Consistency isn't the chief virtue of Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle, but at its best this ragged satire is bracingly, caustically funny. [27 Mar 1987, p.F-C]

A superb entertainment, it also has something to say.

Evil Dead 2 is, pardon the expression, consistently lively--a ghoulish splatter comedy that uses wildly excessive gore to provoke the kind of shock that lies between a laugh and a scream. [10 Apr 1987, Friday, p.M]

The film has an easy target in poking fun at rural folks, but it also has a warm message about individuality. It's also beautifully photographed. [8 May 1987]

Levinson invests his script with a richness of theme that helps make it a comedy classic.

These extremely attractive characters deserve a better finish. [8 May 1987, p.7-D]

The movie could reasonably be rated S for slow because director Alan Parker seems more concerned with style and with hiding the film's big mystery than with pacing. We develop no empathy for the Rourke character, and so watching the movie, as attractive as it is physically, is like riding on a slow conveyor belt. [06 Mar 1987, p.A]

It's Mary Stuart Masterson, bringing a depth and tenacity to her role that nowhere appears in the screenplay, who leaves the lasting impression. She escapes the airiness of Hughes's vision to establish something like a human being. [22 Feb 1987]

This is the third in a hyper-violent and rather stupid series of thrillers about an adult child killer--with knives for fingers--who is burnt to death but now has returned to haunt more teenagers in their sleep. The kids are all patients at a clinic where group therapy fails to stop their nightmares. What you get for your money are scenes with a severed head, the simultaneous injection of 10 hypodermic needles presumably filled with heroin and four long tongues that turn into arm and ankle straps for a sex scene. Whoopee! The film's only blessing? It just may be bad enough to kill off the series.

Director Lizzie Borden sticks to the business of trying to elicit natural performances from a cast that includes Off-off Broadway actors, actors with almost no credits and, among the men, some who are not actors at all. To a remarkable degree she has succeeded, particularly in the case of Louise Smith, who plays Molly. [13 Mar 1987, p.D]

There's some solid talent here, but Gottlieb's overemphatic direction reduces them all to broad caricature--the kind of crazed mugging that isn't often seen outside the boundaries of Saturday morning kiddie shows. [13 Feb 1987, p.A]

Over the Top is pretty much like all of the other successful Stallone films, which probably means that it will be a success, too. In fact, it`s considerably better than the ragged, recycled Rocky IV, though it lacks the wild excesses that made Rambo and Cobra campily entertaining.

Director Bob Rafelson, one of the leading lights of the 1970s ("Five Easy Pieces"), makes a terrific comeback in a stylish piece that is as beguiling and lush as its central character. [6 Feb 1987, p.AC]

Director Arthur Penn (Bonnnie and Clyde) may have intended this to be a campy homage to Hitchcock, but instead he gives us a boring, frustrating and stupid story. [06 Feb 1987, p.A]

The brilliance of the film is the way in which Allen pays tribute to radio while subtly condemning television, which, he seems to be arguing, has partially robbed us of our imaginations.

It's a dim, thoroughly synthetic film, so far removed from its source--much less from any original creative impulse--that it barely seems to exist. [30 Jan 1987, p.A]

Crimes of the Heart feels random, vague and sluggish. The incidents don't build upon one another, but merely collapse into an undifferentiated heap. [12 Dec 1986, p.A]

The Bedroom Window is not at all an unskillful film, but that, in some ways, is what is most discouraging about it: Hanson is more than good enough to do something of his own. In its drive to imitate the past, Hollywood is leaving itself without a present. [16 Jan 1987, p.L]

A dim-witted remake of the great "Bonnie and Clyde," with Estevez playing a decent young man saddled with an unfair criminal record that prevents him from getting a job. [9 Jan 1987, p.AC]

This film, which tries to use chaos creatively-by shaping it and sculpting it-finally seems little more than a well-filmed mess. [4 Dec 1987, p.B]

Brighton Beah, curiously, still doesn`t work on film, perhaps because movies have no use for stagecraft, no matter how brilliant it may be. Once there`s no practical reason to keep the action restricted to a single set --movies, of course, can go anywhere--Simon`s strategic skills come to seem superfluous, if not an actual liability.

The songs are joyful, and the plant is a foul-mouthed wonder when it begins to talk. Director Frank Oz deserves credit for staging a musical in classic form, creating nothing less than one of the year's most entertaining films. [19 Dec 1986, p.A]

Platoon is filled with one fine performance after another, and one can only wish that every person who saw the cartoonish war fantasy that was Rambo would buy a ticket to Platoon and bear witness to something closer to the truth.

An amiable adventure illuminated at odd moments by some genuine inventiveness. [21 Dec 1986, p.12C]

Technically, "No Mercy" is a smooth, assured piece of work, with a sense of movement and color far superior to Pearce's previous outings. But it is in technique that American action movies have taken their last refuge. The commitment to character is gone, the effort to create credible, vivid situations has been forgotten. What remains is empty know-how, and it is difficult to see the difference between this kind of filmmaking and the impersonal style-for-hire that goes into a typical TV commercial.

A weirdly out-of-scale movie that constantly juxtaposes the trivial and the cosmic, less to comic effect than to a mounting sense of muddle and uncertainty.

The movie as a movie is a letdown, because all it consists of is Eastwood's hoarse, foul-mouthed complaining about today's "softies" and then his leading into battle in Grenada a bunch of rag-tag kids that he has molded into men. This is all material recycled out of films as varied as "The Dirty Dozen" and "Police Academy." [5 Dec 1986, p.A-C]

Nimoy directs the comedy in a loose, relaxed, almost sketch-like manner, but when the film moves into its multiple-cliffhanger climax, he's still able to generate some genuine dash and tension. The only drawback is that the Enterprise gang is starting to look a little long in the tooth for such strenuous action.