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]

Clive Barker's Hellraiser is one of the more original and memorable horror movies of the year: a genuinely scary, but also nearly stomach-turning experience by a genre specialist who seemingly wallows in excess and loves pushing conventions to their ghastly limits. [18 Sep 1987, p.18]

It's too thin to be satisfying. It consistently sparkles and moves along gracefully, but at a mere 81 minutes it leaves you unsatisfied. Although trimmed from an R to a PG-13, reportedly in light of the AIDS scare, you're nevertheless left with the feeling that more than sex ended up on the cutting-room floor. [19 Sept 1987, p.9]

When it's funny it's often hilarious and low-down, but when it isn't, it's embarrassingly grim. On the whole, however, it balances out as an amiable diversion -- provided you're in a suitably relaxed and undemanding mood. [18 Sept 1987, p.14]

It degenerates into one more cliche-ridden revenge movie. [19 Sep 1987, p.9]

As The Fourth Protocol begins at the outside and curls its way into the center of its wildly complex plot, it becomes almost a "Saturday Night Live" spy spoof. We're saturated with detail: Where will the nested Russian folk-art dolls, the visiting violinist's patent-leather shoes and the American Air Force officer's randy wife fit into the Greater Scheme of Things? Gradually, as our eyes glaze over, it becomes very hard to care--and even harder to suppress a giggle.

Hamburger Hill pays heartfelt, richly deserved tribute to the young American soldiers who fought so valiantly there. If only director John Irvin, who was in Vietnam in 1969 making a BBC documentary, and writer Jim Carabatsos, a Vietnam veteran, had been content to honor these men who were prepared to risk their lives in what had become a singularly unpopular war. But they don’t trust the soldiers’ brave actions to speak for themselves and instead give them a series of preachy, rabble-rousing speeches that add up to a diatribe against the anti-war movement at home rather than an attack on U.S. involvement in the war in the first place.

When this movie stumbles, it stumbles honestly and sympathetically, but, when it succeeds, it makes history sing. [11 Sep 1987]

Sadly in need of renovation. [28 Aug 1987, p.8]

Jean de Florette is like good peasant bread: honest, chewy, unsurprising and heavily satisfying.

Smart and funny, touching and unabashedly sensual... the sweet sleeper of a hot season. [21 Aug 1987]

The biggest problem is with the kids themselves, which are played by little people with electrically operated fake heads stuck on top of them. The kids have very little expression, and their voices seem disembodied. As a result, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie seems so much cheap fakery at a time when breathtakingly convincing special effects have become the rule rather than the exception.

Eventually the film's suspense underpinnings take over its personal story, yet that tension Quaid and Barkin generate still holds.

An across-the-board winner, an exuberant crowd-pleaser that marks its writer-director-star Cheech Marin's first effort apart from his longtime partner Tommy Chong.

No Way Out's greatest prize is Costner, a leading man at last: fiercely good, intelligent, appreciatively sensual in a performance balanced perfectly between action and introspection. It's a movie that lends itself to more than one sitting, and when you go back, armed with full understanding, Costner's work seems even better than the first time, richer, more complex and many layered.

There's a moral to the new teen movie Can't Buy Me Love: Money can't buy popularity. But it seems to have been lost on the movie makers themselves. What are they doing here but trying to spend their way to audience approval, success and glory? The plot is another one-sentence gimmick, the jokes juvenile, the morality a sham.

The Monster Squad is such fun, it makes you wish you were a kid again.

The aspirations behind Lady Beware -- a tale of psychological and physical molestation -- are unquestionably earnest, heartfelt and serious. At the same time, what's presented on screen is as vile and tasteless as everything the film makers purport to disdain. [22 Sept 1987, p.6]

If you take it on its own terms -- as a summer teen exploitation film locked into an adolescent vision of life, with no particular ambitions to step out of its class -- it's a movie that works just fine. [14 Aug 1987, p.26]

A misfiring, underdone epic that takes its inspiration not from life or literature, but from a toy line and the cartoon series it inspired.

The jokes grate on you, the buoyancy seems feigned and none of the nonsense is lyrical. The talent involved seems misused. This film is conceived as a vehicle for Madonna and, even as such, it's a rattling failure. The movie diminishes her, the worst thing a vehicle can do. [10 Aug 1987, p.1]

Aside from an occasional reference to Carroll, The Care Bears' Adventure is just standard 1980s children's fare. The same kind of minimal plot, sappy songs, badly timed gags, limited animation and smarmy message have been used in so many recent cartoons that even small children must be tiring of the pattern. [07 Aug 1987, p.6]

Stakeout is this summer's suntan lotion: It won't linger in the memory any better than it would survive a quick dip in the pool.

