For a story about sexual awakening and discovery, Desert Hearts is a taut, fatally careful movie with no looseness--and no abandon--to it and no feeling for detail that would let these characters really live.

One of “Trouble’s” nicest gifts is a pair of lovers to sigh over, whose future you agonize about, lovers who can make each other roar with laughter while lovingly intertwined. How long since we cared anything about a couple on the screen?

Delightful... The film is buoyed by a captivating performance by Ringwald, who has an unerring ability to share her character's emotions with an audience, as if we were eavsdropping behind her makeup mirror. [28 Feb 1986]

Sanitized for our protection and in the hands of director Adrian Lyne, 9 1/2 Weeks is a swooningly silly cautionary tale about the bad and the beautiful; a pair whose sexual tastes might have surfaced after a night of watching "Bolero" on videocassette. [21 Feb 1986, p.1]

It's a cheap, easy rehash of Spielberg's "Duel" and "The Hitchhiker" (which Red may not have seen)--along with grabs from "Halloween" (the unstoppable fiend), "Jackson County Jail" (the innocent motorist driven outside the law) and "Straw Dogs" (manhood through blood rites). Nothing is original.

Despite its large scale, it plays like a formula TV movie. [14 Feb 1986, p.C4]

The movie is like the bikers; it's best and freest when it's just racing ahead. Whenever it stops, you ask too many questions.

Despite some exuberant football action, a pair of buoyant rock-sound-track montage scenes and a tidy, uplifting finale, Wildcats is a disappointingly timid fable. It’s refreshing to see a strong-willed female character like McGrath, who’s loaded with grit and determination. But she’s surrounded by so many cardboard figures--her ex-husband is a cowardly worm, her rival football coach a wild-eyed chauvinist--that her triumph has the hollow ring of comic melodrama.

A love of the world of movies permeates the first-class, crackling excitement of F/X, giving a rare dimension to this thriller.

It’s not only poignant but also fun and unabashedly entertaining in the way that “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” still is. And it does have it all: authentic, sumptuous 16th-Century settings awash with warm Tudor brick, a splendid cast adorned with jewel-encrusted costumes, palace intrigue and, best of all, a pair of star-crossed young lovers who are irresistible.

Mellow, beautiful, rich and brimming with love, "Hannah" is the best Woody Allen yet and, quite simply, a great film. [7 February 1986, Calendar, p.6-1]

For all its genuinely funny moments and its mix of outrageousness and insights, Down and Out remains curiously unsatisfying in the way it resolves the Nolte character.

There's nothing wrong with Hollywood's obsession with making '80s updates of the Horatio Alger story. But Youngblood doesn't come close to capturing the spunk or spirit of youthful dreams.

It’s a story idea that seems dubious at first, but manages to flesh out wondrously--mostly because scenarist Ron Shelton has such a wickedly tight grip on the absurdities and dynamics of small American cities.

If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, why is Sidney Lumet’s Power the sexless diatribe that it is, all high-tech visuals and no emotional grounding? Its sole juiciness comes from Gene Hackman as a raffish Southern media consultant, well-cured in bourbon and branch water. The outlandish daring of his performance is almost rave-up enough to recommend the movie. Almost.

It’s cute and high-spirited, and it shows some talent and verve. Watching it, you feel that Beaird is capable of something really good; even when his material goes stale and tasteless, there’s a joie de vivre in his direction.

Iron Eagle has an unintended hilarity that builds and builds. But don't take this as one of those so-bad-it's-good endorsements: The film is a total waste of time.

A clunky, poorly executed shocker.

After much time with this soggy, quarrelsome clan, your sympathies may lie entirely with the bear.

Somehow The Boy in Blue, amiable enough, always feels like an "afternoon" movie -- a throwaway, not good enough to plan an evening around. [03 May 1986, p.9]

It’s swift and mean--a little empty perhaps, but not enough to distract you from its pleasures: the stark, brilliantly metallic gleam cinematographer Misha Suslov puts on his images, the psycho-electric jabs of the Lalo Schifrin score, the clean thrust of the plot, the furiously lucid action and the canny, almost stylized, minimalist performances of the actors (Jones, Hamilton, Vaughn, Richard Jaeckel, Keenan Wynn, Ving, Smith and the others). The movie may be shallow, but it’s also trim. It has that easy virtue of the old-line Hollywood B film: little visible excess fat.

