Vincent Canby

My Beautiful Laundrette has the broad scope and the easy pace that one associates with our best theatrical films. It puts its own truth above the fear of possibly offending someone. Without showing off, it has courage as well as artistry. A fascinating, eccentric, very personal movie.

Sea of Love is a lugubrious imitation of a second-rate television movie, over-produced and over-cast. Mr. Pacino tears into a role made out of rice paper, for messy results, while Miss Barkin does her level best to seem simultaneously sexy, homicidal and innocent, which is not easy.

Phantom of the Paradise is an elaborate disaster, full of the kind of facetious humor you might find on bumper stickers and cocktail coasters.

The plot, set in and around El Paso, is unimportant and nonstop, like an old-fashioned, Saturday afternoon serial, which isn't at all bad. Steve Carver, the director, understands that in such films action is content.

The film has no big scenes, and it takes a while to get the hang of it, but once you do, it's as funny as it is wise. The three lead performers are extremely good, never for a second betraying the film's consistently deadpan style.

As performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.

Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala triumph again with their entertaining, richly textured film. [13 March 1992]

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is so beautifully acted and so well set (in and around Boston's pool halls, parking lots, side-streets, house trailers and barrooms) that it reminds me a good deal of John Huston's Fat City. It also has that film's ear for the way people talk—for sentences that begin one way and end another, or are stuffed with excess pronouns.

It's a must-see for anyone who shares the belief that Mr. Jarmusch is the most arresting and original American film maker to come out of the 1980's.

Good Morning, Vietnam, directed by Barry Levinson (Diner, Tin Men) succeeds in doing something that's very rare in movies, being about a character who really is as funny as he's supposed to be to most of the people sharing the fiction with him. It's also a breakthrough for Mr. Williams, who, for the first time in movies, gets a chance to exercise his restless, full-frontal comic intelligence.

Phil Joanou's Final Analysis is an entertaining exercise in psychological suspense up to a point. Then the ghost that has been pleasurably haunting it, that of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," turns out to be an illusion, and the real villain is revealed as that implacably clear-eyed monster, demon logic.

The premise, though, is the only satisfying thing about Looker, which Mr. Crichton has directed from his own original, stupifyingly nonsensical screenplay.

The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.

A very curious though effective entertainment, a scathing social satire in the form of an outrageously clumsy spy story told with a completely straight face.

A small, joyful lark of a film.

It's movie making of the high, smooth, commercial order that Hollywood prides itself on but achieves with singular infrequency.

Class of 1999 is the paranoid student's dream movie, full of absurd battle scenes and failed attempts at dark humor.

Falling Down is the most interesting, all-out commercial American film of the year to date, and one that will function much like a Rorschach test to expose the secrets of those who watch it.

The Neverending Story is a graceless, humorless fantasy for children, combining live actors and animated creatures in mostly imaginary settings.

The movie is full of the kind of atmosphere that can be created by elaborate sets, dim lighting and misty landscapes, though it has no singular character or dominant mood.

Two-Lane Blacktop is a far from perfect film (those metaphors keep blocking the road), but it has been directed, acted, photographed and scored (underscored, happily) with the restraint and control of an aware, mature filmmaker.

Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.

Make no mistake about it: Miss Hemingway, a beauty who looks a lot like Miss Stratten, is not giving an impersonation but a true performance, as fully realized as the somewhat limited circumstances allow. There is an alertness, humor and intelligence to her work that immediately identifies her as one of our best young film actresses, someone who reinvents character in her own image rather than simply miming it.

Stir Crazy is an energetic but spiritless shambles.

A film noir that's murky without being terribly mysterious.

The movie, which Mr. Aldrich directed from a screenplay by Christopher Knopf, is cheap and nasty without having any redeeming vulgarity and absolutely no conviction of truth.

Ideas and issues in this film are as scarce as hen's teeth. In their place are little signposts that tell us what we are supposed to believe without thinking...Power is a well-meaning, witless, insufferably smug movie that -if it does anything at all, and I'm not sure it does - anesthetizes legitimate outrage at some of the things going on in our society.

Though Mr. Billingsley, Mr. Gavin, Miss Dillon and the actress who plays Ralphie's school teacher are all very able, they are less funny than actors in a television situation comedy that one has chosen to watch with the sound turned off.

Yet more important than anything else about Blow Out is its total, complete and utter preoccupation with film itself as a medium in which, as Mr. De Palma has said along with a number of other people, style really is content.

For a film that's so innocuous, Teen Wolf is aggressively boring.

Mr. Arcand's dialogue is not didactic. It's spontaneously funny and rueful and full of oblique revelations. Though highly intelligent, his characters are prone to self-delusion. They're nothing if not civilized, but they don't hesitate to lie and cheat in their own interests.

Fire in the Sky treats the story with cautious, unimaginative, quite boring politeness.

The movie can't make up its mind whether it's about a tumultuously difficult but rewarding friendship or whether it's a sendup of the contemporary literary scene. It fails as both.

Biloxi Blues, carefully adapted and reshaped by Mr. Simon, is a very classy movie, directed and toned up by Mike Nichols so there's not an ounce of fat in it.

Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is a beautiful, courageous, foolish, romantic, and reckless film.

Very beautiful and the first truly interesting, American-made western in years.

A silly attempt to crossbreed an Our Gang comedy with a classic horror film, which usually means that both genres have reached the end of the line.

