Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,945 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Autumn Tale
Lowest review score: 0 Argylle
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,227 out of 7945
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7945
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7945
7945 movie reviews
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  1. Misery
    Two scenes in Misery are shockingly brutal. But many more are wickedly amusing - especially the ones stemming from the fact that no small part of the writer's torture is the way his deranged muse uses language. There's something simultaneously comical and scary about the way Bates employs euphemisms to keep the lid on. [30 Nov 1990, p.29p]
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  2. Eating
    Eating is an eventful afternoon with a bunch of colorful characters. They're oh-so-enlightened, and they're oh-so-miserable. [10 May 1991, p.29]
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  3. Predator 2
    Downey's cameo is one of the few unexpected - even terrorful - moments in this entirely pedestrian sequel, which like its predecessor is almost but never quite frightening. [21 Nov 1990, p.38P]
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  4. 3 Men and a Little Lady
    The most uncomprehending sequel of the last few years. It shows no awareness at all of what made the first film work so surprisingly well. What little emotion it summons is superficial and sentimental. The rest of the time it falls back on dumb farce and embarrassing Brit-bashing, climaxing with a vacuous chase scene. And this in a film that's supposed to be more mature than its predecessor. [21 Nov 1990, p.37]
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  5. Rocky V
    By now, Rocky of the drooping eyes and damaged brain has turned guru, emphasizing heart, soul and family ties when the evil promoter starts goading him and playing mind games with his protege. Stallone, said to be following Arnold Schwarzenegger into comedy, is starting earlier than anyone realized. [16 Nov 1990, p.78]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Rescuers Down Under
    Unlike The Rescuers of 1977, which was flat and negligible, this sequel features full-bodied images and a number of distinctive, memorable characters. It also features an adventure plot that serves as a wry, environmentally conscious allegory while it entertains the kids. [06 Nov 1990, p.77p]
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  7. The Krays
    The Krays is one of the artiest, eeriest gangster movies ever made. [15 Sep 1990, p.14p]
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  8. Jacob's Ladder
    The strength of Jacob's Ladder is that we never know what the next scene will be. But that's also its weakness. We don't feel involved with the characters here. We just feel jerked around. Jacob's Ladder, finally, is bummer theater. [2 Nov 1990, p.73]
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  9. Vincent & Theo
    Vincent and Theo is one of the great Robert Altman films... It's Altman's most structurally conventional film, although it's filled with such trademarks as overlapping conversations. It's also his most personal and deeply felt. [16 Nov 1990, p.81]
    • Boston Globe
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Graffiti Bridge
    Like Purple Rain, the record/film that made Prince a superstar, Graffiti Bridge is a hodgepodge musical that has a few satisfying bits - and a lot of sharp music - but fails as a narrative. [03 Nov 1990, p.22p]
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  11. Graveyard Shift
    The scariest thing about Graveyard Shift is the money, time and energy - however minimal - invested in its creation. If you're looking for a good rat scare, the alleys near Haymarket might be a better place to invest your time. [27 Oct 1990, p.11p]
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  12. Night of the Living Dead
    Particularly because Savini obviously feels a responsibility to the original, it's impossible for this new film to unfold with any sense of discovery or surprise. It's almost all just at the level of dutiful replication. [19 Oct 1990, p.35]
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  13. White Palace
    There's warmth and a kind of benevolence in bed with them, too, and it carries the film past its compromises. If White Palace is no "Last Tango in Paris," it's at least a sizzling, fat-free "Last Hamburger in St. Louis." [19 Oct 1990, p.33]
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  14. Avalon
    The film often settles for the sentimental and the anecdotal rather than trying for something richer and deeper, but on those levels it works well enough. Audiences will relate to its warmth and sincerity. Essentially, the film is a series of pages from Levinson's family album and it means something to us because it clearly means something to him. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]
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  15. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
    Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is sweet but dumb and clumsily executed, with its central character overdrawn and undermined, and the adults mostly written off as geeks. What the film needs is some of the troublemaking spunkiness Roxy showed when she left town. [12 Oct 1990, p.30p]
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  16. Memphis Belle
    Since each member of the 10-man crew is given his small equal share in the movie's script, none of them is able to add emotional weight to the realities of soldiering. That means that actors like Matthew Modine and Eric Stoltz have no place to go with their talent. Like the movie, no one is bad, really, but then no one is good. [12 Oct 1990, p.29p]
    • Boston Globe
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mr. Destiny
    There's many a comedy to be made about money and the way it changes us and our perceptions, but Mr. Destiny - which wastes agreeable performances by Ron Lovitz and Bill McCutcheon as well as the principals - isn't it. [12 Oct 1990, p.33p]
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  18. Henry & June
    Henry & June is a gorgeous film, one aimed at the intelligent and discriminating. As iconography, it's a stunner. But it would be better off as a silent. It's an example of talent and intelligence determined to do everything right, only to have almost everything come out wrong. [05 Oct 1990, p.53p]
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  19. Desperate Hours
    This remake of The Desperate Hours, the 1955 Humphrey Bogart criminal-on-the-lam suspenser, is crisp and atmospheric - and doggedly ordinary. [05 Oct 1990, p.46p]
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  20. An Angel at My Table
    Dodging the pitfalls of making a film about a writer is no small challenge, but Campion succeeds unforgettably in Angel at My Table. [14 Jun 1991, p.31]
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  21. King of New York
    King of New York means to slam its excessses into juiced-up nocturnal flamboyance - and does. Assaultive and mindless, it's an incoherent mess. But its manic energies and go-for-broke stylistic gestures keep it from ever seeming dull. [15 March 1991, p.42]
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  22. Pacific Heights
    Pacific Heights is the hot fall thriller Hollywood has been waiting for. A slick, jolting successor to "Jagged Edge," "Fatal Attraction" and "Sea of Love," it beats the odds by inducing us to sympathize with a San Francisco yuppie landlord couple stuck with a tenant from hell. [28 Sept 1990, p.45]
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  23. Texasville
    A second-rate novel and a second-rate movie, in which some interestingly faceted acting can do only so much. [28 Sep 1990, p.46p]
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  24. Narrow Margin
    Narrow Margin isn't awful. It's solid and adult, but plodding and dull, rather like a living room filled with the last generation's furniture - not old enough to be considered an interesting antique, yet fundamentally out of touch with the present. It's too reasonable for its own good. [21 Sep 1990, p.44p]
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  25. State of Grace
    State of Grace is a high-powered, luxuriantly textured Irish gang movie that you keep watching, convinced that at any moment it's going to come together and really grab you. It doesn't. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]
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  26. White Hunter Black Heart
    The sad thing about Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart is that it fails in every important respect, yet is in no way cheap or exploitative. [20 Sep 1990, p.81p]
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  27. Hardware
    The chief trouble with Hardware is that it doesn't seem to contribute anything uniquely its own to the genre, although it works hard dismembering bodies and otherwise crushing and tearing them apart with its circular saw and drill-bit arms after homing in on them with its ruby laser eyes. [14 Sep 1990, p.40p]
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  28. Postcards from the Edge
    With its wry take on the manic triviality of the industry, it's not only the most sparklingly jaundiced showbiz entertainment since "All About Eve." It's also the gutsiest mother-daughter story since "Terms of Endearment." Call it "Terms of Endurement," plan on laughing a lot, and you won't be far off. [13 Sep 1990, p.97]
    • Boston Globe
  29. The Killer
    As far as shootouts go, The Killer is an over-the-top success. It's shameless in its excesses - in its filmic allusions, in its camp emotionality, in its frenzied and slo-mo sequences of bullet fire. There are shades of Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah in the artfelt violence, and a direct hit on "Duel in the Sun" as two blinded lovers crawl to each other but miss. Throughout the absurd goings-on, director John Woo's playfulness is hard to resist, and Chow Yun-Fat as the hired killer has an appealing deadpan charisma. [28 June 1991, p.72]
