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.