Midway through The Lost Boys there's a brief scene that suggests the magic and power it could have had. This scene suggests a fable of seductive evil-but nothing in the movie is ever half as evocative again. It's more lost than the Boys: a glossy fiasco with most of the real blood sucked out of it.

I feel just rotten about this, but I'm afraid I've outgrown James.

Sequels to big-budget popular hits usually end up super-slick, shallow and inflated. But this one isn't even super-slick; it's shallow and deflated...The overall effect is of a story atomized and dying before our eyes, collapsing into smashed pulp, ground down into big-budget Kryptonite ash. [27 July 1987, p.1]

There is the music, however, great dollops of '50s songs, and it lifts the movie when the dialogue and the earnest-but-uninspired direction keeps it earthbound.

It's no thigh-slapper like the Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School," but it's exceptionally good-natured and perceptive, and Harmon, in his first starring screen role, is a real charmer. [22 July 1987]

Despite a level of lurid violence that may offend many, this movie has a motor humming inside. It's been assembled with ferocious, gleeful expertise, crammed with humor, cynicism and jolts of energy. In many ways, it's the best action movie of the year. [17 Jul 1987]

In a wicked mess of unmatched water shots and dreadful interior airplane sequences, the characters outlined in little blue halos, the performances range from the mortifying to the merely immemorable. Against all odds, Lance Guest and Karen Young manage to be warm and credible. Podgy but game, Michael Caine, bravely attempts mouth-to-mouth resusitation on a role which is little more than anecdotes strung together. It is not his finest hour.

The movie’s tone is light, absurd; its sharper comments lie a little below the waterline.

It's a gross parody of its original. And since the original was a gross parody to begin with, the whole thing begins to seem gaseous, overbright, hideously inflated, as if all the bodily function jokes were about to belch it right off the screen.

It's one of those movies that, however well it works now, might have been pretty bad with a different cast and director. It doesn't really transcend its genre; it just stretches it in amusing and sometimes surprising ways.

Simply calling Surf Nazis Must Die a bad movie doesn't do it justice. This is a horror-action movie with dull action and horror, feebly done on every level: leaden satire, a repulsive romance, a revenge saga of zero intensity. The actors are often upstaged by the beach graffiti.

Using a twist on the ingenious premise of "Fantastic Voyage" -- miniaturized travel within a human body -- and a pair of very different but equally irresistible leading men, Innerspace is densely inventive and consistently hilarious. [1 July 1987, p.C1]

In a superb cast of mostly unknowns -- with the exception of Matthew Modine and Dorain Harewood -- D'Onofrio, who put on 60 pounds for this pivotal role, and Ermey are exceptional. [26 June 1987]

There are individual moments to remember with affection, but the plot has miles to go before we sleep. [26 June 1987, p.1]

If Spaceballs disappoints you, it isn't because it's unfunny or not entertaining. Brooks at medium pressure is still more amusing than most movie makers. [25 Jun 1987, p.1]

For all the laughter it generates in its confrontations between city and country folk and their ways, Withnail and I has a decidedly dark and subtle undertow. One hilarious incident after another may keep the semiautobiographical Withnail and I perking along, but it is at the same time a ‘60s joy ride about to tailspin into the sobering ‘70s.

I can't think of a current movie in which every element is in such balance: Martin seems unfettered, expansive, utterly at ease, capable of any physical feat (except possibly drinking from a wine glass without a straw). There's a tenderness to him that's magnetic. Daryl Hannah's Roxanne, an astronomer, is smart and sublimely beautiful all at once, her skin apricot-colored in this mountain sun, her face rhapsodic as she talks about muons, gluons and quarks.

It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen.

Under Australian director George Miller ("Mad Max"), The Witches of Eastwick begins so promisingly. It has such smashing separate moments, so succulent a cast and so interesting a premise that watching it crumble into stomach-turning crudeness and "Poltergeist"-scale special effects is deeply painful.

Good as much of John Schlesinger’s The Believers is--and it’s one of the better-produced, more exciting and intelligent thrillers of the year--it’s hard to keep from wondering, as you watch, why he wanted to do it in the first place.

It's overwhelming and, in a curious way, it's charming, but at the center, even though you see it in the right place, you detect not a heart, or a mind, but something like a hot, roasted marshmallow beating and burbling within a thickened, ursine breast.

The animal photography is what gives Benji the Hunted its greatest appeal for both children and their parents, but the film makers' notion of wild animal behavior is peculiarly suburban and misleading.

It's an icy parody of suburban bliss, featuring the kind of proud pop who gets his kicks from loving his family to death. [23 Jan 1987, p.15]

It's strange that in this somber inspection of moral fiber and what causes it to fray, De Palma couldn't have made his hero at least as interesting as his villain, and both of them at least as complicated as they were in life.