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  30. Darkman
    The film works because Raimi's motor-rhythmed pop sensibility was ready to take off in this movie, and does, in a series of wonderfully hyperkinetic comic-strip lurches. [24 Aug. 1990, p.34]
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  31. After Dark, My Sweet
    After Dark, My Sweet sticks to essentials, and nails the fatefulness in this doom-haunted genre. [24 Aug 1990, p.35p]
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  32. Pump Up the Volume
    It's a celebration of free expression that treats youth like a fierce and beautiful animal, and never attempts to tame it. In Pump Up the Volume, the "why-bother" generation finds a voice, and begins to bother. [22 Aug 1990, p.47]
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  33. My Blue Heaven
    My Blue Heaven is weightless and unwieldy. It's a confused carnival of silly subplots and characters who never manage to form an ensemble. [17 Aug 1990, p.37]
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  34. Taking Care of Business
    Taking Care of Business could be a lot worse. It's a swift, if entirely predictable, identity-switch movie that wastes little time on the way to its morality play conclusion. [17 Aug 1990, p.36p]
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  35. Air America
    The concept of Air America is refreshing, but its enactment goes nowhere fast. [10 Aug 1990]
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  36. Mo' Better Blues
    Mo' Better Blues has problems. Lee hates being compared with Woody Allen, but it looks as if he's going to do what Allen did in trying a new kind of film until it works. [03 Aug 1990, p.29p]
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  37. Young Guns II
    Young Guns had no vision at all. Young Guns II at least tries for poetry and irony and epic scale. And it finds humor in such things as the outlaws' keen appreciation of media exposure and image-making. But its chronicling of the gang's downfall just slogs. [01 Aug 1990, p.63p]
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  38. Presumed Innocent
    Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]
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  39. The Unbelievable Truth
    While Hartley, who made this movie on a shoestring budget, has avant on his mind, he's not nuanced enough to quite pull it off. [03 Aug 1990]
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  40. The Freshman
    The Freshman, to be fair, offers delights. It's slight, a conceit better written than directed by Alan Bergman, but with flashes of witty satire and moments of screwball charm. [27 July 1990, p.29]
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  41. Navy Seals
    Like "Fire Birds," another recent special-team flick, Navy SEALs is a transparent attempt to showcase adventure sequences. Plot? Character? Who has time for subtlety amid all those dangerous maneuvers? It's all an excuse for the action - but even the action in Navy SEALS is dismal. [20 July 1990, p.32]
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  42. Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]
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  43. Quick Change
    As a performer, Murray moves through the film with a lovely doomed aplomb. And his quick verbal wit is almost enough to pull Quick Change off. But as a director, his inexperience costs him. His camera isn't as quick as his tongue. [13 Jul 1990, p.29]
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  44. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
    The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a nonstop gross-out contest of absolutely no socially redeeming value at all, unless you happen to value laughter. Ford Fairlane is funny garbage. [11 Jul 1990, p.41]
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  45. Jetsons: The Movie
    You're never unaware of the calculation underlying this Jetsons movie. Still, it succeeds in teleporting the clan to the movie screen. [6 July 1990, p.61]
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  46. Die Hard 2
    It's not quite as jolting as the high-impact original, but it's got enough explosiveness to blow away the other sequels in this summer's parade of high-body-count blockbusters. [4 July 1990, p.29]
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  47. RoboCop 2
    RoboCop 2 isn't brain-dead, and perhaps that should be enough in this summer of pummeling sequels. But it isn't. Not in an action movie. [22 June 1990, p.43p]
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  48. Betsy's Wedding
    Alda's work as a writer on M*A*S*H didn't go to waste. His script delivers a lot of laughs - patently related to TV sitcom, but laughs all the same. Betsy's Wedding is fun, and LaPaglia is a find. [22 Jun 1990, p.43p]
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  49. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    Gremlins 2 is one of the few sequels that improves on the original. [15 Jun 1990, p.33p]
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  50. Another 48 Hrs.
    Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are back in Another 48 HRS., and so is some of the chemistry between them. But although this sequel is more amped up than the original "48 HRS.," most of the thrills are gone. [8 Jun 1990, p.35]
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  51. Back to the Future Part III
    Back to the Future III has no future. The reason is that it never works up much of a past as it sends its gull-winged DeLorean time machine back to the Old West. In effect, it goes back to the Age of Steam and runs out of gas. [25 May 1990, p.45]
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  52. Fire Birds
    There are the obligatory bonding scenes, including a boxing match and an early morning heart-to-heart, but without tension and warmth. Jones manages to be lovable, but he and Cage never manage a chemistry. [25 May 1990, p.50p]
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  53. Cadillac Man
    Cadillac Man isn't perfect, but it's got enough peppy lowlife turmoil under its hood to pass most of what's on the road these days. [18 May 1990, p.77p]
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  54. Bird on a Wire
    Bird on a Wire is pedal-to-the-metal moviemaking by the numbers. What it's got going for it is that Goldie Hawn is cute and Mel Gibson is cuter as they struggle to mate screwball comedy to a chase thriller. The pleasant surprise is that Gibson has a flair for light comedy and the timing to bring off double-takes. It's a relief, too, because little else in Bird on a Wire is fresh. [18 May 1990, p.77p]
    • Boston Globe
  55. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    German director Uli Edel's film of Last Exit to Brooklyn, while honorable, just doesn't roar off the screen the way the novel roared off the page. [11 May 1990, p.33p]
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  56. Wild Orchid
    It's a movie Playboy spread, with irksome misogynist overtones. And, as the camera swoops liberally along the tropical seaport, it's hard to imagine how such a lovely spot was made to seem so tawdry and so tedious. [28 April 1990, p.8]
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  57. The Guardian
    The Guardian, based on a Dan Greenburg novel, is more suspenseful than most of the movies made from King's books. One reason is that Friedkin allows a certain weight of ominousness to accumulate, being in no hurry to let us know exactly what specific form the threat will take, or even from whom it will come. [27 Apr 1990, p.33p]
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  58. Q & A
    While Q & A derails, it's still marked by a love of language and a genuine civic passion that isn't afraid to face ugly facts, and of how many films can that be said? [27 Apr 1990, p.29p]
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  59. Miami Blues
    Miami Blues is just good enough to make you wish Demme would come back with Ward and direct another film based on Willeford's deceptively casual you-saw-it-here-first laser-beam vision of Miami as surreal American litmus. [20 Apr 1990, p.31]
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  60. Crazy People
    Although Crazy People would have been snappy fun in the '30s, or really wacky in the hands of a Preston Sturges in the '40s, it's pretty flaccid and pedestrian in Tony Bill's hands, not crazy enough. Still, it's on to something with those parodies. [11 Apr 1990, p.43]
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  61. The Gods Must Be Crazy II
    No less than the first film, this new effort is both disarmingly sweet and politically appalling. [13 Apr 1990, p.48p]
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  62. I Love You to Death
    while not without pleasures, I Love You to Death essentially seems a film in search of a tone. [06 Apr 1990]
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  63. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    Muppetmaster Jim Henson has done a good job of translating the Turtles - and their 4-foot-tall rat guru, Splinter - into animatronic form. [30 Mar 1990, p.28p]
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  64. The Fourth War
    It's intelligently crafted, above average for this presumably dying genre, and if you can get past a couple of potential credibility problems, you'll find it absorbing. [23 Mar 1990, p.45]
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  65. A Shock to the System
    When a tone is sustained as confidently and with as many delicious flourishes as A Shock to the System manages, and the screen is filled with characterful performances, it's a sign the director is doing something right. [23 Mar 1990, p.46p]
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  66. Blue Steel
    The slightly androgynous Curtis is always interesting to watch; her sentience, her thin lips pressed into an ironic smile, her hood-ornament sleekness are tempered by a believable capacity for edgy affection. But the fact that the force is against her is minor compared to the way the film is against her. Blue Steel victimizes her more than any of the celluloid heavies in it. [16 Mar 1990, p.42]
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  67. Lord of the Flies
    Like the earlier film version, this one often exchanges the dark poetry of Golding's writing for action and connect-the-dots social anthropology, but it's crisp, taut and involving nonetheless. [16 Mar 1990, p.39]
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  68. House Party
    Catchy and unobtrusively assured, it's both hip and innocent, stylized and natural, charming its way through a conventional hey-kids-let's-have-a-party plot with bright comedy, great dancing, and on-top-of-it rap. It even manages to send a few messages about responsibility without being boring. In short, it's the best teen genre movie in ages. [23 Mar 1990, p.43]