It leaves itself wide open to charges of pretentiousness. Yet "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style.

Although Mr. Chayefsky has written a very contemporary melodramatic farce, his political sympathies have their roots in the liberalism of 20 years ago.

1492 is not a terrible film. Yet because it is without any guiding point of view, it is a lot less interesting than the elaborate physical production that has been given it. Only a very great writer could do justice to all the themes the Columbus story suggests. Ms. Bosch may be a very good researcher, but she's not a very great writer. She can't even squeeze in many relevant facts, much less define the relevance of those she does include.

A Little Romance is a movie that seems to have melted the minds of everyone of any stature connected with it.

Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.

A wild, noisy, sometimes very funny film that eventually becomes as unstuck in its own exuberance as its hero, Billy Pilgrim, the Illium, N. Y., optometrist, is unstuck in time.

Instead of moving the audience, Mr. Goldberg achieves the kind of effect that Jack Benny got when he played his violin. The flesh crawls.

Kafka is opaque without ever being mysterious, frightening or suggestive of anything but movie making. Its chases through dark narrow streets don't create suspense, since nothing is at stake.

There Was A Crooked Man . . . is really a duel between two men, one good, one bad, and it's these smaller, more civilized confrontations, done with irony and wit, that make the film one of the more pleasant things you're likely to see this season.

The problem with comedies as witless as this is that the villains are much more appealing than the good guys. One winds up rooting for the fellows who would tear down the Plaza to put up a 100‐story, glass‐andbrass breadstick.

A flaccid movie version of Jim Harrison's slightly less flaccid 1979 novella...The movie is soft and aimless. Revenge is the kind of film in which subsidiary characters and events are more interesting than anything the movie is supposed to be about. Even the brutality has no shock effect.

With this, his fourth commercially released feature, Mr. Jarmusch again demonstrates his mastery of comedy of the oblique. He seems to see his characters through a telescope, while attending to their talk with some kind of long-range listening device. Everything that is seen and heard is vivid and particular, but decidedly foreign. Meanings are elusive. Themes can be supplied by others. He's also becoming an increasingly fine director of actors.

Wall Street isn't a movie to make one think. It simply confirms what we all know we should think, while giving us a tantalizing, Sidney Sheldon-like peek into the boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and powerful.

Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.

The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.

The movie has some good things, but in the way it has been directed by John Flynn it moves so easily and sort of foolishly toward its violent climax that all the tension within Charlie has long since escaped the film.

It's a movie that contains a certain amount of unseemly gore and makes no sense whatsoever.

With far fewer high spirits than “Animal House,” and only two characters of any interest, Meatballs reveals itself to be a loud, offkey cry for conformism of a most disappointing sort. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing.

One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made.

Norma Rae is a seriously concerned contemporary drama, illuminated by some very good performances and one, Miss Field's, that is spectacular.

An exceptionally clumsy, unpleasant action-melodrama. [1 Aug 1980, p.C12]

Paris, Texas begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out.

Falling in Love is not a bad movie by any means. It's not stupid or gross or cheap. It's been done with taste, but it's the sort of production that, even when it works, which it frequently does, seems too small and trite to have had so much care taken on it.

This 1984 is not an easy film to watch, but it exerts a fascination that demands attention even as you want to turn away from it. That the Orwell tale still works so well - and this version works far better than the 1956 film adaptation - also makes it apparent that the novel was always more cautionary in its intentions than prophetic.

Fast, vivd espionage-betrayal thriller, dandy plot. [24 Sep 1975]

Brubaker is an earnest, right-minded, consistently unsurprising movie about a penologist named Brubaker (Robert Redford), who sets out to reform a single corrupt prison and finds himself bucking an entire system, including the state administration that appointed him to his job. It says a lot about a movie that the only mildly interesting characters in it are those who are corrupt, such as the insurance-selling member of the prison board, played by Murray Hamilton, and a smarmy building contractor, played by M. Emmet Walsh, who attempts to buy Brubaker's neighborly good feelings with a homemade chocolate cake.

The Schrader screenplay, based on an original story by Mr. Schrader and Mr. De Palma, is most effective when it's most romantic, and transparent when it attempts to be mysterious.

Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.

By, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.

How to Beat the High Cost of Living is a feeble house-fly of a comedy that unsuccessfully attempts to make fun of one of the more dismaying problems of our time: inflation.

Miss Denis's mastery of film-making technology, which is something that can be learned, is equaled by her splendid control of narrative, a more elusive talent. She is astonishing. There are no dark corners in the story. Everything that happens is vivid and clear, though subject to the kind of speculation that tantalizes and rewards.

There's very little excitement, but quite a few laughs, all provided by the dialogue contributed by Bert I. Gordon, who wrote the screenplay and then produced and directed it.

What makes it so instructively entertaining is the pivotal character of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannerly, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. [17 Oct 1990]

The dialogue reports funny things instead of showing them. The movie remains in a limbo halfway between the informed anarchy of Monty Python comedy stripped of all social and political satire, and the comparatively genteel comedy of "The Lavender Hill Mob." [15 July 1988, p.C8]

Line by line, the dialogue isn't all that quotable, but there is consistently funny life on the screen. The film's comic timing is nearly flawless.

A cheerful, somewhat vulgar, very cleverly executed comedy about what goes on in a single 10-hour period in a Los Angeles car wash.

