A second helping of horror tales inspired by an old 50s comic-book series. Original Creepshow director George Romero contributes the screenplay this time, basing it on some tastefully selected Stephen King morsels.

The film rarely strays from easy likability, with Hallstrom's spare, efficient styling creating a sense of chaste northern lyric (simultaneously warm and chilly: everyone wears coats in summer) familiar from early Bergman. More unassuming mongrel than pricey pedigree, but not a bad time in all.

The character interactions are strong, especially for this depleted genre, and Hill's tight, efficient styling recovers a lot of lost formal ground: his framing and crosscutting are as sharp as ever, and the bloodbath finale is, improbably, a model of intelligent restraint, the classicist's answer to Peckinpah baroque.

Plenty of strikes against this--moronic story line, obligatory animal mugging, more "awwwww" opportunities than any film since 3 Men and a Cradle--but it's still one of the most accomplished pulp fantasies in a while...When everything finally comes together, it works wonderfully well.

It's a pleasant enough diversion, in an amateurishly personal sort of way, though Townsend's frequent recycling of actors (for reasons of budget rather than laughs) makes for some odd Pirandellian confusions.

Director Jerry Schatzberg has made a penetrating study of human relations--racial and sexual--within a sharply observed social framework.

The effects are just as delirious this time around, but the nightmare poetry has vanished, along with the sense of archetypal purpose and narrative inevitability that held the jack-in-the-box original together.

Very much a matter of shared taste and attitude, but cultural outsiders had best beware.

The snickering humor that percolated through the Coens' debut, Blood Simple, is the whole show here, and it's damn near hysterical.

Unfortunately, director Richard Donner doesn't pay much attention to text, subtext, or anything else; his 1986 film is empty glitz in search of a style, with arbitrary action substituting for ordinary narrative coherence.

Everything comes easy here, especially the right to narcissist complacency, but Hughes/Deutch are too busy playing Mr. Goodvibes to worry about the contradictions at the heart of their shallow moral vision.

Director Arthur Hiller (Love Story, Silver Streak) just puts his apolitical head down and digs into the mess without worrying about style or sense.

Interminable...Writer-director Richard Lowenstein seems as bored with the proceedings as most spectators are likely to be; consequently there's probably more gratuitous camera movement per square inch here than in any other film of 1986.

Rick Moranis is properly nerdish as the flower-shop attendant who keeps his carnivorous charge supplied with a steady stream of human plasma, and Ellen Greene makes a good scatterbrained innocent in the ersatz Broadway mold, but the best moments in this 1987 release belong to Dr. Steve Martin as a dentist with a professional yen for pain.

He makes a good job of it, though the wider aspirations to contemporary relevance seem dubious. Stone seeks large lessons in the experiences of ordinary men in battle, but it isn't clear Vietnam has anything new to offer: war is hell and somebody inevitably gets shafted, but the uniqueness of this conflict lies away from the military arena: in politics, psychology, and history. For all the purported naturalism, the film seems resolutely schematic, and the attitudes shaping the drama are far from open-ended.

Pearce pads out his plot with lots of borrowed bits (notably from The 39 Steps, with Gere and Basinger as manacled fugitives), but the borrowings don't have any resonance of their own: they simply hang on the story like empty thematic husks.

The whole film seems ideologically forced and out of place, an attempt to resurrect the retentive virtues of Ford and Hawks without the cultural context that gave them expressive strength.

Peter Weir's 1986 adaptation of Paul Theroux's best-selling novel is literally that - an adaptation without much character of its own.

I suspect the unconverted will want to be beamed up pronto.

Away, away with all of you and your sorry master, director Alan Johnson, whose every prospect for future employment in this darkling realm of TV pilot failure must be waning by the hour.

What matters most is feeding white-bread fantasies (the film is set in the slow-footed 50s, when blacks are only a rumor and nobody's ever heard of slam 'n' jam) and laying on the inspirational corn.

Jonathan Demme's picaresque joyride across the American landscape is still arguably the best thing he's ever done.

A few too many moralistic foreshadowings, but most of the time Cox's situations and characters develop on their own eloquently entropic terms.

Perhaps what is least satisfying about Beineix' effort is its implied theme—that women are mere muses to be addled, suffocated, and sacrificed to revitalize the imaginations of men.

As with Nostalghia, Tarkovsky’s previous work of exile, it’s possible to balk at the filmmaker’s pretensions and antiquated sexual politics and yet be overwhelmed by his mastery and originality, as well as the conviction of his sincerity.

Bolt's moralizing ironies (as leaden here as in A Man for All Seasons and assorted David Lean scenarios) are enough to sink a thousand war canoes, and Joffe doesn't help things along with his patronizing vision of native innocence: the Indians only exist to be sentimentalized—as angels, victims, and amiable rehab projects for enterprising Christians.

