The animation is fairly unexciting though serviceable, and the overall mystification of class difference would probably have made Dickens shudder, but kids should find this tolerable enough.

The results are high-spirited, with nice ensemble work from Almodovar's team of regulars, but the playlike structure (originally derived from Cocteau's The Human Voice but drastically reworked) is disappointingly conventional.

A strong, disturbing picture (1988) in which Meryl Streep’s beauty and talent and director Fred Schepisi’s intelligence are both shown to best advantage, without easy points or grandstanding.

All in all, an entertaining (if ideologically incoherent) response to the valorization of greed in our midst, with lots of Rambo-esque violence thrown in, as well as an unusually protracted slugfest between ex-wrestler Roddy Piper and costar Keith David.

Well-acted but otherwise conventional war hokum.

The mad campy moments—which chiefly involve snake woman Amanda Donohoe slinking around in various stages of undress or in dominatrix outfits—are worth waiting for.

The film is unsparingly gritty, but with a woman's tenderness it also grants the characters an occasional moment of grace.

Memories of Me, directed by ex-Fonz Henry Winkler, is a "Long Day's Journey into Schmaltz," in which an already overripe father-son conflict is further sugared by large doses of show-biz sentimentality. [07 Oct 1988, p.A]

Clint Eastwood's ambitious 1988 feature about the great Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) is the most serious, conscientious, and accomplished jazz biopic ever made, and almost certainly Eastwood's best picture as well.

An astonishing tour de force--especially for Irons, whose sense of nuance is so refined that one can tell in a matter of seconds which twin he is playing in a particular scene.

The weaknesses of the film are twofold: an inability to convey any convincing grasp of the present beyond the family's present (and ongoing) situation, and a belt-and-suspenders heavyhandedness that has always been Lumet's biggest stumbling block in driving home a dramatic climax.

Baseball fans might find this marginally absorbing; for anyone else it's as conscientious and stylistically pedestrian as director John Sayles's other films, and a mite overlong to boot.

The larger considerations and film noir overtones detract too much from the facts of the case, and what emerges are two effective half-films, each partially at odds with the other.

Director Jonathan Demme's farcical and broad 1988 comedy, written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, doesn't really work, but there are plenty of enjoyable compensations.

Harlin's arsenal of conceits and visual effects--pirouetting overhead angles, dancing trigonometry formulas, a pizza flavored with tiny human heads, a lot of fancy play with a water bed, and much, much more--keeps it consistently watchable and inventive.

Francis Coppola's stylish and heartfelt tribute to the innovative automobile designer Preston Thomas Tucker turns out to be one of his most personal and successful movies.

The efforts to plant this story in a contemporary vernacular are not always successful but the performances are uniformly fine in their adherence to the material, and consistently avoid any vulgarity or showboating.

Full of odd notions and interludes, the movie never really comes together, but fitfully suggests a cross between Boys Town and Greaser's Palace.

Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious energy.

Very, very stupid.

Despite a hokey prologue and ending (the latter imposed by producer Charles Evans), this is one of George Romero's most effective and interesting horror thrillers—not as profound as his remarkable Living Dead trilogy, but unusually gripping and provocative.

While the level of imagination here is scaled to the bite-size dimensions of TV, the sense of an alternate universe felt in Herman's TV show is woefully lacking. But fans and undemanding kids may still be amused.

Miraculously, De Niro and Grodin turn this sow's ear into a plausible vehicle for a buddy movie, and thanks to both of them, this movie springs to life.

An episodic thriller that certainly has its moments, but eventually peters out into dull formula standbys; Eastwood's Harry seems weary of his own sarcastic witticisms, and the ones here won't make anybody's day.

Murphy takes on a softer edge than usual this time: the plot recalls a Jeanette MacDonald operetta of the Depression, the mythical African country looks like a Beverly Hills fever dream, and, true to Murphy's idealized black middle-class view of things, everybody gets what he wants without much fuss or sacrifice, and virtually the only poor people in evidence are white.

