Psycho III, directed by Perkins himself, is years behind the Hitchcock original in quality, it's light years ahead of Psycho II. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Disney unleashes a mousey minor masterpiece. [02 July 1986, p.C5]

David Bowie, flaunting a Marianne Faithfull hairdo, stars in Jim Henson's latest puppety film, the flagrantly unoriginal Labyrinth. [1 Jul 1986, p.A1]

Ruthless People is a farce rather than a satire and it's far less ambivalent toward the behavior it depicts than All in the Family was - it actively encourages the audience to tee-hee over people being horrible to each other. Dale Launer's script is often extremely funny, especially when Midler is around, but it's an extended sick joke that doesn't realize it's got a disease. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Not a moment lasts longer than itself - even the jokes have no resonance, and certainly nothing other than the jokes has consequence. Running Scared is a mediocrity from any angle, but it serves quite well as a prototype of the new Hollywood product. [27 June 1986, p.D5]

Although 18 minutes shorter than the 126-minute original, this picture drags unashamedly, and its conflicts are repeated so predictably that the action becomes a kind of water torture. [24 June 1986]

This is the funniest teen movie I've seen in eons.

Both Cobra and Raw Deal are designed primarily to get the audience off on violence, and both are successful; what makes Raw Deal marginally preferable is not only the bizarre charm of its star, but the fact that the filmmakers are honest about what they're up to and do not unduly exploit the hostility of the audience.

At almost two hours, the film is a solid 20 minutes too long. [6 June 1986]

Jake Speed is slower than a dying bullet, its tongue so firmly in its cheek that it can't enunciate a single sentence pleasingly. [30 May 1986, p.C5]

There is no acting to speak of (and to speak of Cruise's performance at all would be embarrassing) but there is a point of view. This is yet another Ramboesque instalment in the current American obsession with might making right. As a movie, Top Gun is negligible and near ridiculous; as a cultural phenomenon, it is sobering and faintly frightening. [16 May 1986, p.C5]

Guttenberg has yet to make a comedy that isn't all the more pleasant for his presence. Sheedy, meanwhile, is wholesomeness personified - almost a new Sally Field embodying the positive aspects of American willpower, energy and openness. She has talent. She has freckles. She is a star. Even robots fall for her. Badham wired this one up pretty good. [09 May 1986, p.D1]

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

3 Men and a Cradle is in fact a dated farce with designer cinematography. [25 April 1986, p.D1]

It's not fair in a film like this, a shambles from beginning to end, to judge the performances, but as Tom Cruise has now become a big star, something should probably be said of his characterization. Something. [21 Apr 1986, p.C12]

Stripped of absolutely everything Absolute Beginners has borrowed from absolutely everything else, the entire film would fit absolutely snugly into a cockroach's shoe. [19 Apr 1986]

Wise Guys is never more than a nice time, but it's never less than that either, and because the timing of the jokes is so bang-on, it makes you wish De Palma would get away from the blood bag more often. [23 Apr 1986, p.C5]

Critters mounts a moment or two of suspense, but director Herek has as much wit and even less visual imagination than the people who created Night of the Comet. [16 Apr 1986, p.C6]

Kureishi's sensibility is very much his own - he's more compassionate than Fassbinder (the portrayal of the white mistress is heart- wrenching) and far funnier. The zingers fly by so fast in My Beautiful Laundrette they almost go unnoticed. [28 Mar 1986, p.D1]

Rad has the best opening credits sequence since the last James Bond picture, but it has nowhere to go from there. It doesn't even try. [3 Apr 1986, p.D6]

Director Fred Walton (When a Stranger Calls) cheats shamelessly to effect the various surprises, but has so much of that "who-is-next?" tension going for him that the movie more or less makes itself. [01 Apr 1986, p.D9]

Director Richard Benjamin has found a quintessential comic premise for young adults in the eighties: a couple purchases a house. The Money Pit is elaborately physical, but in the manner of Buster Keaton pictures, with some scenes reminiscent of those charmed moments when an entire wall would collapse on the hapless Keaton, but our beloved "stoneface" happened to be standing just where the opening for a door was. [26 Mar 1986, p.C10]

Highlander's flashy style is the cinematic equivalent of a Las Vegas chorus line: always kicking. Without Lambert, who displays an unexpected comic talent along with intensely photogenic passive-aggressive eyes, and Roxanne Hart, whose knowledgeable portrayal of a New York detective is undercut by the symphony of screams extracted from her toward the end, and Connery, who wears a pearl-drop earring and is supposed to be Spanish but still has the burr and brio of James Bond, Highlander would be little more than an everlasting video; it's not much more than that, as it is. [10 Mar 1986, p.C9]

The movie made me so happy, and here I am back on the subway with Nerdo, and there's this jerk across the aisle who's like ancient, 30 at least, and he's got the nerve to look right into my see-through Madonna lace outfit. And he winks. Oh, barf- ola.