Here is a satire about government and business corruption that's as empty, corrupt and manipulative as everything it attacks: a frantic, jokeless comedy about selling out, that sells out itself constantly. This is another big, dumb, pointless picture, a "high concept" movie that's all concept and no movie.

But you know students. Some rotten Emperor’s New Clothier among them would be bound to point out that “Revolution” is utterly and fatally devoid of a story on which to hang its breathtaking pictures. And they’d have a point.

Ran, which translates as "chaos" or "turmoil," is at once brisk and vital, elegiac and contemplative, intimate and epic, tragic yet shot through with humor. It combines the energy of youth with the perspective of maturity. It encompasses all of human nature in its folly and grandeur, and it does so in images as beautiful and terrifying as any ever captured on film and in performances that are impeccable.

Unfortunately, and through no fault of Meryl Streep, there doesn't seem to be enough electricity generated out there in Africa to power a love story 2 1/2 hours long.

This time out, Spielberg has chosen to put an antic disposition on, and with the single exception of casting, his almost every decision has been disastrous. He has prettified or coarsened; he has made comic scenes broadly slapstick and tiptoed over the story's crucial relationship. The result, alas, is the film purpled.

Inspired by the Parker Brothers board game of the same name, Clue is more frenetic than funny, more strained than suspenseful or scary. In fact, it's not the least bit scary or suspenseful but instead quickly grows tedious. The more you struggle to keep track of the constantly multiplying plot developments, the harder it gets to care who did it. [13 Dec 1985, p.6]

In this stately and fairly slavish representation, directed by Richard Attenborough, what pokes through with the pain of a broken bone is how thin the material really is. [12 Dec 1985]

It’s a raw, explosively funny, elemental tragicomedy about the pure willfulness of love...Basinger is the movie’s revelation. She makes May a jumpy, juicy, full-tilt, sensuous creature. Scrubbing in exasperation at the tendrils of hair that cloud her face, clamping herself to Eddie’s leg like a blond barnacle, she has her own funny side too, but what you remember most is May’s longing, so deep it’s torn her up inside.

This is grim and witless storytelling, and what makes it so depressing is that it hasn't improved by so much as a chemical trace since the days of the first "Rocky."

At all times the wretched high-concept, low-intelligence story contrives to bring everything down to its sudsy level. [22 Nov 1985]

Richard Brooks’ Fever Pitch lives up to its title in capturing the frenzied existence of the compulsive gambler...It also resembles its subject in its hit-and-miss quality: Some scenes pay off, others don’t. But it never lets up, and the result is a film that’s always a pleasure to watch even when it’s defying credibility at every turn or moving so fast it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on.

The shiveringly memorable Smooth Talk may be the first film to get adolescence in America right, down to the last, delicate seismographic tremor. What it knows about the age will scare adults to death, because these film makers remember , as clearly as Joyce Carol Oates did when she wrote the short story from which “Smooth Talk” was made.

Once Bitten is that extreme rarity, a youth movie that's made the grown-up discovery of how sexy and amusing a situation can be if you leave things to the imagination.

Even with Arthur Penn as its director, and ingenious casting, it is, sad to say, mainly for connoisseurs of the car chase, European style

These characters need rescuing from screenwriter Colin Welland’s view of life in middle-class America as oppressively banal. By the time he gets finished sketching in the deadening of the American family, you may feel like beating Hackman to the front door...Twice in a Lifetime is a dreary masquerade of a serious movie.

Imagine Steven Spielberg gone existentialist, Carne and Prevert making rock videos, a punk "Diva" and Jean Cocteau crossed with the Clash, and you may get an idea of the peculiar charms awaiting you in the cavernous, fluorescent interiors of Subway. [Nov 16, 1985, p.16]

It's simply the best, funniest Grand Guignol horror picture to come along in ages.

