Vincent Canby

Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose.

A little bit of Into the Night is funny, a lot of it is grotesque and all of it has the insidey manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening rooms.

Class of 1984 is sort of crudely funny. The movie's idea of punk culture is also picturesque. But it quickly gets worse and worse until it achieves a degree of awfulness that, though rare, isn't much fun.

Exhuasting without being much fun.

Funny Farm is good-natured even when it's not funny...As a comedy style, it has the impatience of a child who plants radish seeds and then pulls up the first tiny sprouts to see how they're doing.

These sequences—the dogfights over Dover, the disintegration of planes in mid-air, the graceful tactics of evasion—are more than just technically stunning. They also are beautiful, in the completely impersonal way that the spectacle of machines—working well and seemingly with wills of their own—can be beautiful. Unfortunately, something less than one-third of the film takes place in the air.

Night of the Living Dead is a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farm house by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.

The movie is mostly a series of automobile chases through Los Angeles, but there is also some humor.

Silent Running is no jerry-built science fiction film, but it's a little too simple-minded to be consistently entertaining.

Frogs, which is not to be confused with The Birds for an instant, is an end-of-the-world junk movie, photographed rather prettily in Florida and acted by Milland as if he were sight-reading random passages from the dictionary.

Gene Kelly, who directed two classic musicals with Stanley Donen, here acts like a caretaker of a big, valuable property. He and Michael Kidd, his choreographer, have protected everything Gower Champion gave the original, and added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.

Just Another Girl on the IRT means to be instructive about teen-age pregnancies, but what it's saying is none too coherent.

The three stars are good actors, but they have nothing much to work with. Their biggest challenge is to make the audience believe they are blood relatives, a question that would be quickly dismissed if the script were more compelling.

Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.

Midway solemnly cross-cuts between the war councils, chart rooms and communications offices on the American side and those on the Japanese side, with characters, who often have to be identified by subtitles, laboriously trying to give us all of the exposition necessary to make the battle coherent. There's no way to act such roles.

Most of the time, Peggy Sue Got Married is either underdeveloped or simply not thought through. The way the film gets Peggy Sue into and out of the past is no less lame than the explanation for Bobby Ewing's recent resurrection in "Dallas." So much key information is missing or left uncertified or undramatized that the film appears to have been edited by termites.

Manages to be both prissy and prurient at the same time, as well as goofily romantic and nasty. To this extent, I suppose, it is an accurate reflection of Miss Hinton's sentimental fiction about earnest, inarticulate young readers.

Though special-effects experts in Japan and around the world have vastly improved their craft in the last 30 years, you wouldn't know it from this film.

The direction by Michael Caton-Jones, the Englishman whose first theatrical feature was Scandal, is undistinguished here, but the material is not great.

At its best, Black Rain has the glitzy quality of an extremely long and clever television commercial. One can't be sure what is being sold, but the eye isn't bored.

Wes Craven's Swamp Thing wants desperately to be funny and, from time to time, it is. However, you might wish it would trust the audience to discover the humor for itself.

Mr. Brickman, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay (with Thomas Baum), has a real gift for eccentric comedy and characters. The Manhattan Project, with its vaguely populist leanings, isn't crazy enough. Mr. Brickman fails to make big issues comprehensible. He just makes them small.

It contains too many show-down scenes, too much raw material that hasn't been refined, and more brutality than either the movie or the audience can make dramatic sense of. Yet it also contains a magnificent performance by Jessica Lange in the title role. Here is a performance so unfaltering, so tough, so intelligent and so humane that it seems as if Miss Lange is just now, at long last, making her motion picture debut.

It is an intelligent movie, but interesting only in the context of his other works.

The plot, which more or less prompts the gags without interfering with them, has something to do with a competition between the two police academies to see which one will survive a state-decreed budget cut. It's perfectly serviceable.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF, a Western period farce about a town-taming supersheriff, is something designed for sensibilities shaped by "Petticoat Junction" and "Green Acres."

A nonsensical, Hollywood-made, R-rated adventure-fantasy set in a primeval past about usurped kingdoms, erring knights, recently awakened ogres, distressed princesses and various hangers-on.