It's big, colorful, slightly vulgar, occasionally boring and full of talent not always used to its limits.

Comes on with the seductiveness of an expensive perfume that inevitably evaporates before the night is over. However, though it promises more than it can ever deliver, this classy-looking melodrama is soothing, in the way that luxe can be, as well as redeemingly funny, in part, at least, for not becoming mired in its own darker possibilities.

Miss Peters is funny and charming lip-synching Helen Kane's I Want to Be Bad, and Mr. Martin is something of a revelation as a danceman. The movie, though, is not easy to respond to. It's chilly without being provocative in any intellectual way.

They want to show us everything, to give us our money's worth. In so doing, they've not just opened up the play, they've let most of the life out of it.

Acting of this sort is rare in films. It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer. Were Mr. De Niro less an actor, the character would be a sideshow freak.

The film recreates Toby and Caroline's aimlessness, but without appearing to understand it enough to make it as moving and important as it ought to be.

Tootsie is the best thing that's yet happened at this year end. It's a toot, a lark, a month in the country.

Mr. Penn plays Meserve with terrific elan. There is plausibility in every movement and gesture, and especially in his crafty handsomeness. His Meserve is the sort of man one credits with thoughts when the mind may, in fact, be completely blank.

GREASE is not really the 1950's teen-age movie musical it thinks it is, but a contemporary fantasy about a 1950's teen-age musical—a larger, funnier, wittier and more imaginative-than-Hollywood movie with a life that is all its own. It uses the Eisenhower era — the characters, costumes, gestures and particularly, the music—to create a time and place that have less to do with any real 50's than with a kind of show business that is both timeless and old-fashioned, both sentimental and wise. The movie is also terrific fun.

One may legitimately debate the validity of Malick's vision, but not, I think, his immense talent. Badlands is a most important and exciting film.

It has its charms but not for a minute is it believeable, and it's certainly never embarrassingly moving in the schmaltzy way of such slick Hollywood kidflicks as Paper Moon and even The Champ. [01 Oct 1980, p.19]

A rollicking musical memoir, as much a recollection of the show as of the period, a film that has the charm of a fable and the slickness of Broadway show biz at its breathless best.

It possesses high points you simply don't find in lesser if more consistently funny movies.

An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.

Chan Is Missing is not only an appreciation of a way of life that few of us know anything about; it's a revelation of a marvelous, completely secure new talent.

As free in form as it is generous of spirit.

Mason Gamble, the 7-year-old who plays the title role, won't be any competition for Macaulay Culkin of "Home Alone." He's a handsome boy, but he displays none of the spontaneity that initially made Mr. Culkin so refreshing. He seems to follow direction well, if in a somewhat robotic way.

Willard, which is otherwise a dull movie of no major consequence, is a rather astonishing footnote to a major urban problem.

Silverstein has elected to tell the story of Lord John's survival largely in terms of Sioux rituals relating to such things as wars, weddings, deaths, and even spiritual deliverance. I must admit that I found all this interesting, although I'm the sort of Indian buff and tourist who gets a kick out of watching contemporary Navajos do their rain dances in tennis shoes.

Tremors wants to be funny, but it spends too much time winking at the audience. More than anything else, it looks like the sort of movie that might have been put together so that tourists visiting Universal Studios could see a movie being made.

The visual style is charmingly conventional, as gently reassuring as that of a Donald Duck cartoon, sometimes as romantically pretty as an old Silly Symphony.

Swept Away is less a film about ideas than about previous commitments, for which neither character can be held completely accountable. The enormous appeal of the comedy has to do with the way, briefly, each character, is able to overcome those commitments.

As the gritty, raspy-voiced sergeant, Mr. Eastwood's performance is one of the richest he's ever given. It's funny, laid-back, seemingly effortless, the sort that separates actors who are run-of-the-mill from those who have earned the right to be identified as stars.

It hits a couple of ecstatically funny high points, only to plummet into a bog of second-rate gags, emerging a long time later to engage the audience by the sheer, unstoppable force of the Brooks chutzpah.

Mr. Lee means for Malcolm X to be an epic, and it is in its concerns and its physical scope. In Denzel Washington it also has a fine actor who does for Malcolm X what Ben Kingsley did for “Gandhi.” [18 November 1992]

A good-natured, end-of- the-world B-movie, written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, a new film maker whose sense of humor augments rather than upstages the mechanics of the melodrama.

Movies are not like people who, if they're basically nice and decent, can be liked even if they're not very stimulating company. Movies of that order wear one down. They demand attention without giving much in return - amiability is not enough. This is Vision Quest.

To appreciate it fully, however, one must have a completely uncritical fondness for Kirk Douglas as he acts his heart out in two roles; for picturesque landscapes; for silly plots, and for dialogue that leans heavily on aphorisms too homespun to be repeated in a big-city newspaper.

After Hours is not, ultimately, a satisfying film, but it's often vigorously unsettling.

The Hit' is a disappointing English underworld movie directed by Stephen Frears. Less a film noir than a film gris, partly because almost all of it takes place in sun- drenched Spain and because the characters talk too much. These guys don't have to use guns. All they have to do is open their mouths and bore each other to death.

As played by Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's funniest, most cohesive comedy to date, this Dr. Frankenstein is a marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of beautiful bosoms.

The movie makes no sense as either melodrama or metaphysics, so that its expensive special effects go up in smoke. Literally.