Jessica Lange plays the scrappy '60s singer with sweet ferocity.

Remo Williams is a slam-bang action-adventure loaded with surprises. Just when you think it's going to be just another bone-cruncher steeped in patriotic paranoia, it sends itself up hilariously. Remo Williams has some of the funniest, brightest dialogue heard on screen all year.

Jagged Edge is really something. It vanishes from the memory like an old grocery list, yet while you’re in it you’re caught. Shocked, intrigued, confused, unnerved and finally snapped right back in your seat with fright, but held all the way.

The Boys Next Door is a dark, forbidding vision--perhaps too harsh for audiences accustomed to more frivolous pictures of teen high jinks. But its lack of sentimentality gives it a rugged moral force--it doesn’t soften the twisted fury that sends these kids careening into a crazed death trip.

Natty Gann may have been created with the thought of giving young women a heroine to admire. Perhaps, to return to Places in the Heart, the difference is between a film written out of a personal need to tell a particular story and one created as a "property," full of sure-fire elements that have worked in the past: a kid, a dog, a missing parent. The real missing element is heart. [11 Oct 1985, p.1]

Tedious and contrived.

A beautiful, deadly serious attempt by Paul and Leonard Schrader to illuminate the life--and death--of one of Japan's most highly visible and self-propelling enigmas.

Make no mistake about it: Streetwalkin’ (a very hard R) is first and foremost a blood bath.

A medieval adventure-love saga in which all the cliches have been turned inside out. Instead of chivalry, the 1985 movie focuses on swinishness and brutality. Instead of love it offers lust and lechery; instead of heroism, pillage and murder. The "instead-ofs" go on and on, leaving us no one to root for and everything and everybody finally a turn-off. [10 July 1988, p.TV2]

A delicious adaptation by Susan Isaacs of her novel, directed with a light, knowing touch by Frank Perry. It’s a blithe, sparkling, sophisticated comedy-mystery laced with dark humor that couldn’t be more welcome in the current summer avalanche of teen movies. How gratifying to hear once again dialogue that crackles with wit and humor (and doesn’t even require subtitles!).

Unfortunately, for all the admirable respect director Franc Roddam and writer Lloyd Fonvielle (who co-wrote Roddam's "The Lords of Discipline") bring to their extensive reworking of the legend of Frankenstein and his bride, they're over their heads -- waaaaayyy over. The result is a film that commands affection for its ambition and civilized sensibility, but nonetheless provokes unintended laughter. [16 Aug 1985, p.C18]

Year of the Dragon has an arrogant, electric energy that dares you to look away from the screen for an instant. Do so and you miss a furious piece of action that has bubbled up, seemingly out of nowhere.

The wrong crowd will find these antics infantile and offensive. The right one will have a howling good time.

It's a brisk, smart satirical comedy from the writers of "Police Academy" and the director of "Valley Girl," set in a Caltech-like institution for the whiz kids of the sciences. How refreshing it is to see young people depicted as having a capacity for thought as well as emotion.

The film's greatest asset is Kelly LeBrock, who is triumphant. She may represent souped-up womanhood at its most fanciful but she does so with great warmth and a sharp sense of herself.

There was bite and outrageousness and a touch of the surreal to the excesses of National Lampoon's Vacation (in which Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis humanized Hughes' cartoonlike material). This was writing whose springboard might have been awful firsthand experience. European Vacation feels as though it were dreamed up to cover the rent on the beach house for the summer.

If you care about animation as an art form, it is impossible not to be thrilled by Disney's "The Black Cauldron." [27 July 1985, p.1]

Let's hope Romero is not tempted to go for a quartet, for at this point sheer gruesomeness overwhelms his ideas and even his dynamic visuals. He would, in fact, have been better off not having tried for a third installment. [04 Oct 1985, p.4]

One Red Shoe has trying moments (the sewer-man joke; the awful fate of Belushi’s character), but the rest of it whirls by as summer comedy ought to, and rarely does.

A dippy, joyous meander of a movie, more than a little messy but abundantly rewarding.

