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.