Red Heat is directed in a fiery, muscular, pop-graphic style. And it has a James Horner score that puckishly mixes Prokofiev and rhythm and blues. But it's also a movie with a cramped interior. The action scenes seem to be squeezing out everything else, pressing the characters against the wall. [17 Jun 1988, p.1]

The Great Outdoors is about as much fun as ants at a picnic for anyone over the age of 10. It's a crass, blah comedy about summer vacation perils that teams Dan Aykroyd and John Candy, but gives them next to nothing to work with. If the prolific and profit-making John Hughes weren't the writer--as well as the co-executive producer--of this scattershot nonsense directed frenetically by Howard Deutch, it's hard to imagine the film getting made, let alone attracting Aykroyd and Candy.

Decline's redeeming grace is its jocular, damn-the-proprieties air and, for the first half, its staccato editing rhythm. It's damnation is most of the music and its relative avoidance of heavy metal's darker corners: the pith and point that Alex Cox gave punk in Sid and Nancy.

Hickox, the son of Douglas (Theatre of Blood) Hickox, shows a derivative, choppy, jagged style in his feature debut. He makes an uneasy stew of this mix of hip, flip teen-slasher gore and movie-buff aestheticism, of callous black humor and smarmy sentimentality. There’s a big problem here: too much waxy buildup.

It's just that when a movie is this close, with so much of the sports flavor (co-producer Thom Mount is co-owner of the real Durham Bulls), you like to see it perfect. [15 June 1988]

It's an ultra-slick, ultra-flat movie that cuts like a cellophane knife. No edge, no blood.

Poltergeist III is another sequel that seems to exist for no better reason than justifying its title and number.

Like a sensational party the night before, Big Business may not bear the closest scrutiny in the cold light of day, but it gives an irresistible glow at the time. And when it gets on a roll, it's a movie with more wit to its lines and a more pungent array of them than much of the mishmash that has passed as Bette Midler's Greatest Movie Hits. [10 Jun 1988, p.1]

The greatest thing about Big is that its makers have known how to end it in a thoroughly satisfying fashion, which is always the challenge-and often the stumbling block-of fantasy. In never confusing what is child-like with childishness, Big is actually a refreshingly grown-up comedy-for the entire family. [3 Jun 1988, p.1]

Funny Farm --a weak-fish-out-of-water comedy about a New York City couple who see their rural paradise turned into a rustic hell--is a movie with a doubly deceptive title. This movie isn't about a farm, and it isn't very funny, either.

Admirers of Rambo III will probably point out that it moves fast. But then, so does a gazelle-and a gazelle has better dialogue and more personality. [25 May 1988, p.1]

Crocodile Dundee II is almost as much fun the second time around. As an adventure it's nothing special, yet it's an inspired and good-humored presentation of one of the freshest, most likable screen personalities to emerge in the past decade. [25 May 1988, p.1]

Willow is a perfectly agreeable tale of magic, little people, heroic warriors, babies among the bulrushes and a wicked queen who must be overthrown lest the world be engulfed in evil. If it evaporates from memory with the airiness of a bubble bath, at least it leaves a friendly glow and a sense of a magical world lovingly evoked. [20 May 1988, p. c1]

It's been theorized that the popularity of the "Friday the 13th" movies is because the juxtaposing of scenes of lovemaking and extreme violence somehow eases young people's sexual fears. However, this "Friday the 13th", which was written by Daryl Haney and Manuel Fidello and directed by John Carl Buechler, is so dumb and contrived it's hard to imagine it working up any feelings except boredom. [17 May 1988, p.C3]

It also begs for an anarchic-camp approach, or else a deeper exploitation of the very real fears the common citizenry have of men in blue in so many urban climes nowadays.

While this concept is enough to make even the strongest moviegoer stock up on garlic and crucifixes, the actual film defies the odds--it has a novel twist and a great deal of energy and polish.

Hacking through the jungle of cliche and reservoir of bad acting in Bloodsport are some pretty exciting matches. It all boils down to a confrontation between a clean-cut noble warrior and a snorting, apish, dirty fighter. As usual, it's no contest.

