There is a terrifying moment in adolescence when suddenly some of the kids are twice as big as the rest of the kids. It is terrifying for everybody: For the kids who are suddenly tall and gangling, and for the kids who are still small and are getting beat up all the time. My Bodyguard places that moment in a Chicago high school and gives us a kid who tries to think his way out of it.

The question, of course, of why anybody of any age would possibly want to see this film remains without an answer.

Each character in this movie is given the dramatic opportunity to look inside himself, to question his own motives as well as the motives of others, and to try to improve his own ways of dealing with a troubled situation. Two of the characters do learn how to adjust; the third doesn't. It's not often we get characters who face those kinds of challenges on the screen, nor directors who seek them out. Ordinary People is an intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving film.

There is no need for this movie. That's true of most sequels, but it's especially true of Smokey and the Bandit II, which is basically just the original movie done again, not as well.

A mushy and limp musical fantasy, so insubstantial it keeps evaporating before our eyes. It's one of those rare movies in which every scene seems to be the final scene; it's all ends and no beginnings, right up to its actual end, which is a cheat.

This is the kind of movie that some kids would probably enjoy - it's filled with technology, special effects and action. But it just doesn't make any sense. And It lacks the wit to have fun with its time travel paradoxes, as last year's wonderful Time After Time did. It just plows ahead. Or behind. Or somewhere.

Because McQueen can be so effective in action pictures, The Hunter is all the more frustrating: Didn't anybody point out that the script was a mess that made no sense? Didn't anybody have the guts to? Maybe they thought superstar McQueen would save the day. Pictures like this could finish him off.

Caddyshack never finds a consistent comic note of its own, but it plays host to all sorts of approaches from its stars, who sometimes hardly seem to be occupying the same movie.

Stylish, intriguing, and very violent.

Hard-boiled, filled with action, held together by male camaraderie, directed with a lean economy of action. It's one of the most expensive B-pictures ever made, and I think that helps it fit the subject. "A" war movies are about War, but "B" war movies are about soldiers. (Review of Original Release)

There are so many different characters and story lines in the movie that it's hard to keep everything straight, and harder still to care.

It's a total miscalculation from beginning to end, inspired by an idiotic decision to increase the average age of the Benji audience by starring him in a movie rated PG.

It is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc. Example: Airplane Captain (Peter Graves): Surely you can't be serious. Doctor (Leslie Nielsen): I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. This sort of humor went out with Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and knock-knock jokes. That's why it's so funny.

The Blue Lagoon is the dumbest movie of the year. It could conceivably have been made interesting, if any serious attempt had been made to explore what might really happen if two 7-year-old kids were shipwrecked on an island. But this isn't a realistic movie. It's a wildly idealized romance, in which the kids live in a hut that looks like a Club Med honeymoon cottage, while restless natives commit human sacrifice on the other side of the island.

A film that depends on deceiving us has got to play by its own rules. If we are going to be deceived in general, fine, but then we can't be cheated on particulars.

What's a little startling about this movie is that all of this works. The Blues Brothers cost untold millions of dollars and kept threatening to grow completely out of control. But director John Landis (of “Animal House”) has somehow pulled it together, with a good deal of help from the strongly defined personalities of the title characters. Belushi and Aykroyd come over as hard-boiled city guys, total cynics with a world-view of sublime simplicity, and that all fits perfectly with the movie's other parts. There's even room, in the midst of the carnage and mayhem, for a surprising amount of grace, humor, and whimsy.

Brubaker is a grim and depressing drama about prison outrages - a movie that should, given its absolutely realistic vision, have kept us involved from beginning to end. That it doesn't is the result, I think, of a deliberate but unwise decision to focus on the issues involved in the story, instead of on the characters.

It's fun, it's slick and it's carefully put together, but it's more of an exercise than an accomplishment. Everyone does their schtick, the plot complications unfold like clockwork, but we find ourselves not really caring.

Hollywood Knights is a stupid movie that relies on flatulence for jokes, but Michelle Pfeiffer had to start somewhere. [18 Oct 1999, p.43]

But there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why. Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease.

Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals that it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it. Without knowing much about the reasons why the movie was made, I'd guess on the evidence that the director, Robert Kaylor, was fascinated by carnivals, spent a lot of time with one and shot a lot of film, and then found himself forced, to shape his material into some sort of traditional, commercial story. Inside this movie is a documentary struggling to get out.

