either 18- or 81-year-olds.

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]

As he spins his mesmerizing story of the fixing of the 1919 World Series, John Sayles moves to a new level of dexterity as a writer-director.

Diamond-hard and mesmerizing… Bening and Cusack are perfection at what they are doing, she twinkly as any rhinestone, he dangerously passive; it's hardly their fault that Huston is the motor of the piece and so ferociously seductive that one cannot look away from her. [5 Dec 1990]

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]

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]

Class Action s good, chewy entertainment, part courtroom pyrotechnics, part Machiavellian legal maneuvers. [15 Mar 1991]

This one you see for the pure love of great movie making. Its tough-minded, unsentimental writing and ferociously brilliant acting--across the board and especially at the top--manage to give a pretty good idea of what Christy Brown, the Dublin-born writer, poet and painter, was all about.

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]

It is excruciating: a combination of Beth Henley’s insistently eccentric screenplay, Bruce Beresford’s frenzied direction and the sight of three singular talents on an acting roller coaster with no one riding the brakes.

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.

Arm wrestling and hamburger building have been exhausted as backgrounds for movies, so it was probably inevitable that bartending would be next. But nothing quite prepares you for the hamburger that Cocktail makes of an old and relatively honorable profession. [29 Jul 1988, p.14]

One of “Trouble’s” nicest gifts is a pair of lovers to sigh over, whose future you agonize about, lovers who can make each other roar with laughter while lovingly intertwined. How long since we cared anything about a couple on the screen?

Anger? Outrage? Are these new feelings for audiences dealing with the fact of rape--aborted or not? You might hope not, but if they are, the film generates them, as well as the shamefully satisfying taste of bone-cracking revenge. But they still don’t add up to reason enough to make a movie, or to make it in 1986.

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]

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.

As The Fourth Protocol begins at the outside and curls its way into the center of its wildly complex plot, it becomes almost a "Saturday Night Live" spy spoof. We're saturated with detail: Where will the nested Russian folk-art dolls, the visiting violinist's patent-leather shoes and the American Air Force officer's randy wife fit into the Greater Scheme of Things? Gradually, as our eyes glaze over, it becomes very hard to care--and even harder to suppress a giggle.

Stirred up impassioned debate everywhere; it would seem the greatest compliment that could be paid a stunning entertainment. [30 June 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

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.

Bold, sneaky, brilliant Punchline works its change-ups unmercifully. I can't remember laughing this much with tears still streaming down my face, or beginning to weep while my sides still ached from laughing. The closest to it was "Terms of Endearment." [30 Sept 1988, p.C1]

Irresistibly funny… Just about the best holiday gift imaginable. [23 Dec 1988, Calendar, p.6-1]

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]

At all times the wretched high-concept, low-intelligence story contrives to bring everything down to its sudsy level. [22 Nov 1985]

In all his athletic scenes, leaping through doors, leaping between uptown and downtown trains, leaping on an assortment of villains, Swayze is just fine. It's the movie's big cosmic questions that throw him; for these he's reduced to a look of total stupefaction--not the movie's finest moments. [13 July 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Using a twist on the ingenious premise of "Fantastic Voyage" -- miniaturized travel within a human body -- and a pair of very different but equally irresistible leading men, Innerspace is densely inventive and consistently hilarious. [1 July 1987, p.C1]

A frenetically unfunny and charmless movie.

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]

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]

The wonder is that anything in a country this exotic, full of such potential wonder, could be made this enervating.

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]

Stand and Deliver itself, with its message of the soaring rewards of learning, aims high and delivers perhaps a B+. But it's already a better, less cliched film than La Bamba, with considerably more on its mind, and its strengths may pave the way for more complex, more demanding stories of the Latino experience for all audiences.

Unfortunately, director Michael Lehmann's point of view is swivel-mounted: He doesn't have the courage of his cynicism. [31 Mar 1989]

A preachy, empty story, enlivened by a great central performance and generous dollops of self-delusion, not the least offensive of which are Topor's and Lansing's quoted comparisons of their movie to the moral climate of the Holocaust. To paraphrase dear Joseph Welch, have they no shame? [14 Oct 1988, p.4]

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.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael isn't truly terrible, it's truly confused. It's as though director Jim Abrahams wanted to do heartfelt comedy-drama but couldn't quite shake off the wicked edge of his alma mater, ZAZ: Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, the dementos behind "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun."

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

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.

Stakeout is this summer's suntan lotion: It won't linger in the memory any better than it would survive a quick dip in the pool.

Nothing works, except perhaps the sight of Julia Roberts' lean, well-tempered midsection and her roughly eight yards of legs that, in this frail comedy, are worked until they're almost a story point of their own. [23 Mar 1990, Calendar, p.F-14]

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]

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

The delectable Babette’s Feast is a fable told with passion, intelligence and sumptuousness. Although it certainly has a feast at its center, it would be a mistake to think that its tribute is intended only for great cooks. No, it’s a deep reverence to all great artists--whether they make books, bowls or ballets, baskets, quilts, songs, poems, paintings . . . or films.

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.

Nicholson's Joker will be the pivotal point for many. It's his energy, spurting like an artery, that keeps the picture alive; it's certainly not the special effects, the editing, which has no discernible rhythm, or the flaccid screenplay.

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

The director has been able to do nothing with this wheezing script, one of the subplots of which involves Dempsey's dad believing that his son is gay. And the movie's moments of physical farce are mortifying...What makes "Loverboy"(rated PG-13 for sexual situations) such a pitiful waste is that Dempsey has so much potential charm.

Actually it's not a bad notion for a satiric comedy and this one begins well, but then veers entirely out of hand until it's as over-inflated as its own Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and as funny as a mugging. [23 Nov 1988, p.1]