White Nights

The director, Taylor Hackford, doesn't have the cinematic savvy to sustain so many tensions in a meaningful way; and the screenplay strays far over the line between incisive political comment and heavy-handed Red-baiting. Read full review

White Nights is too ponderous to have the pizzazz of trash and too dumb to have the insight of art - it's a lumbering behemoth of a film in which the extraordinary talent of its one authentic star, Mikhail Baryshnikov, is exploited in a Cold War cartoon that suggests a musical adaptation of Ayn Rand's anti- Soviet novel, We The Living. [22 Nov 1985]

Pic shies away from the world of classical dance, personified by leading man Mikhail Baryshnikov, in favor of Gregory Hines' 'improvography' and assorted modern stuff in blatant music video contexts. Read full review