Though it's somewhat better than its predecessor, largely through sheer directorial and photographic panache, it's still pretty disreputable and mindless. [29 Apr 1988, p.4]

Unlike pornography, it takes place in a recognizably real world. It is a much better film than "9 1/2 Weeks," which King wrote and produced. [2 May 1988, p.5]

Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi, like his earlier “Koyaanisqatsi,” is a lyrical documentary that turns the instruments of technology against it. In some ways, the new film is less effective, but it’s also more visually spectacular: a mesmerizing cascade of sensuous sights and sounds.

Bagdad Cafe, which Adlon wrote with his wife, Eleonore, and Christopher Doherty, is a miracle of timing and control for all its aura of zany, off-the-cuff spontaneity. It is the work of a director who has such a clear idea of what he wants and where he's going that he can take his time to build up every joke for the maximum payoff.

The movie has the same problem as Davis' Chuck Norris vehicle, Code of Silence. Starting in the semi-realistic framework of the '70s cop movies, it veers off into '80s action movie cloud-cuckoo land: the paranoid one-against-a-hundred cliches of the average Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job. [08 Apr 1988, p.14]

For all its supernatural vein, Lady in White has an engaging, Hardy Boys feeling about it and, in Lukas Haas, probably the screen's most irresistible performer this side of Kermit the Frog. And every ounce of Master Haas' adorability will be put to the test, because Lady in White is also a virtual junkyard of mismatched ideas and elements, thrown up on the screen in a friendly, haphazard fashion. [22 Apr 1988, p.8]

It’s a veritable crazy quilt of ideas that manages to engage our attention while our heads continue to dart away from the shocking images on screen.

My Neighbor Totoro is a gentle and affirming film. It's certain to delight smaller children, although boys accustomed to the slam-bang violence of super-hero cartoon features and TV shows may chafe at its leisurely pace.

Without complexity to its characters, with little balance and without a hint of the personal, family or community issues involved, Colors becomes a movie that never has to ask "Why?"--a vivid, noisy shell of a film filled with eager young actors rattling along on the surface of a lethally important subject. [15 Apr 1988]

The film is on the lean side in matters of story and depth of characters. Its strengths are its pure, ingratiating sweetness, its insider’s view of cross-cultural romance and its eye-popping picture of a thoroughly Westernized Tokyo that has rushed to embrace every worst idea America ever exported--and added a few of its own: sing-along caraoke videos and love hotels, which are a little like the Madonna Inn on a franchise scale.

As directed with the heaviest of hands by newcomer Paul Flaherty from an impoverished screenplay by debuting feature writers Josh Goldstein and Jonathan Prince, it’s not likely to make fans of either 18- or 81-year-olds.

While Bridges is a capital stylist, "Bright Lights" needed a great deal more than style. (Real emotion, for one thing. Believability might also have been nice.) And while Fox is puppyish and charming, his character, Jamie, has to go through a real epiphany during the film's weeklong time frame and Mr. Fox is hard-pressed to suggest a two-Excedrin headache.

By the time this irresistible treat is over, it has created some of the funniest moments and most inspired visual humor and design we may expect to experience at the movies all year. [30 Mar 1988]

Nichols gives the piece a funny, fragile somber mood that works almost completely.

Johnny Be Good, a would-be satire on the excesses of big-time college football recruiting, is so bad that the NCAA might consider using it as punishment for coaches who violate regulations.

Despite the final escape of star Steve Guttenberg, and the loss, long since, of the original director and writers, this is almost a good movie. It's an incremental, heavily qualified success, but "PA 5" is an improvement on the elephantine, witless "2," "3" and "4."

A refreshingly original thriller that is also a wrenchingly poignant family drama.

Stand and Deliver itself, with its message of the soaring rewards of learning, aims high and delivers perhaps a B+. But it's already a better, less cliched film than La Bamba, with considerably more on its mind, and its strengths may pave the way for more complex, more demanding stories of the Latino experience for all audiences.

Vice Versa may be a better film than Like Father, Like Son, largely because of the direction and Savage’s performance, but it’s still a disappointment.

Technically, and on a performance level, Prison earns time off for good behavior. However, the story feels as if it was conceived by someone working with an expired artistic license. [24 May 1988, p.8]

Since the humor in Moving never rises above the level of a stale sitcom, the film defeats proven comedy director Alan Metter and even its star, Richard Pryor, stuck in the squarest, most strait-jacketed role of his career.

The delectable Babette’s Feast is a fable told with passion, intelligence and sumptuousness. Although it certainly has a feast at its center, it would be a mistake to think that its tribute is intended only for great cooks. No, it’s a deep reverence to all great artists--whether they make books, bowls or ballets, baskets, quilts, songs, poems, paintings . . . or films.