Another Stakeout is made for the kind of person whom television drives out of the house to the movies but who doesn't want surprises when he arrives at the theater. It's big-screen television fare.

Should it survive—and I suspect it will — it will be largely because of the restrained, affectingly comic performance of Peter O'Toole in the title role. Everything else in this British public-school romance is either out of symmetry or out of date.

Too superficially knowing to be a camp classic, but it's an unintentionally hilarious mixture of muddled moralizing and all-too-contemporary self-promotion.

The narrative unfolds in a series of short, sometimes enigmatic scenes that have the effect of a series of simple declarative sentences. They describe the action without ever interpreting it. After a while, one realizes that there really isn't an awful lot to interpret.

Going in Style, a first commercial feature written and directed by Martin Brest, means to be both moving and comic, but though the cast is headed by three fine actors, two of whom, Mr. Burns and Mr. Carney, are also extremely funny men, it never elicits any emotional response more profound than curiosity.

The Great White Hope is one of those liberal, well-meaning, fervently uncontroversial works that pretend to tackle contemporary problems by finding analogies at a safe remove in history.

Stay Hungry, the new film directed by Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens), isn't all bad. It just seems that way when it pretends to be more eccentric than it is and to have more on its mind than it actually does.

Mr. Rourke and Mr. Johnson handle their roles with more ease and humor than can be accommodated by a movie so stuffed with mindless fistfights, gunfights, helicopter chases, explosions and leaps from tall buildings.

The dialogue is mostly composed of rude variations on ''eek,'' ''ugh'' and ''I'd like to sleep with you this evening.''

Too much of the film seems unfinished. Almost every four scenes could be condensed into one. The comedy doesn't build to any climax. It just rolls on, with Ms. Hawn doggedly working to create some sense of oddball fun. The characters, as written, are as flimsy as Newton's dream house, which, even though based on a House Beautiful award-winning design, looks less habitable than a billboard. Even its brand-new furnishings are tacky.

So flecked with minor dishonesties that you come to recognize it as a sort of Formica Western, something that amounts to a parody of the real thing.

The movie was directed by Jack Gold from a screenplay by John Briley and it's fuzzy on a number of key issues that possibly could have made it fun, had they been sharper.

Mr. Donner has obvious difficulty coordinating the various elements of the overall vision.

Pat Garrett and Billy the kid suggest either that he (Peckinpah) has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.

It's not that Oliver and Company is not up to par. It actively denies its own unique heritage. [18 Nov 1988, p.C8]

Chaplin is to serious biography, even to Mr. Attenborough's Gandhi, what unfortified cornflakes are to real food. It's slick packaging around what is mostly warm air.

The special effects aren't bad, and there are fewer decapitations than in Conan the Barbarian. Mr. Fleischer seems to want this film to be funnier than was the first one, directed by John Milius, but Mr. Schwarzenegger, a body builder who can lift freight trains, can't easily get his tongue into his cheek.

Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.

Mr. Boorman takes these myths very seriously, but he has used them with a pretentiousness that obscures his vision.

It's not giving away state secrets to report that Rocky finds that success has made him fat and that to triumph again, he has to learn to be ''hungry.'' Rocky's problem is thus not that of America in the 80's but more like America in the affluent 60's and early 70's.

The scenery is pretty but the movie never makes one wish to be in it. Mr. Russell, a good, reliable actor, prompts a few smiles as the raffish, impossibly self-assured sailor who is always half tight. Mr. Short and Ms. Place also are attractive in spite of the dim material.

The film, written by John Elder and directed by Terence Fisher, is not without its intentional giggles. Compared with "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein," however, it is very straight and solemn, chock full of the old horror film values we don't see much of any more.

The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.

As cheerful and painless as not going to the dentist.

As in his last film, "Sorcerer," Mr. Friedkin seems bent on supplying us with more sociological information than is entirely necessary, whereas more information about the heist itself would have been welcome.

Airport, the film version of Arthur Hailey's novel, is the sort of movie most people mean when they say Hollywood doesn't make movies the way it used to. This isn't just because Airport resembles any number of old Grand Hotel movies. Rather it's because it evokes our nostalgic feelings, not only for the innocence of old movies but also for the innocent old times in which we saw them.