Gordon still hasn't mastered the simplest filmmaking techniques. The gross-out sliminess and sexual acting out are supposed to provide a purgative release, but all Gordon does is gawk at the excess for what seems like forever: his voyeurism is too unpleasant for casual entertainment, too mild to constitute a pornographic vision.

The underlying rhythms of repression and release are reflected in the film's visual line, with cool, controlled images suddenly giving way to aggressive flashes of liberating camera movement. The plot creaks a bit, and the character relations aren't exactly fresh, but all things considered it's a reasonably satisfying effort.

It's grave, lumbering, arrhythmic, and bloated, an emotional hogwallow of catchpenny insights and easy sentimentality...In short, a real bagful.

I suppose the constant repetition is necessary (Matlin's character only communicates through sign language), but it points up the film/play's willingness to sacrifice situational truth for didactic accessibility.

Gordon’s remarkable as the emotionally disarranged, psychologically disintegrating jazzman, and when the little Frenchman calls him a genius, you suddenly realize what that overused term implies: not moral worthiness or superior personhood but a giftedness beyond accounting that hardly belongs to character at all.

Though the idea of the therapy appears to be the demystification of sex, the filming, with its voyeuristic detachment and curious prudishness (no genitals are shown), serves only to perpetuate the familiar fetishistic mechanisms.

You want misery? he gives you misery—dark, drear, suppurating medieval oppressiveness; monotony? he gives you that too, lots and lots of monotony; subhuman grotesquerie and primitive superstition? not to worry: this guy didn't direct Quest for Fire for nothing.

Some scuzzily noirish moments, thanks to Robby Müller's slick black-and-white cinematography, but once the deadbeat trio get thrown into their cell, the film comes to a virtual halt: it's minimalism reinforcing minimalism, with none of the subtle counterpoint between movement and stasis, environmental opening out and psychological shrinking in, that gave Stranger its small energetic charge.

It's mostly fascinating, though the unconverted may be in for a rough two hours.

There's no formal stylization to speak of, but this is, after all, a film about performances, and Medak simply points his camera at the actors and lets them chew away. Some of the chewers are better than others, and Harvey Keitel and Frank Langella especially, coming from opposite poles of intensity and languor, deliver the honest emotional goods.

I'm rather intrigued with what Mann does with his stylistic envelope: it's simultaneously hypnotic and enervating, meditative and empty, like a white-noise background or a field of electronic snow on the tube.

Without his comic underpinnings (there's only a crude pie-eating fantasy as comic security) Reiner seems lost in his own cinematic wilderness—button-down careful, almost afraid to move. His only storytelling strategy involves crosscutting from one talking head to another, and he leaves too many literary ends dangling from the Stephen King novella on which this 1989 film is based.

They must've been working overtime on the Xerox machines at New World Pictures, since this 1986 women-behind-bars exploitation spoof sounds like a literal remake of 1983's Chained Heat (which was itself a remake of a remake of a remake).

There aren't any flesh-and-blood characters here, only superimposed attitudes: it's almost like reading a rape-crisis textbook, with every lesson italicized.

It's an interesting experiment Cronenberg's attempted, if ultimately in the wrong direction.

It's easy to pick this emotional bunny rabbit apart—for the sentimental bathos, the literalism, the radiating wholesomeness (everything David Lynch parodied in Blue Velvet, down to the impeccable small-town streets and flowers framed against a screaming blue sky . . . only Castle gives it to you straight, without irony)—though what's remarkable here, and altogether rare, is the artifice and polish of Castle's studio-rooted style.

Not a bad film, and certainly more polished than Holland's "Better Off Dead" debut, though it's marred by unevenness and the director's ineradicable penchant for infantile clowning (think Three Stooges, think Soupy Sales and worse).

Made for less than $30,000, Lee's first feature poses him as a rival to Woody Allen, nearly equaling him in psychological authenticity, perhaps bettering him in virtuosity and sheer creative glee.

Nothing quite works as it should: the rhythms are subtly off, the pace is forced, the comedy overextended . . . and the surfeit of hommages—to the Keystone Kops and Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis and all and sundry—threatens to sink it before it gets out of the starting gate. But there's something to be said for Edwards's insatiable overreaching, and at times the orchestration of pratfalls and comic pairings could hardly be more deft.

Huyck's direction is resolutely uninvolved—every shot of every arrhythmically paced scene cries out for instant anonymity—and only Jeffrey Jones's sardonic scenery chewing as an archetypally deranged scientist keeps things marginally watchable. Lea Thompson is completely out of her element as Howard's sexpot girlfriend (though graduated, thankfully, from the treacly virginality of SpaceCamp), and as for the guy(s) in the duck suit . . . well, he/they deserve our condolences and prayers.