The best of three Star Wars films, and the most thought-provoking. After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.

Fame is a genuine treasure, moving and entertaining, a movie that understands being a teen-ager as well as Breaking Away did, but studies its characters in a completely different milieu.

My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film's foreground obscured its larger meaning.

It doesn't have that sneaky sense of awful things about to happen. Scott makes the hero so rational, normal and self-possessed that we never feel he's in real danger; we go through this movie with too much confidence.

Little Darlings really wants to be two movies at once: A fairly serious film about teenagers and sex, but also a box-office winner like "National Lampoon's Animal House" or "Meatballs." That's why we get awkwardly forced comedy like the food-fight scene. The movie also suffers from uncertain direction.

It's warm, entertaining, funny, and centered around that great Sissy Spacek performance, but it's essentially pretty familiar material (not that Loretta Lynn can be blamed that Horatio Alger wrote her life before she lived it). The movie isn't great art, but it has been made with great taste and style; it's more intelligent and observant than movie biographies of singing stars used to be. That makes it a treasure to watch, even if we sometimes have the feeling we've seen it before.

It contains the sounds and rhythms of real teen-age lives; it was written and directed after a lot of research, and is acted by kids who are to one degree or another playing themselves. The movie's a rare attempt to provide a portrait of the way teen-agers really do live today in some suburban cultures.

The level of intelligence of the screenplay of "Saturn 3" is shockingly low - the story is so dumb it would be laughed out of any junior high school class in the country - and yet the movie was financed. Why?

Here's a movie that's well visualized, that does a riveting job of exploring an authentic subculture, that has a fairly high level of genuine suspense from beginning to end. . and that then seems to make a conscious decision not to declare itself on its central subject. What does Friedkin finally think his movie is about?

The Fog is encouraging because it contains another demonstration of Carpenter's considerable directing talents. He picked the wrong story, I think, but he directs it with a flourish. This isn't a great movie but it does show great promise from Carpenter.

A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.

The whole movie has a winning sadness about it; take away the story's sensational aspects and what you have is a study in loneliness.

If The Electric Horseman has a flaw, it's that the movie's so warm and cozy it can hardly be electrifying. The director, Sydney Pollack, gives us solid entertainment, but he doesn't take chances and he probably didn't intend to.

Takes us all the way to the rim of space only to bog us down in a talky melodrama whipped up out of mad scientists and haunted houses.

Let's say Roller Boogie is no better and no worse than the beach blanket/bikini/bingo/bongo movies, and from there you're going to have to take it by yourself.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a movie of good performances, and it had to be, because the performances can't rest on conventional melodrama.

It's a movie based on an idea, and all the conventional wisdom agrees that emotions, not ideas, are the best to make movies from. But Being There pulls off its long shot and is one of the most confoundingly provocative movies of the year.

It's not fair to say Steven Spielberg's 1941 lacks "pacing." It's got it, all right, but all at the same pace: The movie relentlessly throws gags at us until we're dizzy. It's an attempt at that most tricky of genres, the blockbuster comedy, and it tries so hard to dazzle us that we want a break.

I didn't find “The Jerk” very funny...There's a smarmy undercurrent in this movie that seems to imply that Steve Martin may be playing a jerk, but that we all know what a cool guy he is. Well, if you're going to play a jerk, play one as if you think you are one, or you might wind up looking like a jerk.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is probably about as good as we could have expected. It lacks the dazzling brilliance and originality of 2001 (which was an extraordinary one-of-a-kind film). But on its own terms it's a very well-made piece of work, with an interesting premise.

Sentimental without being corny, a tearjerker with dignity. The Great Santini is a movie to seek out and to treasure.

It was produced, written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also wrote American Graffiti, and it has the same sharp memory for those specific moments when young people suspect they are doing certain things for the last times in their lives. So it is bittersweet, of course -- bittersweet, that indispensable street you travel through adolescence on.

Here's an angry comedy crossed with an expose and held together by one of those high-voltage Al Pacino performances that's so sure of itself we hesitate to demur.

The film gathers fearful force.

The first hour of this movie belongs among the great filmgoing experiences. It is described as an epic, and earns the description.