Because both Miss Redgrave and Miss. Jackson possess identifiable intelligence, Mary, Queen of Scots is not as difficult to sit through as some bad movies I can think of. It's just solemn, well-groomed and dumb.

Considering the dreary circumstances, the performances are quite good, especially those of Mr. Scott, who can do this sort of thing before breakfast; Timothy Hutton, an Oscar winner for Ordinary People; Sean Penn, as the one cadet at Bunker Hill with a grain of sense; Tom Cruise, as a murderously gung-ho cadet, and Evan Handler, as a cadet who remains a humane civilian at heart.

Such a vulnerable movie that if it were a little less sappy, one might feel compelled to protect it, as if it were someone under 7 or over 65 -- that portion of the public for which it is intended.

The sort of comedy that leaves you exhausted, though not from laughing.

Valiant Southern sheriff. Effective, unsurprising.

Like "Blood Simple," it's full of technical expertise but has no life of its own... The direction is without decisive style. [11 Mar 1987, p.C24]

Though Mr. Hanson ("Bad Influence," "The Bedroom Window") is a slick movie maker, he is not an especially persuasive one here.

A silly, jumbo-size sequel to the original film adaptation of Arthur Hailey's Airport.

In 9 1/2 Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries.[21 Feb 1986, p.C17]

Zorro, the Gay Blade, which was directed by Peter Medak (''The Ruling Class'' and ''The Changeling'') and written by Hal Dresner, has some of the slapdash bounce of Bob Hope's long-ago Paramount comedies. Though it doesn't have the authoritative timing and leering presence of Mr. Hope, it has its own careless charm and an appealing tolerance for jokes that aren't wildly funny.[24 July 1981, p.16]

Mr. Mann may well become a very good theatrical film maker but, among other things, he's going to have to learn how to edit himself, to resist the temptation to allow dialogue that is colorful to turn, all of a sudden, into deep, abiding purple. Time after time scenes start off well and slip into unintentionally comic excess.

The movie is extremely long (two hours and 34 minutes) and so slow that by the end you feel as if you've been standing up even if you've been sitting down.

Peter Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, who adapted Joe David Brown's novel, have set out to make a bittersweet comedy that is both in the style of thirties movies and about the thirties. They evoke the time (1936) and the place (rural Kansas and Missouri) so convincingly that their rather sweet formula story seems completely inadequate, even fraudulent.

It's a shapeless mass of film stock containing some brilliant moments and a lot more that are singularly uninspired.

Is Blue Collar an action film or a meditation upon the American Dream? I suspect it wants to be both though it's not very serious at being either.

The revelation of Lipstick is another Hemingway, first name Mariel, Margaux's 14-year-old sister, who plays her sister in the film. As the chief witness to the events within the movie, and its ultimate victim, she gives an immensely moving, utterly unaffected performance that shows up everything else as a calculated swindle.

Mr. Levinson, who both wrote and directed Diner, the small, exquisitely realized comedy about growing up aimless in Baltimore, here seems to be at the service of other people's decisions. Though entertaining in short stretches, The Natural has no recognizable character of its own.

The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly.

What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't time for actors to develop anything much in the way of plausibility of characterization.

It's full of the old Meyer preoccupations — insatiable women, impotent men, lonely desert landscapes in which the promise of sex is the only reliable compass. Yet something has been lost. Could it be innocence?

Prom Night is a comparatively genteel hybrid, part shock melodrama, like Halloween, and part mystery, though it's less a whodunit than a who's-doing-it.

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 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.

Stir Crazy is an energetic but spiritless shambles.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The idea is funnier than the execution. Miss Goldberg is only funny when she is being foul-mouthed, which seems rude since no one else is allowed to respond in kind or degree.

Bustin' Loose is not unbearable, though a soft-hearted Richard Pryor is not a terribly funny Richard Pryor.

Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.

I don't automatically object to contemporary allusions, but I prefer to find them myself, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller is so busy pointing them out to us that the effect is to undercut its narrative drive and the dignity of its fiction.

The Fog is constructed of random diversions. There are too many story lines, which necessitate so much cross-cutting that no one sequence can ever build to a decent climax. The movie looks quite pretty but prettiness of this sort is beside the point in such a film.