Superman is good, clean, simple-minded fun, though it's a movie whose limited appeal is built in.

Cadillac Man does not stay long in territory pioneered by Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Mr. Levinson. It turns, rather awkwardly, into a hostage-situation comedy featuring a cuckolded young man named Larry (Tim Robbins).

A singularly lumpy sort of movie. The film's most riveting sequence comes at the very beginning, when we see a crucified Jesuit missionary being tossed - cross and all - into the river and carried over the spectacular Iguassu Falls. Nothing that follows, including more pretty scenery and quaint costumes, comes close to equaling the drama of that one sequence - about a character who remains forever anonymous.

Cat's Eye is pop movie making of an extremely clever, stylish and satisfying order.

A peculiar sort of Disney movie in that it's likely to scare the daylights out of the very young while reducing their usually sober-sided elders to unfortunate giggles. The audience in-between may well enjoy the standard spook-movie effects, but I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end.

Network can be faulted both for going too far and not far enough, but it's also something that very few commercial films are these days. It's alive. This, I suspect, is the Lumet drive. It's also the wit of performers like Mr. Finch, Mr. Holden, and Miss Dunaway.

The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.

Lookin' to Get Out is not as bad as Mr. Ashby's Second Hand Hearts though, like that film, it is a showcase in which excellent actors are allowed to make fools of themselves.

To anyone who doesn't share the camera's adoration, this sort of behavior becomes so comic that Rambo turns into something of a camp classic.

The focus of the movie is so wide, and the logistics of the production so heavy, that Oliver himself, dutifully played by 9-year-old Mark Lester, gets flattened out and almost lost, as if he had been run over by a studio bulldozer.

The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.

Thomas Tryon, the actor (The Cardinal), wrote the screen adaptation of his best-selling novel, which is in almost every way more precise, more complex and less ambiguous than the "Summer of '35" sort of movie Robert Mulligan has made from it.

Nothing Miss Close has done on the screen before approaches the richness and comic delicacy of her work as the Marquise. [21 Dec 1988, p.C22]

A Chorus Line is less a movie than an expensive souvenir program.

As a film, Lifeguard is romantic twaddle, but as sociology it's a spontaneous assault on a very American way of life.

Andrew Klavan's screenplay, adapted from a novel by Simon Brett, comes up with funny lines now and then, but it never has any clear idea whether it is a black comedy, a satire or maybe even a psychological study of a serial killer.

Police Story is of principal interest as a souvenir of another culture.

A comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors.

Sometimes funny and, in the way of small-screen entertainment, so perfectly predictable that one could mail in the laughs.

Jo Jo Dancer is a far from great movie. However, there's something revivifying about seeing Mr. Pryor take this flyer in writing, directing and acting in his own work.

Though Coming to America is a romantic comedy the director steers the film more often toward quick, in-and-out comic situations and gags that are only mildly funny. In part this is due to the fact that Mr. Murphy plays the prince with cheerful, low-keyed innocence that is completely legitimate, but is not supported by the short attention span of the screenplay. The romance is tepid.

So entertaining, so flip and so genially irreverent that it seems to announce the return of the great gregarious film maker whose "Nashville" remains one of the classics of the 1970's.

A big-screen blowup of the sort of "I love you, Pop" television play that littered the small screen 25 years ago.

An amiable, $20-million musical. That's a high price to pay for something that is more an expression of good intentions than evidence of sustained cinematic accomplishment. However, because amiability is never in over abundant supply, especially in Hollywood super-productions, the movie can be enjoyed more often than simply tolerated.

A Nightmare on Elm Street puts more emphasis on bizarre special effects, which aren't at all bad.

Hook is overwhelmed by a screenplay heavy with complicated exposition, by what are, in effect, big busy nonsinging, nondancing production numbers and some contemporary cant about rearing children and the high price paid for success.

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is wise and funny and just a little bit scary. Though it's an adaptation, it has the manner of a true original.

You've a right to wonder why anyone would want to work so hard - with such an expenditure of imagination - to transform a play with such a distinctive voice into a movie that sounds like any number of others.

A fascinating, slightly chilly picture — as well as one of the best Preminger films in years.

With its screenplay adapted from Rostand by Mr. Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere, the movie is really memorable, though, only for the Depardieu performance, and for the chance it gives us to hear the original French verse.

Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.

200 Motels is not all bad, but because it's a movie with so many things going on simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting—in actual effect, soporific.

The Brother From Another Planet, set in major part in Harlem, means to be fantastic as well as funny and satiric, and from time to time, it is each of these things. Mostly, though, it's a nice, unsurprising shaggy-dog story that goes on far too long.

It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales.

The screenwriter, who often uses bits of dialogue from the novel, doesn't hesitate to add new material that is completely inappropriate.

Like many album covers, Purple Rain, though sometimes arresting to look at, is a cardboard come-on to the record it contains.

An intelligent, beautifully acted adaptation.

The Toho moviemakers are quite good in building miniature sets, but much of the process photography—matching the miniatures with the full-scale shots—is just bad.

THE RIGHT STUFF, Philip Kaufman's rousing, funny screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book about Project Mercury and America's first astronauts, is probably the brightest and the best rookie/cadet movie ever made, though the rookies and cadets are seasoned pilots and officers.

The members of Mr. Linklater's cast, most of whom are non-professionals, are so amazingly effective that it's hard to believe they didn't make up their own lunacies.

