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.