It's very easy to make it sound funnier than it ever is. Like ''Caddyshack'' and ''National Lampoon's Vacation,'' which Mr. Ramis also directed, and like ''Animal House'' and ''Ghostbusters,'' which he also wrote in part, Club Paradise is full of funny ideas that are never adequately developed. The best it can offer are successful one-liners....The movie is painless, and everybody associated with it is good company, but considering the obvious effort and the expense that went into it, the result should have been much, much better.

The screenplay is stitched together from variations on cliches used by or about the medical community.

It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.

A mushy movie with occasional, isolated moments of legitimate comedy, all provided by Mr. Scott with an assist by Mr. Goldman, whose sense of humor seems to surface in peripheral incidents only.

It's not that the movie runs out of steam long before it has gone on for two hours and 33 minutes, but that we have figured it out and become increasingly dumbfounded.

There is something eerily disconnected about Heaven Can Wait. It may be because in a time of comparative peace, immortality — at least in its life-after-death form — doesn't hold the fascination for us that it does when there's a war going on, as there was in 1941 when Here Comes Mr. Jordan was released and became such a hit. Or perhaps we are somewhat more sophisticated today (though I doubt it) and comedies about heavenly messengers and what is, in effect, a very casual kind of transubstantiation seem essentially silly.

That The Mirror Crack'd never builds up much momentum has less to do with Guy Hamilton's direction and the performances than with the screenplay by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, which promises more sophistication than it ever delivers.

Scrooged works in fits and starts. The mundane demands of the sentimental story keep interrupting what are, essentially, revue sketches, a few of which are hilarious.

Cahill, United States Marshal was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. Perhaps recognizing the new limitations of their star, they spend a good deal of time trying to turn a conventional Western into a children-in-peril movie.

Raggedy Man is something like a country-and-western ballad that relates a supposedly sad, melodramatic story but whose simple, repetitive, upbeat rhythms effectively deny the awfulness of the events being sung about.

Bride of Re-Animator is less a sequel to the critically praised 1985 horror film Re-Animator than a rehash based on the same H. P. Lovecraft stories.

The symbolism here is dream-book basic.

The film has no consistent vision. Even worse, it's not very funny.

Homicide, which refers to metaphorical as well as literal murder, may be Mr. Mamet's most personal and deeply felt work. It's also his most blunt and despairing. Both "House of Games" and "Things Change" deal with conspiracies of some sort. Yet the scam that is the center of this film is unconvincing.

An elaborately produced, mostly charmless adventure-comedy that intends to make fun of a kind of romantic fiction that's one step removed from what the movie is all about.

Strong, stinging triangle of two Vietnam vets and one wife.

The River has a meticulously detailed physical production and, from time to time, is acted with passion by its cast. Yet its ideas are so profoundly muddled that the film must run mainly on sentimentality.

The Fury was directed by Brian De Palma in what appears to have been an all-out effort to transform the small-scale, Grand Guignol comedy of his Carrie into an international horror/spy/occult mind-blower of a movie. He didn't concentrate hard enough, though.

Tank is as immediately forgettable as a lesser, made-for-television movie.

It's neither funny nor solemn. It has the personality not of a particular movie but of a product, of something arrived at by corporate decision.

Death Wish is so cannily fabricated that it sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger. Yet it's a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.

A no-frills, no-imagination reworking of the story about the ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy.

Though the new Robin Hood observes all of the classic confrontations that keep the tale alive, the film winds up as a mixture of listless adventure, wispy comedy and what is meant to pass for social realism.

The only people who emerge from this precious nonsense smelling good are Richard MacDonald, the English production designer, and Sven Nykvist, the Swedish cameraman.

Even though American Flyers is a fatal disease movie involving a couple of bike-racing brothers, it's the film - and not any character - that dies as you watch it.

It is funny, unpretentious and fast-paced. It has a kind of comicbook appreciation for direct action and no time whatsoever for mysticism or for scenery for its own sake, though most of it was shot in Morocco and is fun to look at.

Experiencing it is like watching a 10-ton canary as it attempts to become airborne. It lumbers up and down the runway tirelessly, but never once succeeds in getting both feet off the ground at the same time. The spectacle is amusing in isolated moments but, finally, exhausting.