Hairspray is a deliriously fast and funny satire of the '60s that marks John Waters' best shot yet at mainstream audiences. [25 Feb 1988, p.1]

In Roman Polanski's Frantic--an elegant, icy thriller about an American doctor chasing his wife's kidnapers through the deadlier byways of Paris--we can tell after 10 minutes that we're in the hands of a superb craftsman.

In his brilliantly evocative and warmly comic Hope and Glory, John Boorman shifts the point of view downward, away from the tense and preoccupied adults, to that of a sweetly thoughtful 7-year-old boy, to whom the war is something else entirely. [30 Oct 1987, p.1]

And though School Daze isn't as successful as the more modestly scaled "She's Gotta Have It," in the end, it may be even more rewarding and promising. The movie's seemingly twisted view of higher education suggests a straight eye, a cool mind, a steady heart--and a great aim.

It's a generic action movie with more guns than brains, more car crashes than coherence and more opportunism than originality. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

Despite the movie's ruinous cliches, Neeson puts some genuine anguish into his phonily written scenes as the '60s burnout. Bateman plays to him well, and Phillips, making her feature debut, has some funny moments in the flashy kook role.

Even illuminated by the unsparing performances of Jack Nicholson as Francis and Meryl Streep as Helen, his companion of nine years and another soul stumbling away from grace, the film becomes becalmed and confusing; it lacks the novel's great unwavering trajectory. [18 Dec 1987, p.1]

It has the subtlety and devastating impact of Renoir’s prophetic classic Rules of the Game, and it is suffused with the calm, detached tragic irony and inevitability of the ancient Greek plays.

The movie is grisly, illogical, contradictory, borderline tasteless, riddled with plot holes--and at the same time, decently photographed, cleanly edited and crisply directed. All in all, the waste it represents--of talent, of intelligence, of fine craftsmen and of the audience’s good will--is enough to make one howl like a dog.

The Serpent and the Rainbow does for the old Caribbean zombie movie what Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" did for the serials. It preserves all the spooky fun of a movie like "White Zombie" while drawing upon all the sophisticated resources of big-budget modern film making: richly photographed authentic locales, wondrous special effects and amazingly acute sound recording...The result is an ambitious, entertaining--though not flawless--feat of the imagination, a highly visual and skillful blending of supernatural and political terror, high adventure and anthropology.

For all its real achievements, including a stomach-clutching re-creation of the Soviet invasion of Prague, and for all its uncoy acknowledgment of the power of sexuality, the film ultimately adds up to the unbearable heaviness of movie-making.

The movie has an odd, queasy edge to it. It's cute. But, sometimes, it gets cold cute, ghastly cute. The effect is mixed--like a Norman Rockwell cover redrawn in Gahan Wilson's style by a computer.

It's an '80s "road" film -- in the '70s vein of "Five Easy Pieces" or "Two Lane Blacktop" (which Wurlitzer wrote) -- and it's almost a little masterpiece: morally brave, beautifully measured, funny, sad and powerful. With quiet skill, it tears open and subverts some glittery fantasies of the American dream. [11 Mar 1988, p.27]

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama is too obvious and heavy-handed even for this amount of attention. It deserves a gutter-ball score. [02 Feb 1988, p.7]

Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” is his most off-putting picture since his unwatchable political films of the ‘70s.

The film itself--a dramatic comedy based on the 1965 Saigon gig of irreverent Armed Forces disc jockey Adrian Cronauer--is good-hearted but shallow. It's a piece of programmed irreverence, photogenic torpor, prefab compassion. But Williams, as Cronauer, is so blazingly brilliant that he detonates the center, exploding it in berserk blasts of electronic-age surreality.

Almost any movie with Molly Ringwald at its centerpiece has a built-in plus to it. The wonder about For Keeps is that not even Ringwald's customary glow and bedrock believability make a smidgen of difference. Muddled it is and muddled it remains.