At times a bit too precious, especially inside the young navigator's spacecraft, but the warm regard for character, as well as for our often-inhospitable planetary home, makes for a reasonably good time.

None of it is very convincing, thanks to Tuggle's shaky storytelling: on the one hand, he sets up his plot twists with such elephantine emphasis that the payoffs are invariably anticlimactic; on the other, he relies constantly and shamelessly on the most outre coincidence. Still, the action scenes do have a certain punch and vigor, and there are a few fresh, offbeat views of the City of Angels. Part of the point of the project seems to be to prove that Hall can “act” (as if his comic roles were something else), and he does move honorably if not remarkably through a mumbling Method performance.

Not to raise anyone’s hopes too high, but Gene Wilder has finally made a film you can watch without wanting to exit before it’s over.

Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus.

It doesn't display an ounce of planning or simple craftsmanship (the Jamaican locations are photographed to look like the banks of Lake Calumet), but with a cast like that, it can't help but have its moments.

As the envious, destructive best friends of the central couple, Jim Belushi and (especially) Elizabeth Perkins have the actor's know-how to fill in the gaps, but as the lovers, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are hopelessly pallid.

Perkins tries to imitate Hitchcock's visual style, but most of the film is made without concern for style of any kind, unless it's the bludgeoning nonstyle of Friday the 13th.

Prince's narcissism was easier to take than than that of his contemporaries Sylvester Stallone or Rob Lowe: he didn't regard the rest of the world as an insult to his estimable self.

George Lucas produced and Jim Henson (of Muppets fame) directed this heftily budgeted 1986 fantasy, which seems to be a conscious attempt to play on the female coming-of-age themes of classic fairy tales.

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the directors of the smash Airplane! and the underrated Top Secret!, here turn their hands to a more traditional character comedy, yet this film's funniest effects still come through their imaginative, frequently astonishing manipulations of the narrative line. It's a rare kind of craftsmanship, and it produces a rare kind of pleasure.

There is something disturbing in the way the film elevates cynicism and detachment into heroic attitudes.

It's a pleasant commercial undertaking, though everything about this $30-million production seems a bit overscaled: the stars are too big for their parts, the mystery subplot is too complicated to take a comfortable backseat to the romantic comedy, the special effects (which include two spectacular fires) are too big for the action, and even the wide-screen image is too big for the intimate, offhanded humor.

It's a good character for Dangerfield, one that veers him away from the “I don't get no respect” pathos that comes too easily to him, and enough attention is paid to the minimal plot to integrate Dangerfield's classically constructed one-liners into something like a dramatic situation. This is what they mean by “a good vehicle.”

Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space.

The overriding impression is one of utter nihilism, as reflected in a world divided into bored, crassly materialistic teenagers on one side and doltish, unfeeling adults on the other.

Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).

It still has several moments—most notably a completely offhanded kidnapping—when Cassavetes's inimitable off rhythms do strange and wonderful things to the conventionally written comedy. Big Trouble is just a footnote in the career of one of America's most innovative, unclassifiable filmmakers, but it's something to see.

It's fast-paced and full of gaudy action, yet it's thoroughly unsatisfying, largely because it's so lazy: once Stallone (also the screenwriter) and director George Pan Cosmatos have sketched out the standard genre archetypes, they leave it at that, not bothering to fill in the niceties of characterization, plausibility, motivation, and suspense.

Altogether, an unusually honorable achievement in a form (the remake) where originality is a dirty word.

Every moment is hyped for maximum visual and visceral impact, but Scott doesn't display the slightest bit of interest (or belief) in the actual characters and situations.

Serreau directs for maximum freneticism, with her actors rushing around and regurgitating great torrents of imperfectly subtitled dialogue (a gratuitous subplot involving drug traffickers seems to have been inserted just to double the hysteria), and while there are more than a few laughs, most of them are laughs of recognition—seeing these gags again is like coming across long-lost (and vaguely embarrassing) relations.

Stone works some imaginative changes on the usual formulas of propagandistic fiction—Boyle is anything but the usual bland audience-identification figure, waiting around to be converted to the ideological position of the filmmakers—but as a director, he still didn't have the chops to bring off such an ambitious, multilayered project: the picture lunges into hysterical incoherence every few minutes, and Stone must resort to platitudinous simplifications to clear things up. It's lively, though, to say the very least.

A mixed success, but an exhilarating try.