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  69. Joe Versus the Volcano
    John Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano starts out so brilliantly, so hilariously, so imaginatively, that even as it's cracking you up, you begin worrying that the rest of the film can't possibly be that good. Sure enough, it isn't. In fact, it deflates pretty alarmingly. But at least it has that beginning. [9 Mar 1990, p.27]
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  70. Bad Influence
    The more intense it gets, the sillier it looks. The only thing worth watching in this wannabe noir is Christian Clemenson's performance as Spader's permanently bummed-out pot-smoking brother. Clemenson alone fills the screen with the kind of individuality that makes you steadily deepen your belief in his character. But he's not enough to keep Bad Influence from degenerating into a ludicrous turn-off. [09 Mar 1990, p.27]
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  71. The Handmaid's Tale
    Dutifully bleak, suitably oppressive, the film delivers Atwood's desolate who-owns-our-bodies? indictment with intelligence and probity. [09 Mar 1990, p.25p]
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  72. Glory
    Glory is the long-needed antidote to Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. With a grave clarity that echoes Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Boston Common monument and Robert Lowell's angry poem, For the Union Dead, Glory not only does justice to its deserving subject, but brings it into the popular consciousness with a distinction that compels respect. [12 Jan 1990, p.36p]
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  73. Revenge
    Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]
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  74. Madhouse
    As a film, it's as crass and awful as the house guests from hell to which it so unwarrantedly feels superior. How bad is Madhouse? Bad enough to make a critic think that the similarly themed National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is art, right down to its fried cat. [16 Feb 1990, p.87p]
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  75. Tremors
    Fast-moving, light-handed, assured, even witty at times, and filled with satisfying special effects, Tremors plays like a redneck "Dune." [19 Jan 1990, p.23]
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  76. The Plot Against Harry
    As narrative, the film doesn't quite work, but as a pungent ethnic scrapbook filled with eccentricity and deadpan humor, The Plot Against Harry is a treasure chest of quirkiness. [20 Sep 1989, p.82]
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  77. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    With its hypnotic performance by Rooker as Henry, it's most terrifying not in its carnage (although that's terrifying enough), but when it forces us to confront our own blinkered passage through the world, our blindness to the closeness of violent death. [5 Jan 1990, p.69]
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  78. Sidewalk Stories
    Lane does know how to photograph his own interesting, large-eyed face to potent effect. He's an appealing talent, and Sidewalk Stories is a likable film. Beyond novelty value, it also finds modern ways of making contact with the very real feel for poverty that was so much a part of the early Chaplin films. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]
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  79. Always
    You expect virtuosic technique from Spielberg, and it's there, in spades. What you don't expect is heartfelt romanticism. But that's there, too... Always is a terrific-looking throwback to those large-scale '40s cinematic stews of romantic longing. [22 Dec. 1989, p.43]
    • Boston Globe
  80. Born on the Fourth of July
    Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July is a knockout, a huge angry howl of movie that uses a crippled Vietnam veteran's disability as metaphor for a country's paralysis. [5 Jan 1990, p.67]
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  81. Roger & Me
    In short, Roger & Me is a breath of new life blowing through the Rust Belt. So depressed has this country's underclass been that any sign of life from it makes you want to cheer, and the funny and furious Roger & Me makes you want to cheer a lot. [12 Jan 1990, p.38P]
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  82. Driving Miss Daisy
    Driving Miss Daisy, about the deepening relationship between a Jewish matron in Atlanta and her black chauffeur, is a luminous joy of a film, heartbreakingly delicate, effortlessly able through indirection to invoke the civil rights era without ever once slipping into portentous pronouncements. [12 Jan. 1990, p.35]
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  83. Blaze
    If Blaze is a bit mushy, it's also more than skin deep. It's the kind of film whose shortcomings are easy to minimize. It's a muted last hurrah for a departed and worthy brand of populism, but a hurrah all the same. [13 Dec 1989, p.66P]
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  84. She-Devil
    She-Devil has its moments, thanks chiefly to Meryl Streep's way with the comic role of a la-de-da writer of romance novels. But devilishness is precisely what it lacks. Unlike "The War of the Roses," the other marital vendetta comedy opening today, She-Devil hasn't got the courage of its nasty convictions. [8 Dec 1989, p.59]
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  85. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
    National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.