It's a dry, fluky comedy about the perils of immigrant communities and bad health facilities -- shot in a style that's a clever pastiche of early '30s experimental talkies. The imagery is purposely deranged and the movie pumps it out in slow, deliberate rhythms that become daffy and excruciating. [11 Sep 1989, p.6]

Such nourishing comedy. It satisfies every hunger, especially the irrational ones that seem to hit hardest at holidays: hunger for impetuous romance and for the reassuring warmth of family, for reckless abandon, and for knowing who we are and what we want. [16 Dec 1987]

If you want the true, jaw-dropping details of Pu Yi's life, try the biography by Edward Behr, Newsweek International's cultural editor. If you want a staggering and certainly singular movie experience, The Last Emperor will do very nicely. [20 Nov 1987, p.1]

Not surprisingly, considering that it is a Spielberg production, Batteries Not Included is a handsome film, impeccably (and ingeniously) designed by Ted Haworth and enriched by a superb James Horner score that brings a melancholy tinge to its brassy big band sound. Batteries Not Included is in the best Hollywood tradition of raising serious questions in a thoroughly entertaining way.

Broadcast News is so diabolically clever that you rather expect it to be heartless, in the way that so much surface cleverness can be. No such thing. Heartless is the wrong word for this movie: It's insightful and understanding and marvelous fun, while giving up none of its thoughtfulness. [16 Dec 1987, p.1]

The film tries to mix the two 1930s movie comedy strains: screwball romance and populist fable. But there's something nerveless and thin about it. Hawn and Russell are good, but their scenes together have a calculated spontaneity--overcute, obvious. Director Garry Marshall keeps the lines slamming off each other briskly but with a shallow, hectoring energy. And he doesn't have much visual flair.

Wall Street wants to be a shrewd piece of movie making, our own insider's tip, but it's tinny and thin and close to moral bankruptcy. As for its veracity, it's probably no closer to Wall Street than "The Bad and the Beautiful" was to the skills of movie making. And it's a lot less fun. [11 Dec 1987, p.1]

Throw Momma is another Hitchcock pastiche or parody, but--taken from Stu Silver's coldly clever, verbally intricate script--it has more depth and humor than usual.

For all its good intentions, for the thrillingly staged moments in the film's first quarter-for all the sweeping movement of thousands of people streaming through the streets of Shanghai-and for all its not-inconsiderable craft, the film's grave problem is a lack of central heating: We don't have a single character to warm up to.

Manon of the Spring reminds us how gratifying good old-fashioned revenge can be. Yet the film makers also remind us that carrying vengeance too far is ultimately futile and self-destructive. [24 Dec 1987]

There is no denying the craft of either Martin or Candy, however, and since they are the film, it will undoubtedly find its audience faster than any one of us can get from New York to Chicago.

Three Men strikes a funny chord. The audience seems to want to believe that these guys can be domesticated, but on another level, they don't want the trio broken. They want bachelor fathers, domesticated swingers.

Teen Wolf Too embellishes its inane, cookie-cutter plot with remote direction, witless dialogue and charmless characters.

Flowers in the Attic is a protracted exercise in morbidity, relieved only by moments of ludicrousness. In adapting Andrews' Gothic chiller, writer-director Jeffrey Bloom tries hard to establish an eerie fairy-tale-gone-sour mood, yet fails to work up the credibility necessary to sustain it. The result is a real turnoff. [20 Nov 1987, p.32]

As a concert film, judged from the music, Sign O' the Times is near the top. As a movie -- carrying inside it the embryo of other movies -- it's not fully satisfying. But you sense it could be; however he stumbles, Prince gives you the impression he'll always, catlike, leap back. [20 Nov 1987, p.4]

For the right audience, it'll be fun. It's for action movie fans with a taste for something off the beaten track -- but not too far. And for people who like to rail and spew against the vulgarity and stupidity of TV -- but keep watching it all anyway.

Cry Freedom is not a great movie -- it's an earnest, clunky, awkward one without a fluid sense of story and with its most charismatic figure, the martyred black South African activist, Bantu Stephen Biko, gone before the film's 2 hours and 35 minutes are half over. [06 Nov 1987, p.1]

Death Wish 4 may be preposterous, but on the level of technique it's a solid textbook example of crisp exploitation picture craftsmanship. Thompson clearly takes pleasure in setting up every scene with maximum economy and impact, and his work is that of a professional without apologies.

The two halves of Hiding Out--thriller and teen sex comedy--never meld, working against each other rather than together. Hiding Out never escapes its absurd hook, this mechanical collision of genres. After all, if someone really needs to hide out, isn't the best plan to simply . . . hide out?

There's a razzly-dazzly beauty in Barbara Ling's designs and Kanievska and cameraman Ed Lachman shoot them wittily. But it's swallowed up in the story's empty outrage.

