De Palma has brought back Travolta's edge and intelligence. Relieved of having to give a star turn, Travolta seems happy to buckle down and do a straight-ahead, no-frills acting job. [27 July 1981, p.74]

Kloves doesn't want to play by conventional romantic comedy rules, but he hasn't quite figured out what to replace them with. After the first seductive hour, which dances on the edge of comedy and melancholy, The Fabulous Baker Boys grows increasingly frustrating. The audience is enjoying Klove's hip, knowing update of romantic conventions, but the director seems to think he's making "realism": he misjudges the gravity of his story, and his touch becomes more ponderous. [23 Oct 1983, p.84]

In the end, the film lacks the skill of its actors and ends up feeling disjointed and confused about its own message.

Though well acted, and handsomely shot by veteran Adam Holender, Fresh sacrifices real emotion for thriller contrivances. It's a tourist's drive through inner-city hell. [05 Sep 1994, p.69]

There's something decidedly mechanical about this intermittently gripping movie's bleak view of human nature.

It's no shameless Hollywood weepie, mind you, but an overestheticized, coolly abstracted weepie, which is not necessarily better. [19 Nov 1984, p.132]

The spectacle played out in Levinson's lyrical, dark-hued images never achieves the emotional whiplash the movie's after. Levinson's somber elegance and Toback's volatile aggression don't quite mesh: perhaps what this story needed was the fleet, gaudy ferocity of a Sam Fuller. Bugsy never makes the transition from the filmmakers' heads to the audience's gut.

Jarmusch continues to have a great eye for moody lowlife settings. But his minimalist dramaturgy, so resonant in Stranger Than Paradise, just doesn't give you enough to chew on. His iconoclasm is beginning to look like complacency. It's time this talented filmmaker put more matter in his mannerism. [04 Dec 1989, p.78]

Beresford's nice little movie seems so afraid to make a false move that it runs the danger of not moving at all. [07 Mar 1983, p.78B]

The Elephant Man has great dignity, sweetness and compassion in this portrait of an unlucky monster who must fight to make other humans recognize his humanity. But it lacks dramatic punch and repeats its effects rather than developing a truly complex texture. [06 Oct 1980, p.71]

Dahl himself thought his book would be impossible to translate into film, and for all the ingenuity that's been thrown at the screen, perhaps he was right. This overgrown peach never ripens.

The film seems to want us to pin a medal to its own chest.

Escape From New York gets more conventional as it goes along, settling for chases and narrow escapes when it could have had wild social satire as well. Carpenter has a deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility--which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. [27 July 1981, p. 75]

In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.

Damon's Ripley is considerably different from the charming sociopath in Patricia Highsmith's novel or the smooth lothario played by Alain Delon in the 1960 French thriller "Purple Noon."

Harron sets the stage expertly, but her lack of a point of view ultimately enervates the movie. [6 May 1996, p. 78]

It’s sad to see such stunning work self-destruct. You walk out haunted by the movie that might have been.

But Smooth Talk, alas, is two movies, and the parts don't mesh. What begins as subdued, plotless realism -- everything up to Arnold's late entrance -- then lurches into Gothic melodrama. Arnold is a literary conceit, Connie is real: thus their portentous mating ritual seems more contrived than inevitable. Smooth Talk feels like an anecdote that's been stretched out of shape. [24 March 1986, p.77]

John August's trickily structured script owes an all too obvious debt to "Pulp Fiction," but Liman's film is more like kiddie Tarantino.

Townsend explodes the industry's tunnel vision in a series of skits, the best of which are explosively funny. His vision of the Black Acting School, run by white instructors ("You, too, can learn to walk black"), captures the movie's message in a raucous nutshell. He also gives us a memorable black street version of a Siskel-Ebert-type critic show called "Sneakin' in the Movies." This supercheapo flick ($ 100,000) is a hit-or-miss affair, but it comes as a tonic: no one's made this movie before. [6 Apr 1987, p.64]

Penn's eye for landscapes is stunning, and his affection for outsider lifestyles is tangible. Hirsch, who carries the film on his increasingly emaciated shoulders, performs heroically, but there's an edge missing. The ideal casting would have been the young Sean Penn.

As anthropology, it's fascinating, and everything about the production is first class. But the human drama at the heart of this movie is stillborn.

It's hobbled by the too-familiar conventions of the musical biopic: with so many chapters of Charles's life to cover, Hackford's movie never finds a rhythm, a groove, to settle into. It wins its battles without winning the war.

The heart of the movie is in the Rocky-Rusty relationship, and as long as Bogdanovich sticks with Cher and Stoltz, his film is genuinely moving and largely free of cant. Far more problematic is the portrait of the biker gang who, for all their rowdiness, are about as threatening as Santa's elves. [04 Mar 1985, p.74]

While the first half showcases an impressive new directorial talent, the last two quarters fail to score.

Self-conscious to the point of suffocation.

Gangs is a dream project Scorsese has wanted to make for 30 years. You have to honor its mad ambition. But sadly, it feels like a dream too long deferred.

Too facile to resonate deeply. Shouldn't a movie celebrating Nash give you some idea what his mathematical work is about? Fishier still is the suggestion that the cure for paranoid schizophrenia is love.