Combines live-action and animation with breathtaking wizardry... Alternately hilarious, frightening, and awesome.

Thanks to a fairly good script, this thriller about a Soviet cop sent to Chicago to apprehend a Soviet drug dealer is a respectable enough star vehicle.

There's so little respect for the music that we never see or hear a number from beginning to end, and we rarely hear any of the musicians speak more than a few seconds at a time. Overall the glibness and self-contempt are so thick you can cut them with a knife.

The movie evokes Howard Hawks (in spirit if not to the letter) with its tight focus on a snug, obsessive world of insiders and camp followers where the exchanges between buddies and sexes have a euphoric stylishness and a giddy sense of ritual.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

This is pretty much the Lucas mixture as usual, this time in a Tolkien mode, with everything from the Old Testament to Kurosawa to Disney fed into a blender and turned into wallpaper. For easy-to-please five-year-olds of all ages.

The conceit gets a little out of hand after one of the angels falls in love with the trapeze artist and decides to become human; but prior to this, Wings of Desire is one of Wenders's most stunning achievements.

Thematically, this has a lot to do with the sexiness of class difference and the hypocrisy of marriage and double standards, although, as often happens in porn, the “dream sequences” by the end make it hard to know what's actually happening in terms of plot. But customers looking for photogenic flesh and passion, with a passing plug for safe sex thrown in, won't have much cause for complaint.

Although the results are a bit overextended, the film is still something of a rarity nowadays: an evocative, poetic horror film without a trace of gore (and in this respect, closer to a Val Lewton film of the 40s like The Curse of the Cat People than any contemporary models).

Sheer enchantment, this 1989 animated feature is a key early work by Hayao Miyazaki. It exemplifies Ghibli's style of fanciful realism, paying close attention to minute details as well-drawn figures move across a fluid backdrop. It also deals straightforwardly with substantial emotions like fear of death, though at times it veers toward the heart-tugging cuteness of the Pokemon series.

Narrative continuity and momentum have never been among Hopper's strong points, and this time the choppiness of the storytelling diffuses the dramatic impact without offering a shapely mosaic effect (as in [his] previous films) to compensate for it.

A hollow view of hollowness with a very polished surface.

Only about half of the disconnected gags and oddball conceits pay off, but their gleeful delivery takes up most of the slack.

Perhaps this movie isn't as wise or as profound as Simon wants it to be, but it is certainly a cut above sitcom complacency, and packed with wit and charm.

Directed by Richard Benjamin from a screenplay by John Hill and Bo Goldman, Little Nikita is quite a surprise-a film that moves through several layers of irony and absurdism to arrive at a strong and solid emotional core. [18 Mar 1988, p.A]

On the whole, the adaptation is faithful but some of the qualities of Dinesen's language are lost in translation or through abridgment, and the politics have been needlessly simplified.

Not only Waters's best movie, but a crossover gesture that expands his appeal without compromising his vision one iota; Ricki Lake as the hefty young heroine is especially delightful.

It opens promisingly, with a fine sense of the disorientation of a monolingual tourist abroad and in trouble. But instead of things building from there, the energy gradually dissipates, and by the time the mystery is solved, it's difficult to care very much.

At the same time that Boorman seduces us with such enchantments, he also deceives us with a crafty little googly of his own--persuading us that he is embarking on a fresh adventure while aiming straight for the heart of old-fashioned English cinema.

Malle is certainly sincere in his efforts to describe the overall milieu accurately, and the film is less obnoxious than his pious Lacombe, Lucien (1973), which dealt with a related theme.

Genuinely frightening...it's nice for a change to see some of the virtues of old-fashioned horror films—moody dream sequences, unsettling poetic images, and passages that suggest more than they show—rather than the usual splatter shocks and special effects (far from absent, but employed with relative economy).

