Though it’s a good movie in and of itself, The Little Mermaid is even more fascinating as a Rosetta Stone of Disney history, representing the classic animation techniques that the studio revived for this film, the cheap shortcuts that had prevailed for much of the previous two decades, and the sophisticated modern storytelling that soon became the standard.

It’s a cinematic love song, pure and simple, and Weber isn’t about to let ugly facts get in the way of a parade of gorgeous images and intoxicating ideas.

As a featherweight trifle rooted in young death, an endless mourning process, and quasi-incestuous stirrings, the film suffers from jarring tonal shifts on a continual basis.

It’s a funny, bittersweet film that opens as a cautionary tale about growing up too fast, but deepens into a movie about the unplumbable gulf between childhood and adulthood, and what it feels like to stand on either side, wishing for a way over.

It is much less understandable, and not at all forgivable, that in eschewing the culture-clash comedy of the first film for generic action, the filmmakers forgot they were making a comedy at all.

While Babette’s Feast is bleak, and often ponderous and stony, it eventually resolves as a moving hymn to art.

While it’s corny by design, Hairspray also aims to get at something truthful, about the various kinds of prejudice weighing down the city circa 1963, and how youthful optimism and music made a difference, if only in the lives of those kids craving some kind of diverse, progressive community.

It’s an endearingly odd, consistently creepy film that hearkens back to the director’s previous work.

Dragnet has its share of sharp gags and memorable lines, but for the most part, it’s entertaining but forgettable, a fun romp that assuredly hits all the expected mismatched buddy-cop-movie beats and serves up the subgenre’s clichés straight, rather than subverting or lampooning them.

The profound moral and spiritual emptiness at the core of The Secret Of My Success keeps it from being the dumb fun promised by its premise, title, and extensive use of Yello. The film never bothers to consider why Fox is in such a huge hurry to make it in business, or why the audience should be so invested in his professional success. Instead, it just assumes that everyone is out to make their fortune, get the girl, and come out on top at the end. The film consequently feels like a souped-up Rube Goldberg contraption in a furious hurry to get nowhere in particular.

A non-movie that seems to wash over audiences without making any kind of impression. Except for those it does impress.

There’s an element of self-deprecation to Hogan’s performance—a winking, grinning acknowledgment of the character’s absurdity that nicely undercuts the macho fantasy.

If a middle-American teenager in the late 1980s wanted to see good-looking young folks build a giant ramp in their backyard and do spectacular mid-air twists, then the local video store could satisfy that fantasy, too.

But while it’s first and foremost a terrific showcase for some imaginative designers, Invaders From Mars also holds together fairly well as a movie—or at least better than the choppy Lifeforce does.

A deft, funny, fearless, and gloriously tasteless mix of horror and comedy, Re-Animator proves that entertainment value trumps virtually every other concern.

Though it’s still a disappointment in relation to its two predecessors, it has much to recommend it. It begins and ends brilliantly.

Explorers was rushed into theaters before Dante could work out the kinks or create a third act he was satisfied with, and the result is a strange, wounded beast, filled with wonderful sequences and homemade charm, but also confused and anticlimactic.

Dim, compromised, and dead on arrival.

Donner moves the film at an unhurried pace. The action scenes, for which Broderick and Hauer seem to have done quite a few of their own stunts, are fun, if not especially ambitious, and spaced out between long stretches of Mouse and Etienne traveling the countryside. But, oh, what countryside!

The Sure Thing is queasily old-fashioned, a raunchy road trip without the raunch that nonetheless trades on sex-comedy stereotypes: party animals in Hawaiian shirts, tea-sipping no-fun-niks in neutral-colored sweaters, and a compliant blonde sex doll that is, in fact, a sure thing. The film takes baby steps to something better.

Every scene of The Killing Fields (and every participant in its making) is in service of showing how abruptly a seemingly safe and vital individual can have everything essential stripped away.

Night Of The Comet borrows freely from everything from The Omega Man to Romero’s zombie films to Repo Man, but it never borrows so heavily as to feel like a rip-off of anything.

The Pope Of Greenwich Village benefits immensely from Rosenberg’s decision to film on location in Little Italy, which gives every scene a lived-in feel. The city’s streets, restaurants, back rooms, and lofts are as much a character as Charlie and Paulie, a dreamer and a schemer trying to get ahead in a world where the chips are stacked against them.

Arriving in the middle of the Reagan 1980s, Repo Man remains one of the few examples of revolt within the system, and it’s no surprise to learn that Cox is fond of John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic They Live, which also weds genre mayhem to cutting political satire.

Much of the film is difficult to understand—as with many poems, its meanings are so personal that they’re often cryptic—but Gorchakov’s (and Tarkovsky’s) displacement comes through powerfully in lonely rooms and in tracking shots that give the impression of a soul adrift.

Mann’s achievement in creating his own dreamlike alternate reality alongside a historical one isn’t necessarily diminished by his failure to bring the story across. The keep has a presence: castle walls that stretch to infinity, an ancient Evil that forbids lodgers and requires rituals to contain it, the metaphorical heft of standing over a war of unimaginable atrocity. And thanks to Mann, The Keep has a presence, too.

Sleepaway Camp keeps defying every possible expectation of how a slasher movie is supposed to behave. It isn’t really scary or atmospheric, but the implements of death... are exceedingly gruesome and unprecedented.

As generous as the film is to its characters, it also keeps finding ways to criticize their myopia.