Every now and then a film comes along of such painstaking, overripe foolishness that it breaks through the garbage barrier to become one of those rare movies you rush to see for laughs. The clichés were everywhere, but always just slightly out of place and inappropriate.

The best things about Creepshow are its carefully simulated comic-book tackiness and the gusto with which some good actors assume silly positions. Horror film purists may object to the levity even though failed, as a lot of it is.

A busy, bewildering, exceedingly jokey science-fiction film that looks like a Star Wars spinoff made in an underdeveloped galaxy.

In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat.

TWENTIETH Century-Fox knew exactly what it was doing when it decided to open Modern Problems at theaters all over New York on Christmas Day, without advance screenings for the press. It's not that Modern Problems is so bad, though it is incredibly sloppy.

There's no shortage of talent in The Frisco Kid, but it's the wrong talent for the wrong material.

A phony, attitudinizing, self-indulgent mess, a multimillion-dollar B (for boring) picture with the ear of a cauliflower, the heart of a hustler and the soul of a used-car salesman.

Something Wild is often "Something Wrong."

To make a long story short, the film ends on a note that equally serves Great Wishing Star, the Care Bears, free enterprise and redemption. Very young kids may love this, but anybody over the age of 4 might find it too spooky.

The movie fails mostly because it doesn't trust the audience to do any of the work. What the dialogue doesn't carefully explain or predict is explained or predicted by ominous music and special effects. The movie seems to be playing to itself.

Cute is the operative word for the movie, which stars some good actors doing material that is not super.

Truly, Madly, Deeply should be enchanting, but it isn't. Everyone pushes too hard, especially Mr. Minghella, the writer and director. There are a few amusing lines and a lot of terrible ones, including Nina's overwrought response, early in the film, when her sister wants to borrow Jamie's cello: "It's like asking me to give you his body!"

A couple of professional actors, Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine, head the cast, but the film looks nonprofessional in every other respect.

Plausibility is not always important, but in a film as bereft of distinctive style and wit as Coma, it helps to believe in something. It can even help if one is offended. The aftereffect of Coma is a catlike yawn, benign and bored.

Cross of Iron is Mr. Peckinpah's least interesting, least personal film in years, a hysterically elaborate, made-in-Yugoslavia war spectacle, the work of international financiers and a multinational cast, most of whom are supposed to be Germans although they sound like delegates to an international PEN convention.

The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.

Airport '77 looks less like the work of a director and writers than like a corporate decision.

Mr. Brooks has a couple of major defects to be successful in this kind of project. He is a man with no great feeling for comedy of any sort, and his reactions to the lunacies of contemporary life are trivial.

Loveliness, I'm afraid, is really what this movie is all about.

It's the sort of picture that never wants to concede what it's about. It is, however, enchanted by the sound of its own dialogue, which is vivid without being informative or even amusing on any level.

With the exception of Miss D'Angelo and Lauren Hutton and Elizabeth Ashley, who make cameo appearances, almost everything in Paternity is tired and perfunctory. This is especially true of Mr. Reynolds.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is as aimless as its dimly seen characters, who talk a lot of dreadful, cute-tough dialogue but are never recognizable except as the actors who play them. Even that factor isn't much help in enjoying the film.

The surfing footage is fairly routine until the film's climax, a contest featuring some spectacular shots of surfers seen beneath the overhang of breaking waves. Otherwise, the surfing, writing, direction and performances are of a caliber to interest only undiscriminating adolescents.

It's a collection of occasionally vivid but mostly unfathomable incidents in which people are introduced and then disappear with the unexplained suddenness of victims of mob murders. [U.S. theatrical release]

Gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly.

It's not a question of too little, too late, but of too much, too long.

Big, expensive, ultimately ridiculous movie that appears to have been constructed to be a Love Story on wheels.

A big, expensive Western that doesn't contain one moment that might be called genuine.

Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.

An American Tail looks good but the tale itself, as conceived by David Kirschner for the screenplay by Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss, is witless if well-meaning. It's mostly bland, though every now and then it rises to express its own brand of kiddie-bigotry.

Sneakers is jokey without being funny, breathless without creating suspense, in part because of the feeble plot.