One of the most ingenious, amusing and oddly affectionate horror movies of the year -- a bloody bonbon that you chew with relish. [22 May 1987, p.6]

It has the irresistible freshness of a recipe that many have tried to copy and none have matched: a barbed, sprawling, scintillating vision of a society happily in thrall to its taste buds.

It's hard to believe that the group who came up with the hard, clean edges of "Top Gun," sleek and unfeeling though it may have been, could make a picture as crude, as muddled, as destructo-Derbyish as this one. If Beverly Hills Cop II is its opening salvo, this is going to be a long, smoggy summer. [20 May 1987]

A smart, generous, genuinely funny affair. Sometimes, like the camel who almost ambles away with the picture, it's longish in the tooth, but it is based on an extremely astute vision of life. [15 May 1987]

The Gate, whatever minor triumphs it dredges up, is too hopelessly copycat. It's basically powdered Speilberg on Zwieback toast and Stephen King on a stick. [19 May 1987, p.3]

There's a lot of low-key poetry and nicely casual tension in Hunter's direction and in Frederick Elmes' cinematography--and the acting ensemble is fine. For all its flaws and the revulsion it may induce, River's Edge has something valuable: a dark, harrowing but moral perspective.

A bracingly outrageous portrait of the playwright, his free-ranging life and remarkably constricted times. It is directed by Stephen Frears and stunningly well played by Gary Oldman, that slight chameleon who was Sid in Sid and Nancy; by Vanessa Redgrave, as Orton's agent and confidante, Peggy Ramsey, and by Alfred Molina as the lugubrious zombie Halliwell.

Romance and comedy are dumped in favor of carnage: a self-sabotaging decision for what might have been a cute, enjoyable movie.

For all its lack of suspense, "Gardens of Stone's" intelligence and its unsimple characters make it a notable attempt to deal with that war. [08 May 1987]

Creepshow 2 is a cut-rate sequel from those two popular masters of horror, Stephen King and George Romero, that plays like leftovers. Fans of both deserve better. The second--and the only one of the three stories that King has published--is the best. This vignette is effective because it's simple and suspenseful, but it's not enough to carry the whole movie.

Sam Firstenberg--a decent enough action director who's shepherded along three previous ninja movies--here has a story so preposterous that nothing short of a mutiny could make the movie work.

A film that understands childhood-to-adolescence as few films do, with dark and loving affection. [12 July 1987]

Walter Hill's Extreme Prejudice is as red-hot as a Saturday-night special, an ultra-violent action-adventure fantasy so macho that it verges on parody--on purpose. Sensational rather than serious, it is an exploitation picture but one with class: it has style, a point to make that happens to be highly topical and, thankfully, a dry, saving sense of humor.

Project X strains credibility. Too often it seems an overreaching variation on "WarGames."

A misfiring comic fantasia on business success in the Reagan era. [10 Apr 1987, p.1]

The movie makers try to revive another day’s genre--the early ’70’s “road” pictures--in today’s terms. And it doesn’t work. The looser, more anarchic feelings they’re going after don’t jibe with the modern packaging, and they wind up with something slicked-up, streamlined and hollow--like “Blowing in the Wind” rearranged as elevator music.

What's so amazing about the Police Academy movies is that they keep being made even though they stopped being funny after the hilarious original. We're now up to No. 4, and the most you can say for it is that it is the teeniest bit better, not quite so crass as the last two...Director Jim Drake is at least brisk and amiable; if nothing else, Police Academy 4 is good-natured and doesn't drag.

What boggles the mind is how this bit of navel lint could have seemed even remotely funny to anyone at any stage along its way. Even as a low moment in high concept, it is inconceivable that someone would undertake to make this into a film.

It's just another failed movie: a loud, shallow fiasco that leaves you feeling used.

Hollywood Shuffle is boisterous, out-at-the elbows movie making, an uneven series of skits, really, rather than a consistent whole. But there are wonderful comic moments here, alongside ones that droop from having gone on too long. And pervading the film is an unquenchable air--of optimism, even of community, which uses comedy to address some grievous inequities.

The plot line may fray at times, especially with Fisher's dizzyingly quick segue from magazine reporter to Geraldo Rivera-like television muckraker. But Schatzberg anchors his story with enough pungently observed details of New York--its lofts, chic editorial offices, in restaurants and sad and tawdry street scenes--and with enough marvelous actors, in big roles and small, to give his story real bite.

The astonishing thing about Raising Arizona is how it can move so fast, be so loud, and ramain so relentlessly boring at the same time. [20 Mar 1987]

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn never lets up, continually introducing new characters and adding new thrills and chills right up to the last frame… A terrific trip, although admittedly not one that everybody would enjoy taking. [13 Mar 1987, Calendar, p.6-14]