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!).