The movie, which ricochets between farce and poignancy, casts just enough romantic pixie dust to leave you smiling. It's certainly not the last word on the subject, but it's an amiable start.

Beverly Hills Cop is no masterpiece, but it uses Murphy to maximum effect. At its best, the movie is exactly as brazen, charming and mercurial as Murphy himself, which is to say it is unimaginable without him. [3 Dec. 1984, p.81]

Eastwood is climbing peaks as a director that Eastwood the actor can't scale. Perhaps it's time to cut the rope. [01 Oct 1990, p.70D]

Mandoki's gripping film may pull on the heartstrings too knowingly, but it's hard to forget the sight of the village’s children lying silent and still on every rooftop, praying the recruiting soldiers below will pass them by.

It’s not a particularly sexy movie. What’s shocking to Schrader is not Crane’s promiscuity, but his obtuseness. It’s the story of the unbearable lightness of Bob.

Lili Fini Zanuck's directorial debut is impressively gritty and intense, and she avoids finger-wagging, but for all her good efforts, the movie suffers from deja vu: we've been down this road before. [13 Jan 1992, p.67]

This complex tale is told with great buoyancy and wit thanks to the splendid performances.

Moonraker's only real imaginative surge comes in a rousing pre-credit sequence in which Bond is pushed out of an airplane and survives by deftly sky-diving to a parachutist and swiping his chute. After this, a bizarre blandness takes over. [2 July 1979, p.68]

Polanski treats the hotel with the same virtuosity he displayed in filming the apartment in Rosemary's Baby, one of the most deeply satisfying thrillers ever made. Frantic doesn't maintain this level: there are some irritating illogicalities, and Polanski hasn't fully mined the possibilities of all the elements in his screenplay (cowritten with Gerard Brach), such as Arab terrorists in Paris and the tiny nuclear-bomb trigger they are after. [07 Mar 1988, p.68]

Sweetness is not a quality one normally associates with Clint Eastwood, but true sweetness is precisely what Bronco Billy aspires to -- and occasionally achieves. At once sentimental, arch and harmlessly good-natured, Eastwood's latest is a romantic comedy in which Clint appears as the fast-drawing, trick-riding star of his own Wild West show. [23 June 1980, p.77]

Whatever it is -- movie, photographed stage show, TV spectacular -- Pirates of Penzance is a happy hybrid. [14 Feb 1983, p.85]

Q & A is an uncommonly ambitious thriller, but it rarely goes solemn -- it's a raw, rude Cook's tour of the New York underworld, from transvestite bars to precinct offices to Mafia mansions -- with a violent side trip to San Juan thrown in. [07 May 1990, p.65]

An ambitious, intense, but overdetermined exploration of the varieties of ethnic intolerance.

Russell has created what is surely the loudest, most assaultive movie musical ever made and stretched the genre into a new realm - the phantasmagorical nightmare. [24 Mar 1975, p.24]

The movie's one pleasure is watching Sarandon turn a cliche into a woman crackling with carnality and spirit. [22 Oct 1990, p.74]

Despite an overwrought finale, this stylish horror film is genuinely creepy. See it before the inevitable Hollywood remake.

A delirious example of grrrl power, Hong Kong style.

Take the movie's first words to heart: watch closely. You'll be well rewarded.

Wonderfully cast and acted, Parents establishes an intriguing comic metaphor about the dark side of the nuclear American family but unfortunately doesn't know where to take it. In the end, the wafer-thin script capitulates to the routine horror-movie conventions it's been battling against. But at least until then it puts up a good fight. [13 Feb 1989, p.79]

Proyas floods the screen with cinematic and literary references ranging from Murnau and Lang to Kafka and Orwell, creating a unique yet utterly convincing world.

Aims for a "Princess Bride" mix of whimsy and wonderment, the sardonic and the romantic, with only sporadic success. Both visually and narratively cluttered, the film diverts more than it enchants.

The secret of their endurance is not just in the grossness of their humor -- though their new film is even funkier and funnier than "Up in Smoke." As flipped out as their patchwork story gets, it always stays in touch with a very specific urban reality, a world where you make jokes out of taking a urine sample to your parole officer and find hilarity in Cheech's pathetic attempt to sing his naive Mexican-American protest song. [11 Aug 1980, p.69]

Since somebody this year was bound to make a movie called Valley Girl, let's be grateful the job fell to director Martha Coolidge, who has a light, satirical touch, and screenwriters Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane, whose modest exploitation movie is thoroughly good-natured. [09 May 1983, p.85]

In a project laden with pitfalls, Malle has kept his balance and produced an elegant, ironic and poignant film about our troublesome hearts, minds and bodies. [10 Apr 1978, p.106]

For about an hour the writing, acting and direction coalesce in a prismatic, hyperkinetic ode to end-of-century doom. And then the two-hours-plus film starts to subside into genre convention. [16 Oct 1995, p.86]

Mamet brings an unusual level of intelligence to this boys'-adventure formula, and an edgy understanding of the ongoing games of one-upmanship men play. After a rocky, dutifully expositional beginning, The Edge turns into an unusually gripping suspense movie, its peril all the more effective for being unfashionably low-tech.

As drama, The Dark Crystal comes fully alive only at its rousing climax, and it's hampered by the Ken Doll blandness of our hero. As a bestiary, however, it is bountiful -- a prodigious and amusing parade of things that do much more than go bump in the night. [27 Dec 1982, p.61]

Talk Radio feels like a sketch inflated beyond the breaking point. Sure, it's disturbing. So is watching Morton Downey Jr. Stone seems to believe that he's lifting the lid off the creepy-crawly American unconscious. Perhaps. Or maybe Talk Radio is just a movie in love with the hysterical sound of its own voice.[9 Jan 1989, p.54]