At its best, Light Sleeper is merely theoretical. Most of the time, though, it is artificial and laughably unbelievable. Even the dark, gritty Manhattan locations don't add authenticity.

La Cage aux Folles is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes.

The movie proceeds at the pace of a child reluctant to go to bed. It dawdles over irrelevant details and grows sleepier and sleepier until it seems to be snoozing, though still standing up.

This one is a cut-rate Gremlins, about some small, nasty creatures brought forth by a young man dabbling in the occult.

Howard Franklin's screenplay plays less like a feature film than like the pilot for a failed television series about New York policemen.

Like the novel, the movie means to be trendy but it is out of touch, though not exactly out of date. It has no recognizable center of interest, no anchor for our attention. It's a series of whoopee-cushion gags...More than anything else, The Hotel New Hampshire is exhausting.

Even when the material is feeble, as it is here, Mr. Dangerfield can sometimes be funny, a gravelly-voiced comic confusion of emotional insecurities laced with aggressive tendencies.

An inept science-fiction film from George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh man who established himself as the Grandma Moses of exurban horror films with The Night of the Living Dead.

The movie finally is never very convincing. Even the special effects aren't great. Mr. Connery, however, wears the movie as if it were a favorite old hat. He makes it look good.

Nothing in Switch is that plausible or compelling. Any movie that depends on the presence of either the Devil or God is asking for trouble, and Switch has them both.

The film wants to be honest (and in its cruelties, it is), but the operative sensibility is that of a sitcom world. The characters aren't necessarily idealized, but they are flat and uninteresting. The material is lugubrious. The only seemingly spontaneous moment comes at the very end, which is too late.

The three actresses make an attractive team, but neither the screenplay, by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick, nor the director, Mr. Higgins, uses them very effectively. It's clearly a movie that began as someone's bright idea, which then went into production before anyone had time to give it a well-defined personality.

Miss Applegate is charming when the screenplay allows her to slow down. Working against her is the director, Stephen Herek, who pushes every gag so hard and fast that he seems to be keeping up with a laugh track only he can hear.

As directed by Mr. Ross, True Colors is dreary, humorless, heavy-handed and self-important.

Madonna, left to her own devices and her own canny pace, is a very engaging comedian, and the screenplay, by Andrew Smith and Ken Finkleman, contains a lot of raffishly funny ideas that get lost in the busyness of the physical production.

Sweet Charity, the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, has been so enlarged and so inflated that it has become another maximal movie: a long, noisy and, finally, dim imitation of its source material.

Under Fire, which was written by Ron Shelton and Clayton Frohman, from a story by Mr. Frohman, means well but it is fatally confused.

The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.

Except for Mr. Lloyd, the film is so sweet-natured and bland that it is almost instantly forgettable.

Watching the film is like listening to someone use a lot of impressive words, the meanings of which are just wrong enough to keep you in a state of total confusion, but occasionally right enough to hold your attention. What is he trying to say? It takes a little while to realize that maybe the speaker not only doesn't know but doesn't even care to think things out.

There are some pleasant things in Saint Jack, but there are few surprises, except for the fact that either the movie's editor or Mr. Bogdanovich, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Howard Sackler and Paul Theroux (based on the novel by Mr. Theroux), hasn't found a simple way to indicate the passage of time.

It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.

The events in ''Manon of the Spring'' are no more wildly melodramatic than those in ''Jean de Florette'' but, without the indoctrination provided by ''Jean,'' the second film functions as a mean-spirited review of the first.

The film is technically sophisticated and emotionally retarded.

I'm told by someone whose opinion I respect that the novel was very moving and very sad. The movie is not. It's science-fiction without gadgets, a horror film without thrills.

Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting. Most of the time they aren't.

The Lawn Mower Man depends mostly on a lot of colorful video-game-like special effects. They are very loud but, after a while, the noise and the lights induce a torpor that is quite soothing.

Up the Academy sets out to offend almost everybody, including women, blacks, homosexuals, Arabs, the military, and so on, but they've all been more efficiently offended by other, better movies.

The movie, which directed by Alan J. Pakula, never rewards the attention we give it with anything more substantial than a few minor shocks.

Mr. Frye's initial conceits are good ones, but the film's humor somehow gets sopped up by the spongy writing and direction. The characters are fuzzily realized. The dialogue is lame and the continuity so shaky that one entire subplot sinks in confusion.