The concerns of French Connection II are not much different from those of old Saturday-afternoon movie serials that used to place their supermen in jeopardy and then figure ways of getting them out. The difference is in the quality of the supermen and in their predicaments.

Naked is as corrosive and sometimes as funny as anything Mr. Leigh has done to date. It's loaded with wild flights of absurd rhetoric and encounters with characters so eccentric that they seem to have come directly from life. Nobody would dare imagine them.

Unlike most sequels, which seem to get bigger, fancier and emptier the further removed they are from their source material, Psycho III has a lean, serviceable, stripped-down quality to it.

Like the lovely, extravagantly overemphasized nineteen-thirties' costumes and production designed by Tony Walton, Murder on the Orient Express is much less a literal re-creation of a type of thirties movie than an elaborate and witty tribute that never for a moment condescends to the subject.

Probably the best teen-agers-in-revolt movie since Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge.

The combination of the graphic if meaningless title, Miss Blair and the incomparably funny Miss Stevens is almost irresistible. I should have resisted more. [05 Jun 1983, p.19]

In place of narrative drive it relies, on the momentum created by ‐ its visual spectacle, its prodigal way with ideas, its wit and its enthusiasm for the lunatic business of making movies.

Mr. Washington and Ms. Choudhury, whose first film this is, work well together. He has a screen heft that gives the film its dramatic point. Her voluptuous presence defines the urgency of the love affair. In terms of wit and plain old good humor, they are each other's equals.

A genial, gently mocking, brilliantly executed spoof that may offend the purists but which should delight the buffs.

A low, bawdy cartoon feature that hasn't forgotten that there still can be something uniquely funny in animated films that exaggerate human actions and emotions (in this case, love, rage, compassion and, especially, lust) to the extraordinary extents available only in cartoons.

Mr. Day-Lewis, Miss Binoche and Miss Olin (who was spectacular in Ingmar Bergman's ''After the Rehearsal'') are surprisingly fine -both modest and intense as lovers whose private lives are defined by public events.

A witty, romantic, psychological horror film and it's almost as rewarding as a successful analysis...The fun is not in logic but watching how Mr. De Palma successfully tops himself as he goes along, and the fun lasts from the sexy, comic opening sequence right through to the film's several endings.

Crichton the director seems to have had more fun with the film than Crichton the writer, whose screenplay can offer us no better explanation for the sudden, bloody robot rebellion than an epidemic of "central mechanism psychosis."

Second Hand Hearts needs far more than a change of title to save it from oblivion. It needs a screenplay that doesn't treat its characters as if they were waste baskets to be filled with prose that any self-respecting writer would hide from his best friend.

As directed by Fred Schepisi and written by Tom Stoppard, The Russia House is confused and dim, far less complex, and even far less fun, than almost any le Carre work yet brought to the screen, excluding The Little Drummer Girl.

The footage dealing with the mechanics of the Nimitz is, in fact, interesting, and there is one quite comic sequence in which several of the Nimitz's jet fighters take on two, totally baffled World War II-vintage Japanese Zeros. As an entertainment film, though, the movie is utter nonsense. [01 Aug 1980, p.C3]

F.I.S.T. is a big movie that benefits more from the accumulation of small, ordinary detail than from any particular wit or inspiration of vision. It's also played with great conviction by its huge cast.

Spaced Invaders should have been funnier than it is. It rambles and has too many poorly defined characters. Also, because most of it takes place at night, it's not easy to tell what is going on sometimes, which will confuse the audience for which it is intended.

Blue City is full of unbelievable, ineptly staged action sequences. It's most offensive, however, for its dialogue, and for the frivolous way it debases the shock value of obscene words. If, in 10 years, we wind up with an utterly colorless language, movies like this will have been at least partly to blame.

Still another, thoroughly depressing demonstration of the extent to which television now dictates the style and the manners of so many of the movies we see in theaters.

This study of the growing pains of the leather jacket‐bobby soxer Brooklyn high school set of 1957 is, by turns, cheerful, confused, juvenile and never fully realized.

Some of the action sequences have been well staged, but they've been dropped into the film so indiscriminately that Jaws 2 never builds to a particular climax. It simply drones on and on and on, like a television movie.

A huge, initially ambivalent but finally adoring, Pop portrait of one of the most brilliant and outrageous American military figures of the last one hundred years.

Hollywood's latest big-budget, high-concept, mass-market reworking of material not entirely fresh, has more endings than Beethoven's Fifth, but it's also packed with surprises, not the least being that it's a smashing work. It's vulgar, violent, funny and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.

Miss Armstrong, who was seen as the second, prettier wife in Alan Alda's ''The Four Seasons,'' is the best thing in the film, though even she seems to be a cross between Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett. Mr. Selleck is, indeed, a handsome actor, but his good looks here have no individual personality, which may be the script's fault.

Mr. De Niro and Mr. Grodin are lunatic delights, which is somewhat more than can be said for the movie, whose mechanics keep getting in the way of the performances. [20 July 1988, p.C15]

A horror film that is less mindless than most in that it is both funny and gross.

A film that satisfies not because it sweeps us off our feet, knocks us into the aisles, provides us with visions of infinity or definitions of God, but because it is precise, intelligent, civilized, and because it never for a moment mistakes its narrative purpose.