Explorers itself is bubble-thin, but it glides by gracefully on the charm of its three young heroes and their vividly envisioned adventure in space. It's also a truly gentle film, one of the precious few that actually is suitable for children.

For all its mosaic of nice details, Silverado is still a faintly hollow creation-constructed, not torn from the heart. For a generation of kids to whom the Western is a new adventure, there probably will be action and distraction enough to dazzle. Those who need to be deeply stirred by this redoubtable form will still have to wait: Silverado is good but not great. [10 Jul 1985, p.1]

It closes the trilogy like a lightning blast followed by the ominous, resonant drone of thunder. Great action sequences crop up frequently today, but great action movies are always few and far between. Beyond Thunderdome is one, every bit as much as its two predecessors.

It's big, cartoonish and empty, with an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced. [3 July 1985, p.Calendar 6]

Instead of real people, they've created fast-moving upscale wise guys, so thoughtless, so utterly self-absorbed that you're quite content letting them simply love themselves--they do it so well...The St. Elmo's Fire bunch, for all their wheel-spinning melodrama, is all surface--all speed and stylishness without a bit of emotional resonance beneath.

How the Great Depression, the World War II era, McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare, the Kinsey Reports, America’s rising bohemian subculture, the 1960s civil rights movement and more all affected the fraught evolution of gay and lesbian existence is chronologically examined here in lucid and enlightening ways.

Everyone who grew up with the full range of the Oz books is deeply in Murch's debt. However, the framework surrounding Return to Oz is dark and, I suspect, terribly frightening for very young children. [21 Jun 1985, p.1]

Cocoon is a sly and salty bit of wish fulfillment that, by its tremendous close, has its entire audience wishing along with it. The combined energy it generates is probably enough to raise the Titanic.

To say the film is the treasure of the year would be to bad-mouth it in this disastrous season. Prizzi's Honor would be the vastly original centerpiece of a great year. It's a rich, dense character comedy in which Huston, working from a screenplay Richard Condon and Janet Roach adapted from Condon's novel, cocks a playful but unblinking eye at love, family loyalty and the togetherness of a happy marriage--Sicilian style.

If Perfect didn't have a germ of an idea tucked away in all its posturing silliness, it wouldn't be quite so infuriating. But it has: Superficially it's about sliding-scale morality in journalism today, a not uninteresting subject. [7 June 1985, p.C1]

Rambo is an inane sequel to a fairly good melodrama; another example of an attempt to repeat an earlier success that goes wildly out of scale.

Brewster's Millions isn't bad so much as flat. And flat comedy has about the appeal of flat champagne.

An unpretentious and amusing low-budget sci-fi entertainment. [24 Sep 1985, p.5]

As a thriller it has its moments, as a romance it's sometimes touching, but as a comedy it's too often a bust.

A numbskull comedy about a couple of guys (Rob Morrow, Johnny Depp) on the make at a resort hotel.

Unfortunately, to fit what are seen to be the particular requirements of its director/co-star Burt Reynolds, Stick has been rendered jokey, flaccid and, the worst crime of all, deadly slow. All this in spite of the fact that Leonard was the original screenwriter. [26 Apr 1985, p.6]

By the time this distinctive 1986 film is over we have been treated to a lavish fugue on the themes of childhood, wolves, eroticism and myth. [11 Jun 1989, p.2]

Because of King's phenomenal popularity as a master of the comically macabre, executive producer Dino De Laurentiis has stinted on nothing to bring these tales alive. This means that the special effects are impeccable and Giorgio Postiglione's production design meticulous and inspired. Yet it's the well-drawn characters, plus the brisk, stylish direction of Teague and superb camerawork of Cardiff, that make it work.

Desperately Seeking Susan is a lark, an exhilarating celebration of people who have the good sense to be in touch with themselves and with each other.

Laced with medieval magic, it has stalwart knights and tremulously fine ladies, heavy-hoofed horses who might have clattered straight out of German fairy tales and broadswords so heavy you or I could never heft them. Most of all, it is a bold, beautiful, marvelous vision.