The movie seems to have been planned, written, acted, shot and edited by people who were constantly being overruled by other people. It's totally lifeless.

The movie plows through one outrageous sequence to the next with the momentum of a freight train.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

White Nights is only tolerable when Mr. Baryshnikov is on screen, especially when he is dancing alone or with Mr. Hines, with whom he does a couple of ballet-tap numbers that are of an order of excellence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

The most offputting thing about such canny, tear-stained movies as The Champ is not their naïveté but their unholy sophistication. These movies don't mean to deal with the world as it really is, but as it should be, a place where there's no pile-up of emotional garbage too big that it can't be washed clean by a good cry.

Like Faces, which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense. Husbands, however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long.

From the moment you read the ads for Tora! Tora! Tora! ("The Most Spectacular Film Ever Made!”), you are aware that you're in the presence of a film possessed by a lack of imagination so singular that it amounts to a death wish.

Steel Magnolias is pop entertainment of an especially condescending, superficial sort. Its bitchiness and greeting-card truisms are made no more palatable by the fact that Mr. Harling probably wrote it with as much sincerity and passion as Mr. Shepard put into "Fool for Love."

The story, as well as Peter Yates's direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innarcent, but the underwater sequences are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling. The shore‐based melodrama is as badly staged as any I've seen since Don Schain's “The Abductors” (1972), which is to remember incompetence of stunning degree.

The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.

The Last Emperor is like an elegant travel brochure. It piques the curiosity. One wants to go. Ultimately it's a let-down.

The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was...Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing, and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems.

With the exception of Mr. Strasberg and Mr. Levene, the actors are as hysterical as their material. The screenplay has one funny exchange. Other than that, the screenplay and the direction are a complete muddle.

1941 is less comic than cumbersome, as much fun as a 40-pound wrist-watch.

This "Prelude to a Kiss" is not only without charm and wit, but it's also clumsily set forth: many people seeing it may wonder what, in heaven's name, is going on.

The most depressing thing about this Godard work is that it seems so tired, familiar and out of date. The movie's 1960's-ish worship of film as an end in itself, which was a mark of so many earlier, more ebullient Godard movies, now is lifeless.

The members of the cast are undercut by both material and direction.

The movie can't make up its mind whether it's a lighthearted comedy, set in what appears to be a posh New England-style prep school just outside Chicago, or a romantic drama about a teen-age boy who has a torrid affair with his roommate's mother. Either way it's pretty awful.

As an actress (Derek) displays the sort of fausse naivete that is less erotic than perfunctorily calculated, in the manner of an old-fashioned, pre-porn-era stripteaser who might have started her act dressed like Heidi. This isn't Tarzan, the Ape Man. It's ''Little Bo Peep.''..The kind of movie that might seem funny when seen after several martinis. Viewed stone-sober, it's a movie of more squirms than screams.

The only thing The Bedroom Window seems to be about is movie making - that is, it's about putting pieces of film together to create momentary effects that needn't signify anything at all. Sometimes this is called ''pure cinema.'' Sometimes, in fact, it's pure nonsense.

In Twins, which is supposed to be funny, the former Mr. Universe and pint-sized Danny DeVito play twins, the result of a genetic experiment that went awry. To the extent that Twins is carried by anybody, it is carried by Mr. DeVito. Mr. Schwarzenegger is dead weight. [9 Dec 1988, p.C18]

The title character in the new horror film titled Leprechaun is supposed to be fiendish but, though the movie's body count is respectable, he seems to be no more than dangerously cranky. That may be because the setting is rural North Dakota, which doesn't suit leprechauns, or because the screenplay and direction are amateurish, which doesn't suit films of any kind. [09 Jan 1993, p.17]

Three Men and a Cradle is almost totally charmless. It's funny in the way of someone who, in attempting to explain a joke, thoroughly destroys the humor, which, I assume, is mostly the fault of Coline Serreau, who wrote and directed it.

This is a ridiculous mishmash of a movie for people who never grew up, which is not so say it's for children. One would think that Mr. Fonda and Mr. Oates had better things to do, but perhaps not. American movie production is in a bad state.