Although it has been made with intelligence, is well directed and acted and is in touch with the ways of lower-middle-class American life, it has the sort of predictable outrage and shape of a made-for-television movie. It has suspense but little excitement.

Breathless has a lot of mindless drive, but it's also funny. It's full of knowing quotes from other movies and from literature - William Faulkner in addition to Marvel Comics. It's less a film maker's journey of discovery than the film maker's testimony to his awareness of ''cinema,'' and sometimes it's just too much.

Philippe Mora is the director, but the only name really worth noting is that of Tom Burman, who did the frequently grotesque special effects.

In the case of Plaza Suite, I don't have the feeling that anything much has been lost, but rather that nothing much was ever there.

Midnight Cowboy often seems to be exploiting its material for sensational or comic effect, but it is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42d Street, avoiding the eyes of the drifters, stepping around the little islands of hustlers, and closing your nostrils to the smell of rancid griddles.

Watching Star Trek — the Motion Picture...is like attending your high-school class's 10th reunion at Caesar's Palace. Most of the faces are familiar, but the décor has little relationship to anything you've ever seen before.

The screenplay, by Daniel Petrie Jr. and Jack Baran, has a number of funny lines and situations, but the end result looks fiddled with by people attempting to ''fix'' things.

An earnest but clumsy tribute to the heroism of the American servicemen - mostly officers - who were captured and held prisoner by North Vietnam during the long, desperate undeclared war we now refer to simply as Vietnam.

The entire film is played at such high pitch it may well exhaust audiences that don't come prepared. And, at the heart of the film, there is the mystery of Jake himself, but that is what separates Raging Bull from all other fight movies, in fact, from most movies about anything. Raging Bull is an achievement.

It seems unfinished, not yet thought through. Even the title doesn't quite fit, since the New York City that Vladimir discovers is far more densely populated by Southern blacks, Latin Americans, Western Europeans, Orientals and Indians from India than by Russians. It sounds as if it were one of those titles around which a screenplay was eventually composed.

Blue doesn't seduce the viewer into its very complex, musically formal arrangements. The narrative is too precious and absurd. The interpretation it demands seems dilettantish.

Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Hanks play well together, but the funniest performance in the film is that of Dabney Coleman, as the smut king (who lisps). Somewhat less diverting are the car chases and the time out necessary to explain the throwaway story.

The screenplay is funny but even better are the sight gags that are a kind of inventory of everything Clouseau has been unable to master in his long, irrelevant career.

Any movie that Jacqueline Susann thinks would damage her reputation as a writer cannot be all bad. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn't—which is not to say it is any good.

Though a seriously conceived film about the American experience in Vietnam, Gardens of Stone has somehow wound up having the consistency and the kick of melted vanilla ice cream.

This time, though, Mr. Lynch's conceits are less often pleasurably disorienting than out of focus.

The film conveys a fine sense of place and period, of weather and mood and the precariousness of life, which are things that Mr. Nicholson responds to as an actor. Yet the plot, along with Mr. Brando, keeps intruding and throwing things out of balance.

It seems to me that by describing horror with such elegance and beauty, Kubrick has created a very disorienting but human comedy, not warm and lovable, but a terrible sum- up of where the world is at... Because it refuses to use the emotions conventionally, demanding instead that we keep a constant, intellectual grip on things, it's a most unusual--and disorienting--movie experience.

Gross, unfunny...In adapting it to the screen, Mr. De Palma and Michael Cristofer, who wrote the screenplay, have made a series of wrong decisions that have the effect of both softening the satire and making it seem more uncomfortably racist than the Wolfe original.

Smashingly funny...This To Be or Not to Be scarcely misses a comic beat right from the opening sequence.

It's a marvelous attempt to recreate a kind of farce that, with the notable exceptions of a handful of films by Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder, disappeared after World War II.

The film's mysteriousness is not profound. Anybody who hasn't guessed the killer's identity after 30 minutes should be forced to watch Rising Sun three times a day until Christmas.

It's the achievement of Mr. Malle, the director of Atlantic City, Pretty Baby and a lot of other very fine, conventional movies, that he has successfully turned his two real-life personalities into actors capable of representing themselves.

Some intelligent, sophisticated people have knocked themselves out to transform bland into bland, and they have succeeded to the extent that anyone who fondly remembers the comic strip, or the old movie serial with Buster Crabbe, probably will not feel cheated.

The Lord of the Rings, is both numbing and impressive. Yet it would be difficult to recommend this movie to anyone not wholly absorbed by the uses of motion-picture animation or to anyone not familiar with Tolkien's home-made mythology, which borrows liberally from various Norse myths, the Eddas, the Nibelungs and maybe even Beatrix Potter.

Prophecy is full of lingering lap-dissolves and elegant camera movements that suggest history is being made. Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack music is so grand it could be played at a coronation, and it's so loud that it pierces the ears and threatens the head. None of this fits the movie.

The Grifters moves with swift unsentimental resolve toward a last act as bleak as any in recent American screen literature. In a less skillful work, it would be a downer. The Grifters is so good that one leaves the theater on a spellbound high. [5 Dec 1990]

The screenplay is ridiculous, and Mr. Eastwood's direction of it primitive, which is surprising because he has shown himself capable in such films as ''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' and ''The Gauntlet.''

A big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama with the kind of visual sweep you don't often find in movies anymore.

Mr. Cruise goes through all this nonsense gamely, as if it were an initiation into a fraternity he wants very much to join.