But these achievements and others—including an undeniable erotic charge to some of the scenes—add up to less than the sum of their parts without a strong enough overall vision to shape them. When Kaufman reaches beyond the novel to flesh things out—with the old-fashioned musical taste of Russian officials, the sexual exploits of the hero, or the expanded part of a pet pig—he usually flattens rather than enhances what's left of the material

Even though Kristy is seen mainly through the uncomprehending eyes of Jake, McGovern manages to fare better with the cliches thrown at her than Bacon does; but neither has a prayer of scoring at a game whose rules and players might have been dreamed up by a computer. Even the cutesy minor gag of putting the title's initials on the hero's license plate has something grimly nonhuman about it.

Ambling along like a wry, laid-back “Heart of Darkness” this likable and touching film makes full use of Frank’s remarkable photographic eye and Wurlitzer’s witty, acerbic, and quasi-mystical handling of myth that has already served him well in his novels. The results are a resonant reflection on the music business and a memorable ode to wanderlust–with lots of good music (by Dr. John, Joe Strummer, and others) on the sound track.

It may drive you nuts, but it’s probably the most inventive and original Godard film since Passion.

Whatever else you might say about this weird, creepy, and funny independent item by Guy Maddin, it's certainly different.

The broad Italian family humor gets so thick at times that you could cut it with a bread knife.

Bernardo Bertolucci's visually ravishing spectacle about the life of Pu Yi is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time.

Matthew Robbins acquits himself honorably as cowriter and director of this gentle 1987 fantasy about miniature spaceships that land on a tenement in Manhattan's Lower East Side and save the tenants from imminent expulsion and disaster at the hands of greedy real estate developers.

The film is full of relevant insights into the kinds of compromises, trade-offs, and combinations of skills and personalities that produce media, and the personal stories are deftly integrated.

Leslie Dixon's script and TV sitcom specialist Garry Marshall's direction are basically warm, funny, and lighthearted, and the relaxed amiability of the two leads—as well as Chicagoan Michael Hagerty and Roddy McDowall (who doubles as executive producer)—helps to make this good family entertainment.

The sensibility of this movie is so adolescent that it's hard to take it as seriously as the filmmakers intend us to.

The pseudomystical vagueness that seems to be Spielberg's stock-in-trade stifles most of the particularity of the source.

Berri remains a boring director, dotting every i and crossing every t with nothing much on his mind but platitude.

Pretty dispensable, though it has one of the best homosexual-panic gags I've ever seen.

Prince himself, passing through a spectrum of costumes and sexual roles, is never less than commanding, as performer, composer, and director.

Marek Kanievska (Another Country) directs with relentlessly fancy visuals in a series of opulent southern California settings; Ed Lachman's cinematography is letter perfect as always in its handling of light and color (assisted here by Barbara Ling's flashy production design), but it's a pity to see it wasted on such claptrap.

Rick Rosenthal's action comedy is positively dripping with good intentions, and although it has its moments of charm, this hands-across-the-waters gesture rarely gets beyond formula Disney material (how far can you get with humanism when the humans are made out of cardboard?).

Recklessly biting off more than they can possibly chew, the filmmakers still give us a memorable apocalyptic view of 1987 England.

The first four letters say it all.

While the actors show some sensitivity and Scott works up a modicum of suspense and involvement, the real interest of this picture is the radiance of the images—a mastery of lighting and decor second only to Scott's Blade Runner, with atmospheric textures so dense you can almost taste them. Unfortunately, this mastery bears only the most glancing relationship to the story at hand, and Scott becomes guilty of the sort of formalism that used to be charged (less justly) against Josef von Sternberg. But even though the movie doesn't leave much of a residue, it looks terrific while you're watching it: Manhattan has seldom appeared as glitzy or as glamorous.

One regrets the pounding Muzak of Tangerine Dream, but this is on the whole a striking directorial debut, at once scary and erotic, with lots of sidelong touches in the casting, direction, and script .

Apart from a few incidental flickers of Wang’s sidelong humor, there’s little of his personality evident in this film about a divorced underground cartoonist (Tom Hulce) finding himself enmeshed in a murder plota story that steadily loses coherence and interest the longer it proceeds.