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

Cruddy, primal, extremely violent, and fairly entertaining, this 1984 feature from the New York-based exploitation outfit Troma, Inc. (Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz) captures some of the snot-flicking spirit of the old EC comics. How much you'll enjoy its deliberate crudity probably depends on how far you can let yourself regress to surly adolescence.

Michael Mann (Miami Vice) produced this exercise in fascist chic, and it plays like a TV pilot filled out with a few cusswords and strokes of excess violence.

This is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance.

Though it's meant as a droll comedy of manners, what emerges is mincing, crabbed, and petty.

Ultimately, this is the kind of film that gets more points for what it isn't—i.e., a typical teen comedy loaded with boob and fart jokes—than for what it is.

Alan Rudolph redreams the dream of film noir in this dense, beautifully executed, highly stylized romantic fantasy.

Slack and unconvincing throughout with the exception of Ringwald, who remains natural and appealing as the thin world of the film collapses around her.

Despite a monotonously fashionable mise-en-scene, Lyne generates some genuine erotic tension between his two stars; you believe in their obsessive relationship, even as most of the action and staging registers as ridiculous.

There's no real resonance between the two halves of the film, yet Allen keeps things moving quickly enough that the film only reveals its basic shapelessness once it's over.

There is little of the gratuitous hysteria that usually mars Lumet's work, and David Himmelstein's busy script (no less than four campaigns are covered, when one or two would do) keeps things moving, though at the price of losing track of a couple of significant subplots.

Paul Mazursky hasn’t only remade Jean Renoir’s sublime 1931 Boudu Saved From Drowning: he’s yuppified it, inverting virtually every meaning until the film becomes a celebration of the crassest kind of materialism.

First-timer Peter Masterson directed; his notion of film is to point the camera in the general direction of the actors.

Cokliss's direction strains for a stylishness it doesn't achieve, yet his fundamentally straightforward style brings out the abstract design of the plot. Is this the first cubist thriller?

A stunning achievement in epic cinema.

In trying to cover so many bets, Petersen has created a film without an identifiable style or subject of its own.

Ultimately this is a film of rare and pleasing smoothness—Hollywood as it was meant to be.

A ferociously creative 1985 black comedy filled with wild tonal contrasts, swarming details, and unfettered visual invention--every shot carries a charge of surprise and delight.

Rossellini left this project before it was finished, and it was edited and released a few years later without his approval—but it still comes across as a remarkably suggestive fable.

The murder-mystery board game becomes a frantic, unfunny spoof (1985) under the direction of British TV writer Jonathan Lynn. The script recycles Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with six guests invited by a mysterious host to spend the night in a creepy mansion, but instead of parodying the material Lynn simply surrounds it with extraneous pratfalls and wisecracks.

It's a rare sequel that fritters away the appeal of the original so completely: within minutes, this continuation of Romancing the Stone has reduced the Kathleen Turner-Michael Douglas couple to a nightmare pairing of the gushingly idiotic and the sourly venal.

Richard Attenborough's direction achieves that balance of impersonality and brisk pacing we've come to recognize as "professionalism," and he doesn't clog up the dancing with too many stylistic gimmicks.

Landis never bothers to account for the friendship that springs up spontaneously between these two antipathetic types, but then he never bothers to account for anything in this loose progression of recycled Abbott and Costello riffs and fumbled Strangelovean satire.

The greatest disappointment is Shepard's own inability to play a Shepard character: a distant, stiff presence, he never seems to enter the emotional battles (with Kim Basinger, as the woman he can't live with and can't live without) that are the play's reason for being.

This is Middle-aged Sherlock Holmes in schoolboy drag, and the audience is expected to chuckle appreciatively as the old material is trotted out.

The film runs through most of Leni Riefenstahl's bag of tricks as it builds up a patriotic frenzy, yet the crazed flag-waving would be a lot easier to take if it weren't so clearly a commercial calculation meant to salvage what is otherwise a crass, careless, shamelessly padded film.

Director Taylor Hackford shapes some engaging performances (the surly, withdrawn Baryshnikov of the early scenes is an intriguing figure) but never extricates himself from the plot machinery; this 1985 feature takes off only in the brief but well-filmed dance sequences.

On the one hand, the action stuff is surprisingly imaginative and well filmed; on the other, the characters are the usual bunch of self-parodic dodoes that the post-Spielberg action cinema has accustomed us to, so it's impossible to believe in the situations anyway.

Joyce Chopra's independent feature plays uncomfortably like two movies jammed into one: the first is a slow, exaggeratedly naturalistic portrait of teenage alienation in the shopping mall culture of California, the second is a violent, stylized gothic shocker. Both films have their modest qualities; it's just that Chopra hasn't found an intelligible transition between the two very different approaches.