The elegantly composed visuals, the stately progression of the scenes, the deliberate understatement of the dialogue, are all as "faithful" to James as a film can be. But that's exactly the film's problem: Ivory hasn't found a way to make his own film, and has ended up with a classroom version of James, a film with no juice or life of its own.

Blake Edwards's "10" is perhaps the first comedy about terminal yearning. Like all great comedies, it deals with emotions very close to our hearts: In this case, the unutterable poignance of a man's desire for a woman he cannot have.

Starting Over actually feels sort of embarrassed at times, maybe because characters are placed in silly sitcom situations and then forced to say lines that are supposed to be revealing and real. When the gags do work, and occasionally they do, it's more a matter of acute social observation than good writing.

Nosferatu the Vampyre cannot be confined to the category of "horror film." It is about dread itself, and how easily the unwary can fall into evil.

Love and Bullets is a hopelessly confused hodgepodge of chases, killings, enigmatic meetings and separations, and insufferably overacted scenes by Steiger alternating with alarmingly underacted scenes by Bronson.

Funny, in that peculiar British way where jokes are told sideways, with the obvious point and then the delayed zinger.

Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting over the trees in the long shot, and the insane power of Wagner's music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: Those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance.

The locker room scenes are totally authentic.

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there. We watch two hours of people being frightened and dismayed, and we ask ourselves... what for? If it's real, let it have happened to them. Too bad, Lutzes! If it's made up, make it more entertaining. If they can't make up their minds... why should we?

Breaking Away is a wonderfully sunny, funny, goofy, intelligent movie that makes you feel about as good as any movie in a long time.

What an elegantly seen Dracula this is, all shadows and blood and vapors and Frank Langella stalking through with the grace of a cat. The film is a triumph of performance, art direction and mood over materials that can lend themselves so easily to self-satire

The Frisco Kid has a certain softness at its center. The Wilder character has a sweetness, a niceness, that's interesting for the character but doesn't seem to work with this material. It's really nobody's movie. The screenplay has been around Hollywood for several years, and Aldrich seems to have taken it on as a routine assignment.

Moonraker is a movie by gadgeteers, for gadgeteers, about gadgeteers. Our age may be losing its faith in technology, but James Bond sure hasn't.

After that first second we quit wondering: This is magic, after all, so who wants to know where Henson is?

For almost all of its length, Escape from Alcatraz is a taut and toughly wrought portrait of life in a prison. It is also a masterful piece of storytelling, in which the characters say little and the camera explains the action. It's one of those very difficult exercises in which large emotions, like the compulsion to be free, are reflected in minute actions, like the chipping away at stone with a pocket nail clipper.

One of the great strengths of Alien is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits. It allows silences (the majestic opening shots are underscored by Jerry Goldsmith with scarcely audible, far-off metallic chatterings).

The Brood is an el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same.

Dawn of the Dead is one of the best horror films ever made -- and, as an inescapable result, one of the most horrifying. It is gruesome, sickening, disgusting, violent, brutal and appalling. It is also (excuse me for a second while I find my other list) brilliantly crafted, funny, droll, and savagely merciless in its satiric view of the American consumer society. Nobody ever said art had to be in good taste.

Over the Edge is a funeral service held at the graveside of the suburban dream. It tells a ragged story that ends with an improbable climax, but it's acted so well and truly by its mostly teen-age cast that we somehow feel we're eavesdropping.

What did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Karl Malden plays a character named 'Wilbur,' and Slim Pickens plays a character named 'Tex'?

This is basically the first sitcom in drag, and the comic turns in the plot are achieved with such clockwork timing that sometimes we're laughing at what's funny and sometimes we're just laughing at the movie's sheer comic invention. This is a great time at the movies.

A Little Romance has been described as a movie about the way kids behave when adults aren't looking. I think it's quite the opposite: A movie about the way kids behave when adults are looking - and when adults are writing the dialog and directing the action, too. It gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm.

The movie is, above all, entertainment: well-acted, well-crafted, scary as hell.

this is a very good movie. Woody Allen is ... Woody, sublimely. Diane Keaton gives us a fresh and nicely edged New York intellectual. And Mariel Hemingway deserves some kind of special award for what's in some ways the most difficult role in the film.