Manufactured comedy of a slick order, depending aImost entirely for its effects on the sight and sound of a bunch of kids behaving as if they were small adults. It's a formula that worked for Our Gang Comedy for many years, and works again here with a bright screenplay by Paul Brickman, based on Bill Lancaster's original characters, and direction of intelligent lightness by Michael Presman.

Even though the mechanics and demands of movie-making slow what should be the furious tempo, this Front Page displays a giddy bitterness that is rare in any films except those of Mr. Wilder. It is also, much of the time, extremely funny

Mr. Lean's Passage to India, which he wrote and directed, is by far his best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter.

Mr. Itami often strains after comic effects that remain elusive. The most appealing thing about Tampopo is that he never stops trying. A funny sensibility is at work here.

Patrick Hasburgh, who makes his feature-film debut as the writer and director of Aspen Extreme, is a ski enthusiast and former instructor who still knows more about skiing than about movies. Even though it runs close to two hours, "Aspen Extreme" remains sort of stretched out and dramatically undeveloped.

The film is superbly acted by Mr. Polanski, Mr. Douglas and Miss Winters, who might not be entirely convincing as a Parisian concierge in a realistic film, but who fits into this nightmare perfectly.

A decently acted, extremely mild romantic comedy that you may think you've seen before, although you haven't.

Nothing in Death Hunt makes a great deal of sense, though the scenery is rugged and the snowscapes beautiful.

The problem is that Wisdom is aggressively boring, either because one can predict everything that's going to happen and exactly how it will look on the screen or because the concept of the film eventually seems even more confused than the title character.

Wolfen is so good-looking that one tends to ignore a certain but very real inner vacuity.

Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy—something very special and eccentric and funny.

Hello Mary Lou has nothing much to do with the original "Prom Night" (1980), except that it's somewhat more entertaining if female nudity, bizarre violence and comically deadpan special effects amuse you...Bruce Pittman, the director, and Ron Oliver, who wrote the screenplay, have constructed the movie as if it were a gourmet banquet for toddlers. From the first course to the last, it's all ice cream.

There's nothing dreadfully wrong with The Dream Team, Howard Zieff's new comedy, except that it's not funny too much of the time. On those occasions when it is funny, the humor less often prompts laughter than mute appreciation of the talents of the principal performers - Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd and Peter Boyle.

A vastly entertaining movie. It's also one of such recognizably serious concerns that you can sink into it with pleasure and count it a cultural achievement.

The dialogue sounds as if it had been gathered by means of microphones hidden in diners, buses, waiting rooms, restrooms, motels and park benches. Sometimes it is hilariously banal, with never a word wasted.

Attempts to be a kind of all American, slapstick Orpheus Ascending, a timeless myth about innocence and corruption told in the sort of outrageous and vulgar terms that Brian De Palma and Robert Downey do much better.

Both Mr. Sellers and Mr. Edwards delight in old gags, and part of the joy of The Pink Panther Strikes Again is watching the way they spin out what is essentially a single routine, such as one fellow's trying, unsuccessfully, to help another fellow out of a lake.

Tepid...A big Punchline problem is that it's impossible to tell the difference between Miss Field's routines that are supposed to be awful, and the awful ones that are supposed to be funny.

It really isn't easy to make a movie as mind-bendingly bad as Best Defense. It takes hard work, a very great deal of money and people so talented that it matters when they fail with such utter lack of distinction.

Looks grand without being overdressed, it is full of feeling without being sentimental. Here’s a film for adults. It’s also about time to recognize that Mr. Ivory is one of our finest directors. [5 November 1993, p. C1]

A terribly gentle if wisecracking comedy about the serious business of growing up.

The film, directed by Joel Silberg in and around Los Angeles, employs a very small story that is meant to be functional but still interrupts the dancing far too often.

There is beauty in Kagemusha but it is impersonal, distant and ghostly. The old master has never been more rigorous. [06 Oct 1980, p.14]

Evil Under the Sun, the latest Agatha Christie whodunit to be given the all-star screen treatment, has nothing but style, but its style goes a long way.

The Bad News Bears Go to Japan isn't the sort of bad movie that angers you. It's sad in the way of something that's been abandoned. It deserved better from the people involved.

Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.

A comic-book movie whose heart is in the right place.

Dog Day Afternoon is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously illplanned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.

A suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit.

The screenplay, by Jerry Belson and Brock Yates, is not so surreally funny as the one for the first film, but funny lines are not what the picture is about. Smokey and the Bandit II is about movement, action, frustration and destruction, and Mr. Needham, one of Hollywood's most successful stunt artists before he became a director, is very good at this sort of thing. Smokey and the Bandit is entertaining in a brainless way.

Though Nela's is a spiritual journey, Mr. Pintilie dramatizes it in the bitter ways of social satire. The movie has the tempo of cabaret theater. It is wildly grotesque, shocking and sometimes very funny. The details are vivid.

Class Action won't put you to sleep. Yet it vanishes from the memory as fast as anything dreamed in the conventional manner.

Gremlins is far more interested in showing off its knowledge of movie lore and making random jokes than in providing consistent entertainment. Unfortunately, it's funniest when being most nasty.

For all of the laughter in "Traffic," there are moments when the banal utilitarianism of the super-highway is seen as a work of extraordinary art.