Not since The Heretic tried to follow up The Exorcist has there been so dismal a sequel as Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment.

Stoltz is simply amazing in the variety, the humor and the absolute lack of self-pity with which he draws Rocky, whose spirit soars so far beyond his body.

Even as you feel grateful to be able to laugh off this film, you realize that its humor is really only inuring you to a nonstop series of stabbings, slashings, impalings, stranglings and yet other means of killing. Be warned: For all its laughs, Friday the 13th -- A New Beginning (rightly rated R) is just one more nauseating sick joke. [25 March 1985, p.C6]

In this film, Shaw come alive for you in ways that go beyond his physical presence (still handsome, a balding, bearded 74), or the sound of his clarinet (its impeccable sheen and limpid line).

The Hit is something special: thoughtful, perfectly performed and carrying the clear stamp of an extremely interesting director.

Of course, "It Happens One Night" comes to mind, but The Sure Thing is so sparkling and original in its humor, so perceptive about human nature in its own right, that its key elements seem classic, not carbons.

A rank, execrable disaster, Certain Fury is the kind of movie that's destined to show up in a trivia game as the answer to the question: "What's the worst film ever to star two Oscar-winning performers?" Rated R for its gratuitous violence, foul language and bad acting, it's a cheesy, ludicrously implausible bloodfest that tries to pass itself off as a distaff update of "The Defiant Ones." [6 March 1985, p.4]

Credibility and even simple logic seem to have gotten short shrift in its transposition to the screen from a highly praised first novel by Terry Davis. The result is a film of some lovely and funny moments, with some appealing people, that finally disappoints.

The Mean Season makes deft use of the thriller form to examine the relationship between those who report the news and those who make it, and how that line can blur dangerously. The film is very honest about how seductive a byline can be.

Although it, too, is gorgeous to look at, this skeletal thriller is as direct and spare as its Mennonites. [08 Feb 1985]

By the time their jaw-dropping story is over, you may feel you have traveled every inch of their journey with them, a downward spiral all the way. What you still may not understand is what really made Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) do what they did, or, more importantly, what made director John Schlesinger feel their story was worth telling.

Neither terrible nor outstanding, it's the kind of middle-of-the-road picture that's hard to remember a week after seeing it. [8 Feb 1985, p.C2]

It's an unambitious, derivative but engaging little comedy...It's hardly original. It's hardly deep. But, in contrast with much of its genre ("Porky's" and its progeny), it's a model of sophistication, decorum and even taste. It has crass moments and cheap shots, but it's still good: cleverly thought out and gracefully filmed by first-time film director Michael Dinner, who directed the PBS "Miss Lonelyhearts."

Fandango overreaches badly and sinks under a heavy weight of symbolism, bathos and sheer preposterousness that no amount of humor and incident can redeem.

Blood Simple becomes a dazzling comedie noire, a dynamic, virtuoso display by a couple of talented fledgling filmmakers who give the conventions of the genre such a thorough workout that the result is a movie that's fresh and exhilarating (in the way that Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva” was).

It's fairly safe to predict that Silent Night, Deadly Night will start making "Worst Movies of All Time" lists almost immediately. It has all the prerequisites. A roaringly bad idea. Derivative scriptwriting. Tastelessness. Naked opportunism. A cast full of actors who mug, gesticulate and savor every rotten line. A general "we're only in this for the money" attitude, visible in every sloppy frame. And, to top it off, that most crucial quality: enough conscious or unconscious humor to keep you watching, and insulting, it. [11 March 1986, p.C5]

It's an absorbing study of power couched in thriller format. As with any Roeg film, the stunning visuals are the real star. [20 Dec 1985, p.22]

Cloak and Dagger is fun for adults as well as older kids, thanks to the imaginative writing (by Tom Holland) and direction (by Richard Franklin).

Unfortunately, Electric Dreams has another thing in common with most rock videos: It’s strong on music and visual effects, while somewhat lacking in story development.

Star Trek III has a genuine spirituality, and, at its end, you may be surprised, especially if you're not really a Trekkie, to realize how moved you've been.