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  86. Back to the Future Part II
    The sequel goes down the tubes by spreading itself across four time zones and inviting comparison to the original by spending most of its time back in 1955, where another mess must be set right. [22 Nov 1989, p.35]
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  87. Harlem Nights
    The best thing about the film is the way it allows Richard Pryor to rise above the demeaning buffoon roles he's been playing for the last few years and finally play a character with dignity and style. [17 Nov 1989, p.89]
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  88. All Dogs Go to Heaven
    All Dogs Go to Heaven" has the right spirit, and its warmth will offset what for small kids might be some scary moments. But it does seem skimpy and warmed over. [17 Nov 1989]
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  89. The Little Mermaid
    The Little Mermaid is more than Disney Lite, as so many of the studio's animations of the last couple of decades have been. It offers a strong link to the classic Disney tradition while generating freshly hatched delights. And it puts Disney back in the animation game in a big way. [17 Nov 1989, p.85p]
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  90. My Left Foot
    Brilliant and impassioned as Day Lewis' performance is, it isn't the only reason this film is so exhilarating. Director Jim Sheridan, who clearly has assimilated Brown's two memoirs (the film takes its name from the first), draws Christy's impoverished Irish family with idiomatic rightness and a satisfying and rare (to American films at least) emotional fullness. [15 Sept, 1989, p.41]
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  91. Dad
    The film is mostly Lemmon's in a quietly stunning performance you frankly didn't know he had in him. [27 Oct 1989, p.29p]
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  92. Henry V
    One of the things that make [Branagh's] Henry V so thrilling is his audacity in trying to turn it into an antiwar play - a view that would have astounded Shakespeare. Astonishingly, he pretty much brings it off, emerging with steadily growing power as the young king who isn't afraid to bloody his hands. [15 Dec 1989]
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  93. The Bear
    Warm, intelligent, humane, The Bear is everything you could hope for in an outdoor adventure. [27 Oct 1989, p.33p]
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  94. Fat Man and Little Boy
    Visually, Fat Man and Little Boy is almost obscenely beautiful. But while Joffe's eye is magnificent, his dramatic instincts are flaccid. [20 Oct 1989, p.79p]
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  95. Look Who's Talking
    Before long, it runs out of steam, playing like the pilot for a TV sitcom called "Baby Knows Best." [13 Oct 1989, p.37]
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  96. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    From the first bracing hint of self-mockery in its title to its smoky, after-hours resolution, it's a grabber and a delight, constantly surpassing our expectations. [13 Oct 1989, p.35]
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  97. Drugstore Cowboy
    Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's fresh, gutsy societal underbelly film, never wallows in picturesque down-and-outism, except at the end, when Dillon's character, frightened by the death of a girl he didn't like much and spooked by his own paranoiac suspicion, checks into a seedy hotel while trying to go cold turkey and not yield to the influence of a junkie priest drolly played by William Burroughs. [27 Oct 1989]
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  98. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
    Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser doesn't make the mistake of trying to oversell Monk as a colorful personality. It doesn't have to. It simply stands back and allows his genuine originality and unorthodoxy to make their own impressions. [13 Oct 1989, p.37p]
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  99. Johnny Handsome
    Johnny Handsome may lapse into downbeat formula, but its acting is pungent, and, in the case of Barkin and Henriksen, as immediate as a razor slash. [29 Sep 1989, p.34]
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  100. Black Rain
    Visually, the film is at its most interesting when Scott's camera rises over Osaka and photographs it in ways that make it look like a modular electrified Lego city with neon and plexiglass trim. We get the feeling that in Osaka we're staring the near future in the face. But if Scott has gone to Osaka in search of a new Blade Runner, he comes up with nothing more than an Asian French Connection II. Many exchanges play like truncated pieces of scenes that originally existed more fully. And the film's frequent nocturnal motorcycle revvings don't have the panache of The Warriors, much less The Wild One. [22 Sep 1989, p.31]
    • Boston Globe
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