All the characters are uniformly obnoxious, and director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) lingers over suffering even more than in his other features.

Not even the crude ethnic humor--Billy Crystal's Mel Brooks-ish Miracle Max--pricks the dream bubble, and the spirited cast has a field day.

The dissection of Edwardian repression never gets beyond the dutiful, tasteful obviousness of a BBC miniseries.

While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread.

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over.

A light and fairly innocuous youth picture.

Less pretentious than Platoon and more attentive to the Vietnamese than The Deer Hunter, this picture proposes with a great deal of skill and sincerity that we honor and respect the men who suffered on our behalf without even beginning to consider why they did so, or to what effect.

If Sayles's bite were as lethal as his bark, he might have given this a harder edge and a stronger conclusion. But the performances are uniformly fine.

Before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein's script and Emile Ardolino's direction.

A throwaway comedy that really delivers.

This taut thriller adds so many twists of its own it might be more appropriately cross-referenced with The Manchurian Candidate, even though it isn't nearly as daffy or as mercurial.

Another early youth ensemble pic from St. Elmo's Fire director Joel Schumacher, with an aspiring-to-hipness cast.

Timothy Dalton stars as the 1987 model James Bond in this 15th entry in the series, with the usual assortment of dope smugglers, KGB operatives, and criminal psychos providing a few anxious moments at the welcoming party. Expect the expected.

By ordinary movie standards it's awful, but fans of cinematic dementia should have fun for about half an hour.

There's a brooding, agonized quality to the violence that almost seems subversive, as if Verhoeven were both appalled and fascinated by his complicity in the toxic action rot.

Angry fish travels to the Bahamas for the Christmas holidays, plotting revenge against the family of a vacationing New England widow (Lorraine Gary). Noel, noel, a charming gift idea with suggestions of inverted seasonal myth—until director Joseph Sargent swamps it all in antimythical literalism and predictable lunchtime theater.

Shot in and around the town of Bradford in long, loping takes, this sprightly comedy, adapted by Andrea Dunbar from her own play, has some of the energy that one associates with the better exploitation films that used to be produced by Roger Corman.

Director Joe Roth (Streets of Gold) seems content with recycling the negative charms of the '84 original and hoping that nobody will notice or care. Roth's no stranger to coarse enthusiasms (he produced the amiably crass Bachelor Party, as energetic as it was inept), but this one's on automatic pilot all the way.

The plot is standard fantasy-adventure pulp, though director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Explorers) has so many screwball things going on in it that the comedy all but overwhelms the formulaic line of action.

Elliptical, full of subtle inner rhymes...and profoundly moving, this is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since "Dr. Strangelove," as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what "The Shining" failed to do.

The film slips occasionally into 80s action-itis and can't resist a few conventional friendship lessons, but most of the time it's fresh, funny, and surprising.

The film's low-tech styling is roughly the cardboard inversion of the cinematic machines it parodies, and Brooks seems less inclined than usual to push the overkill urges too far. Small compensations, I guess, but at least it's not the total washout you'd expect.

As the silver-tongued romantic with the impossible nose load, Martin affects a sincerity that reminds you of Danny Kaye—funny enough, i guess, but I like the smarmy original a good deal more.

Despite the off-rhythm styling and suggestions of primeval menace, there's really not much going on here.

Director Joe Camp, the inspirational hand behind the Benji series, shows some remarkable logistic skills in setting up his scenes, and the wilderness photography is never less than impressive, but there ought to be more to harmless entertainment than following wagging tails across the screen. Some formidable displays of technique here, but the treacly anthropomorphism makes it all seem trivial and wasted.

This 1987 film doesn't quite leave its slasher antecedents behind, but the styling is never less than assured, and Ruben knows how to put bland, unruffled surfaces to sinister Hitchcockian uses.

The often unorthodox inventiveness of Tampopo registers like the dividend of a filmmaker who has found his ideal subject.

The most underestimated commercial movie of 1987 may not be quite as good as Elaine May's three previous features, but it's still a very funny work by one of this country's greatest comic talents.