Remains mired in a smart-alecky film-school sensibility.

Professionally made, quite entertaining, and disappointingly hollow.

Edwards directs this farcical material in an unexpectedly intimate, naturalistic style, giving the characters a conviction that makes the slapstick sequences much funnier and more suspenseful than they might have been. But the film still has a rushed, slapdash feel to it.

It was the most assured film Coppola had made in a decade, full of casual wit and visual invention. And even though the split narrative doesn't quite cohere, Coppola wins an amazingly high proportion of his risky bets, including a finale that takes off into total abstraction.

The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum.

The bucketloads of sanctimonious message mongering ladled on by director Peter Hyams still can't disguise the sheerly mercenary basis of this 1986 project, a wholly uncalled-for sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Under the direction of last-minute replacement Richard Benjamin, the results are insufferable—grotesque, chaotic, demoralized.

Queasily suspended between drag theatrics (Faye Dunaway and Brenda Vaccaro camping it up on a soundstage replica of a carnival spook house) and Spielbergian wholesomeness (Canadian Helen Slater as a toothy, Aryan Ubermadchen), this is one comic-book feature that doesn't fly.

Here the idea of sleep as the ultimate threat is still fresh and marvelously insidious, and Craven vitalizes the nightmare sequences with assorted surrealist novelties.

Like Wenders's other road movies, this is largely about the spaces between people and the words they speak—Antonioni updated and infused with German romanticism; the various means of indirection through which the hero communicates with his son (Hunter Carson) and wife (Nastassja Kinski) constitute a striking motif.

Jewison's lack of interest in developing anything other than his rather debatable ideological point relegates the film to the realm of moderately competent TV drama.

Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet.

Brian De Palma has gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of his 1984 thriller represents the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he's ever done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences.

It might have worked if Apted were as adept at creating an emotional atmosphere as he is in his portraiture of the suburban milieu, but too many unshaped scenes and redundant dialogue passages take their toll.

It's 88 minutes of solid, inventive music, filmed in a straightforward manner that neither deifies the performers nor encourages an illusory intimacy, but presents the musicians simply as people doing their job and enjoying it.

There's nothing but sheer manipulativeness holding this picture together.

Someone had another Hospital in mind, and they even hired Arthur Hiller to direct it, but the attempt to merge black humor and strident social commentary seems even more uncertain this time.

There is enough stylish sex and amusing character work (the supporting cast includes Ed Lauter, Mickey Rourke, Joe Pesci, and Helen Kallianiotis) to carry the day.

Only the engaging lightness of the two lead performances prevents the film from falling into utter treacliness.

All in all, an unusually amiable and well-made comedy.

The two different ends require shifts in point of view that are beyond Sayles's talent as a visual storyteller, and the film does not cohere. Yet many of the individual scenes are charming, funny, and pointed, and the movie gives off Sayles's usual glow of goodwill.

It binds up introductory lessons in music appreciation, Freudian psychology, and fanciful history with a pulp thriller plot.

Rudolph’s off-center characterizations and looping dramatic rhythms keep the tone complex and varied, and the film has a lovely choreographed quality that’s only slightly marred by some indifferent cinematography.

The film is fairly tolerable as these things go: Wilder takes time off from the steamrolling plot for improvised bits with some actor buddies (including Charles Grodin and Joseph Bologna), and the project as a whole is a lot less mawkish than we've come to expect from Wilder's directorial efforts. Still, it ain't exactly state of the art.

All of Cronenberg’s personal obsessions—the distortion of the body, the grotesquerie of sex—are on display, though the treatment is a bit sophomoric. A curiosity item for hard-core Cronenberg fans.

It is a shock and a pleasure to see an American film that doesn't wallow in complacency, but instead suggests—however fleetingly—that disappointment is also a part of life. Curtis is particularly impressive in the strength and maturity she brings to a role written as pure fantasy.

You get the plot, all right, but that's all you get - no body, no texture, no rhythm, no shading.

The project would have been much more palatable as a TV special; as it stands, it's just another symptom of the American cinema's addiction to facile mythmaking.