Hool directs all this so lethargically you might suspect he’s gone missing in action himself.

The film makers lay on their brotherhood theme lightly and their success lies in their knowing when to be -- and not to be -- too serious. They also know exactly how much heart-tugging they can get away with. [06 Nov 1987, p.1]

Stunningly, ponderously bad.

The Hidden has enough smarts that it doesn’t need to be so total and unrelieved a massacre. The caustic dark humor with which it begins ends up drowning in an ocean of blood.

To give the movie its due, it's been directed, at least on the visual level, with unusual elegance: filled with graceful, gliding tracking shots, and icily precise Hitchcockian setups of the bleak decor and scary effects.

No Man’s Land is such a modest, low-key thriller that you’re caught up in it long before you realize it. A contemporary Faustian tale, it’s one of those nifty little movies that arrive without much notice but prove to be far more enjoyable than many more highly publicized pictures.

If plausibility isn't at the very top of your list of requirements in a courtroom thriller, and if dashingly assured performances are, you can have a cheerfully good time at Suspect. [22 Oct 1987, p.1]

This seedy Barfly is beautifully written, acted and directed. It may be full of dank desire, wasted love and jesting misery--but it blooms. Whatever its flaws, it does something more films should do: It opens up territory, opens up a human being.

The "Blue Velvet" of high school horror pictures...Certainly, it's not on the deeply personal, highly idiosyncratic artistic level of the David Lynch film, but it is a splendid example of what imagination can do with formula genre material.

Writer-director Deborah Brock simply fails to give her film style or wit. The grisly shenanigans are as inane and illogical as the rationale behind making this effort.

Mantegna and Nussbaum are so good as the con artists that their reading of Mamet's dialogue--and often Crouse's reading as well--justifies the movie. These actors have worked many times on stage with Mamet, as have J. T. Walsh, and cardsharp Ricky Jay (as a Las Vegas gambler), and when they latch onto these lines, they're like seasoned pitchers palming and scuffing the ball. Oozing confidence, they, and Mamet, put on a coldly skillful, killingly well - calculated show.

A splashingly pleasant little surprise.

The movie is exciting, richly textured. But, despite its high quality, there’s something unformed about it, like a poem that doesn’t quite sing, a painting with a color missing...Even if Someone to Watch Over Me is flawed, it’s the kind of film that offers you many subsidiary pleasures.

Shyer and Meyers... are endlessly inventive. They're not afraid to be sophisticated and screwballish in the best '30s tradition, and they know just how far to exaggerate for laughs without leaving touch with reality entirely or destroying sentiment. The humor in Baby Boom is sharp without being heartless.

Bigelow gets a scary poetry out of these landscapes--and though the film is erratic, it has force and passion...It works on your nerves--not necessarily through its big shock scenes, but through the atmosphere it creates: the sense of dread, no exit, lives plunging out of control, the secret mad pull of murder and outlawry.

It would be tempting to say that inside “Slamdance” is a remarkable movie struggling to free itself from conventional trappings. But the opposite is true. The trappings are what dazzle you; the interior of “Slamdance” is exactly what isn’t remarkable.

The result is a warm, imaginative comedy of wide appeal. [02 Oct 1987, p.8]

The Belly of an Architect has flaws, smudges and intense pleasures. Something like a clockwork orange, it’s an art machine that spurts juice and acid.

It's Patinkin who scores a special triumph. In his role there's a poignant strain of weariness beneath the leaping bravado, a pain under the braggadocio. [25 Sept 1987]

There's not a performance here that doesn't ring true, nor is there a period detail that's the least bit anachronistic in Bill Kenney's production design and Wendy Partridge's costumes. [25 Sep 1987, p.1]

Maurice's slow, agonized dawning of his true nature and its consequences are as beautifully evoked on the screen as it is on the printed page, thanks to James Wilby's wonderfully unaffected portrayal of Maurice and to Ivory and his co-adapter Kit Hesketh-Harvey's graceful yet succinct script, a miracle of both apt selectivity and development that does full honor to its distinguished source. [01 Oct 1987]

Passion, obsession, mad love, the violent clash of insider and outsider-all these themes, plus the performances, are rich enough to carry us past that wounded climax, if not to carry the movie past the fatal attractions of the big box-office cliche. [18 Sep 1987, p.1]