An idea is not enough for a movie. Characters have to be developed, comic situations have to be set up before they can pay off and the story should have a conclusion instead of a dead stop. Real Life fails in all of those areas -- fails so miserably that it lets its audiences down.

The Warriors is a real peculiarity, a movie about street gang warfare, written and directed as an exercise in mannerism. There's hardly a moment when we believe that the movie's gangs are real or that their members are real people or that they inhabit a real city. That's where the peculiarity comes in: I don't think we're supposed to. No matter what impression the ads give, this isn't even remotely intended as an action film. It's a set piece. It's a ballet of stylized male violence.

Other pleasures: The wicked trick used to smuggle Connery into the locked car with the gold; the chase scene on top of the train; and, of course, the exquisite presence of Down, who has a bedroom scene with Connery that makes James Bond look curiously like Sherlock Holmes.

A film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria.

Schrader doesn't speak to the deeper and more human themes he's introduced. Too bad. But Hardcore, flawed and uneven, contains moments of pure revelation.

Has it come to this? Do we need the additional emotional jolts of blindness, paralysis and amputation in order to accept a story about young love and kids succeeding by luck and pluck? People who are handicapped must find that these movies range from the depressing to the contemptible.

Superman is a pure delight, a wondrous combination of all the old-fashioned things we never really get tired of: adventure and romance, heroes and villains, earthshaking special effects, and -- you know what else? Wit.

It is not an anti-war film. It is not a pro-war film. It is one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made.

Force Ten honors all the obligatory clichés, and then there's a nice twist involving the explosion inside the dam, and then we get the special effects, and then it's over. It doesn't leave much of an impression; a director like Guy Hamilton, a graduate of four of the Bond pictures, can turn out action movies like this in his sleep. This time, alas, that's apparently what he did.

What we have here is basically two hours of inventive, colorfully imagined entertainment, with the Brinks job laid on top: A movie-movie, so to speak, and fun from beginning to end.

It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.

What the film gains at Bakshi’s hand is a very clever bag of animator’s tricks, most of which serve to make Tolkien’s characters palpable after all those years on paper.

Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to “Psycho.”

The movie has great moments and a lot of life, sensational special effects and costumes, and Ross, Jackson, and Russell. Why doesn't it involve us as deeply as The Wizard of Oz? Maybe because it hedges its bets by wanting to be sophisticated and universal, childlike and knowing, appealing to both a mass audience and to media insiders. The Wizard of Oz went flat-out for the heart of its story; there are times whenThe Wiz has just a touch too much calculation.

Parker succeeds in making the prison into a full, real, rounded world, a microcosm of human behavior; I was reminded of e.e. cummings' novel The Enormous Room. The movie's art direction is especially good at recreating that world, as in a scene where Hayes and his friends try to escape down an old cistern. And there are visions into the inferno, as in a scene in the madhouse where the inmates circle forever around a stone pillar. The movie creates spellbinding terror, all right; my only objection is that it's so eager to have us sympathize with Billy Hayes.

Above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. [7 Dec. 1997]

Interiors becomes serious by intently observing complex adults as they fend and cope, blame and justify. Because it illuminates some of the ways we all act, it is serious but not depressing; when it's over, we may even find ourselves quietly cheered that Allen has seen so clearly how things can be.

Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.

A well-assembled chase movie--a thriller, with a few existential notes left over from Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers the novel the movie's based on.

The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological. It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made "The Producers."

All of this could have been nice and juicy if Walter Hill had done a few more things with his screenplay, such as made the characters into people.

Somehow manages to combine the sweetness and innocence of the original with a satirical bite all its own.

No revival, however joyously promoted, can conceal the fact that this is just an average musical, pleasant and upbeat and plastic.

The movie gets the feel right, and there's real energy in the concert scenes, especially the tricky debut of Buddy Holly and the Crickets as the first white act in Harlem's famous Apollo Theater.

El sleazo profoundo trasho zilch.

The music probably sounds fine on a CD. Certainly it is well-rehearsed. But the overall sense of the film is of good riddance to a bad time.

Situations aren't explored, characters aren't developed, timing is ignored, but every 30 seconds there's a would-be laugh. Because all we're supposed to do is laugh, the movie is deadening.

Louis Malle's Pretty Baby is a pleasant surprise: After all the controversy and scandal surrounding its production, it turns out to be a good-hearted, good-looking, quietly elegiac movie.