We walk into the theater expecting absolutely nothing of substance, and that's exactly what we get, served up with high style.

This is one of the most intelligent and compelling movie musicals in a long time - and the most grown up.

[Altman] has made a melodrama, almost a soap opera, in which the characters achieve a kind of nobility.

The elaborate special effects also seem a little out of place in a Sherlock Holmes movie, although I'm willing to forgive them because they were fun.

Rocky IV is movie-making by the numbers. Even the climactic fight scene isn't as exciting as it should be, maybe because we know with a certainty born of long experience how it will turn out.

It comes to life in the dance sequences, and then drifts away again.

This movie is sick. It pretends to be a warning against compulsive gambling, but it falls for the oldest dodge in the gambler's book: "I only gambled enough to win back my losses." Maybe I shouldn't have expected anything more from an MGM movie that was shot on location at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

The movie is also uncanny in what it does with its last three shots. I watched them, and could not believe so much could be implied so simply. Leave the movie before it's over, and you miss almost everything, because what Connie does at the very end of the film is necessary. It makes "Smooth Talk" the story of the process of life, instead of just a sad episode.

The movie does not have a conventional happy ending. Life will go on, and people will strive, and new routines will replace old ones. The movie has no villains and few heroes. But it has given us several remarkable scenes, especially two confrontations between Madigan and Hackman, one in a bar, the other at a wedding rehearsal, in which the movie shows how much children expect from their parents, and how little the parents often have to give.

The action, direction and special effects are all better than the last time around, which isn't saying much, since Death Wish II was so ineptly directed and edited that it was an insult even to audiences that were looking for a bad movie.

In the hierarchy of great movie chase sequences, the recent landmarks include the chases under the Brooklyn elevated tracks in "The French Connection" down the hills of San Francisco in "Bullitt" and through the Paris Metro in "Diva." Those chases were not only thrilling in their own right, but they also reflected the essence of the cities where they took place. Now comes William Friedkin, director of "The French Connection," with a new movie that contains another chase that belongs on that short list.

One of the pleasures of the movies, however, is to find a movie that chooses a disreputable genre and then tries with all its might to transcend the genre, to go over the top into some kind of artistic vision, however weird. Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator is a pleasure like that, a frankly gory horror movie that finds a rhythm and a style that make it work in a cockeyed, offbeat sort of way.

Most horror movies are exercises in unrelieved vulgarity, occasionally interrupted by perfunctory murders. This movie, to borrow an immortal comment by Mel Brooks, "rises below vulgarity." If you are sick up to here of horror movies in general and Steven King in particular, this is the movie for you.

Sweet Dreams begins with more energy than it is able to sustain.

The machinery in this movie is so efficient that we don't know the answer until the very last shot.

Invasion U.S.A. is a brain-damaged, idiotic thriller, not even bad enough to be laughable.

It considers, or pretends to consider, some of the most basic questions of human morality and treats them on the level of "Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Convent."

The most unconventional biopic I've ever seen, and one of the best.

After Hours is a brilliant film that is so original, so particular, that we are uncertain from moment to moment exactly how to respond to it. The style of the film creates, in us, the same feeling that the events in the film create in the hero. Interesting.

If I were simply to describe the story of Compromising Positions, it might sound like lighthearted, slightly kinky fun. But the movie has such a bitter core, such a distaste for its characters, that I ended up feeling uncomfortable in its company. I think it's supposed to be a comedy, but I felt depressed by its world of rich, neurotic, bitchy suburbanities.

The fatal flaw in Godzilla 1985 is that it is a bad movie with aspirations of being a good bad movie.

Return is a movie with some nice, droll opening scenes and the obligatory horrible climax. It doesn't make the mistake of Day Of The Dead - talking too much. It's kind of a sensation-machine, made out of the usual ingredients, and the real question is whether it's done with style. It is.

American Flyers is shaky at the core, because it tries to tap-dance around its own central issues.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure goes up and down the hills of Pee-wee shtick, without much concern for things like cohesiveness and consistency. What makes it wear so well is the balance achieved between Pee-wee's nitwit nervousness and his pathetic optimism. [12 Aug 1985, p.35]

Real Genius contains many pleasures, but one of the best is its conviction that the American campus contains life as we know it.

The center of the film is the simple, almost elementary insight that fantasies can be hazardous: You've got to be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.

Fright Night is not a distinguished movie, but it has a lot of fun being undistinguished.

Tells one of those rare and entrancing stories where one thing seems to happen while another thing is really happening.