Cocktail, which opens today at the Cinema 2 and other theaters, is ''Saturday Night Fever'' without John Travolta, the Bee-Gees and dancing. It is an inane romantic drama that only a very young, very naive bartender could love. How it got that way is difficult to understand.

There are a number of hefty laughs scattered throughout "Noises Off," Peter Bogdanovich's screen version of Michael Frayn's English stage farce. Yet there are nowhere near as many as the source material deserves and Mr. Bogdanovich's cast might otherwise have earned.

The dialogue is often brutally comic, and individual scenes cut deep. Yet the narrative finally becomes almost impenetrable. The focus that the director would have demanded of another writer is lacking here.

Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom, terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Federico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point.

As adapted by Miss Henley and directed by Bruce Beresford, this Crimes of the Heart has been turned into a majestic, totally humorless star turn for three individually splendid, collectively lost actresses -Diane Keaton (Lenny), Jessica Lange (Meg) and Sissy Spacek (Babe).

If you have the Clouzot habit, as I have, there's very little that Mr. Edwards and Mr. Sellers could do that would make you find the movie disappointing.

Though there is a near vaccuum at the center of the film, "Sommersby" is never boring, largely because of Ms. Foster's beautifully self-possessed presence.

As written by a gang of three totally confused writers and directed, without apparent style, by J. Lee Thompson, it's a mystery-horror movie with a fatal flaw - the denouement, in which a half-dozen grisly murders are explained, requires almost as much footage as the murders themselves.

Exorcist II begins by looking foolish and slowly becomes a straightfaced film of the absurd.

This is half-heartedly satiric material that's been directed by Mr. Reynolds as if it were broad, knock-about comedy sometimes and, at other times, as if it were meant to evoke pathos, which it never does.

Frank Pierson has written and directed a melodrama about three generations of gypsies that is all color and no substance.

William Lustig is the film's director, and Joe Spinell, who plays the maniac, also collaborated on the screenplay (with C.A. Rosenberg) and wrote the original story. He is terrible in all capacities, though his performance is more immediately objectionable. Watching him act like a psychopathic killer with a mommy-complex is like watching someone else throw up.

Not only the best movie to feature an Egyptian blowgun in several years, but also one of the few really stylish and entertaining American movies of 1985.

The performances are very, very bad, and the mountains boring.

A fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film.

It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.

An often comically inept, unsuccessfully vicious nonthriller about a beautiful young woman, her live-in lover and the crazy Peeping Tom who pursues the young woman neither wisely nor well.

Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact.

Barry Lyndon is another fascinating challenge from one of our most remarkable, independent-minded directors.

The action and the violence of The Getaway are supported by no particular themes whatsoever. The movie just unravels.

Though the body count is high, all of the people killed are faceless or only minor characters, until the end. It's as if the movie were saying that lethal violence is acceptable (and fun) as long as the victims - like the victims of guided missiles and high-altitude bombing - remain anonymous. Any comedy that allows the mind to ponder high-altitude bombing is in deep trouble.

It's the none too promising assumption of See No Evil, Hear No Evil that one physical disability complements another, and that Wally and Dave are made for each other. Yet, against all odds, the movie goes on to prove it with a lot of good, unlikely humor that is often not in the best of taste.Mr. Pryor and Mr. Wilder have never worked better together, possibly because they are playing characters who, being blind and deaf, are not especially funny to begin with, but who also have a certain amount of intelligence.

A good, substantial horror film with such a sense of humor that it never can quite achieve the solemnly repellent peaks of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."

Has the manners and the gadgetry of a sci-fi adventure film but is, at heart, an engagingly mean, cruel, nasty, funny send-up of television. It's not quite Network, but then it also doesn't take itself too seriously.

It seems to want to be a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse suspense melodrama, which demands a lot more ingenuity than Mr. Reiner or Mr. Goldman ever muster. Misery is just good enough that one wishes it were far better. The ideas are there, but they become lost in the heavy-handed treatment.

The film itself is invigorating - written, directed, and acted with enormous insight and comic elan. [27 Sept 1991]

Alien 3 belongs to that branch of fantasy comics, best exemplified by the "Road Warrior" movies, in which the iron and space ages meet for dizzy results.

The Heartbreak Kid occasionally goes for laughs without shame (which is what has always bothered me about Simon's brand of New York comedy), but behind the laughs there is, for a change, a real understanding of character — which is something that I suspect, can be attribued to Miss May.

A couple of sequences in the middle of the movie just mark time, but usually everything works, to make Nashville the most original, provocative high‐spirited film Mr. Altman has yet given.

An immensely entertaining movie -- a topical melodrama that manipulates our emotional responses and appeals to our best prejudices in such satisfying ways that it is likely to be mistaken as a work of fine -- rather than popular -- movie art.

A good deal more tolerable than any such gimmick movie has a right to be.

A surprisingly cheesy horror film to come from Mr. Carpenter (''Halloween,'' ''Escape From New York,'' among others), a director whose work is usually far more efficient and inventive.

A comedy so lazily hip and so laid back that it often seems to be asleep.

The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.

Mr. Cassavetes's use of exaggerated slapstick gestures to underscore the loneliness and fears of his characters is more interesting in theory than funny or moving in actual fact.

An enjoyably hokey, big-budget theatrical film with a lot of kicks and the soul of a television movie. It's exactly what it announces itself to be and won't offend (or surprise) anyone...Although "Dragon" has few surprises, it is an entertainingly predictable enterprise.