There is something very wrong with the attempt of Nine 1/2 Weeks to excite the sensualists and appease the moralists at the same time. Most of the sex is fairly mild, but there are hints of what Nine 1/2 Weeks must have been before Lyne was forced to recut it. [21 Feb 1986, p.C1]

A slasher movie about gay panic, a nasty piece of homophobic angst for the age of AIDs. [25 Feb 1986]

In the hallowed Hollywood tradition of mindless flash, F/X turns the suspension of disbelief into airy entertainment. [7 Feb 1986, p.D3]

"It's one of the problems I have with Hannah. I feel I haven't gone deeply enough." Should Woody Allen ever tire of making movies, he can take up criticizing them.

Once you overlook the laborious contrivance of Jerry's background, Down and Out in Beverly Hills is a sharp, sweet comedy of affluent manners. [31 Jan 1986]

The ending can be read as conclusively upbeat or as corrosively ironic. Still, Youngblood is never less than fascinating, and it's a bit like the game it explores: the times you don't want to look at it are the times you can't look away. [31 Jan 1986, p.D1]

The vulgarity and jingoism of Iron Eagle prevent it from functioning even as breezy entertainment. [17 Jan 1986, p.C10]

Runaway Train, which could have been Kurosawa's Wages of Fear, has been re- written by a committee and does not explore the theme so much as hold it up for ridicule: Runaway Train is an also-Ran. [23 Dec 1985]

The insult begins with casting Cage, a patently American actor who makes no effort to Canadianize himself, as a Canadian legend: the role could have made a Canadian a star. It continues with races so sloppily edited the relative positions of the skiffs change dramatically during two-second reaction shots. [17 Jan 1986, p.C1]

If it had the guts to be either zany or pointed, it might have been both; instead, it's neither. It's an old copy of Mad magazine that wouldn't have been your favorite even when you were 12. [6 Jan 1986, p.C11]

What's wrong with The Color Purple - and nothing that's wrong with it keeps it from being a joy to watch - is what you'd expect of Spielberg: he chews on Alice Walker's hard edges until they're gummy. [21 Dec 1985]

If you see Clue only once, and it's hard to imagine seeing it more than once, even for the five different minutes, the "A" is by far the best, featuring as it does (this does not give away the identity of the murderer) a splendidly funny shtick from Madeline Kahn. [13 Dec 1985, p.D5]

On film, Bennett's bouncing brainchild is Richard Attenborough's Workout Tape, love story attached; the specificity is gone. The 16 auditioning dancers could be any people or all people. [11 Dec 1985]

Good Landis work looks like a comically heightened reality, and it scores with sharp moments in which the world is ridiculous and being American is possibly just as ridiculous. Spies Like Us, his latest, ranks with his poorest efforts, in which strange people start out in extraordinary situations and the lead characters have a pig-out; pushing for wildness, Landis gets mired in crudity (as in Animal House). [09 Dec 1985]

White Nights is too ponderous to have the pizzazz of trash and too dumb to have the insight of art - it's a lumbering behemoth of a film in which the extraordinary talent of its one authentic star, Mikhail Baryshnikov, is exploited in a Cold War cartoon that suggests a musical adaptation of Ayn Rand's anti- Soviet novel, We The Living. [22 Nov 1985]

Every season it appears that Hollywood has truly and finally run out of comic things to say with coming- of-age scenarios, and every once in a while it's demonstrated that the genre simply needs intelligent handling. Once Bitten is one of the better things to happen lately to adolescent sex comedies simply because it isn't gross; because it isn't mean- minded; because Jim Carrey has a way of pouting that makes him look like he has buck teeth. [27 Nov 1985]

Says the audience: "Howcum they make movies like this?" [9 Nov 1985]

Death Wish 3 is a little like granddad yelling, You kids better get out of my yard, and then following up his threat by tossing a grenade onto the patio and turning the kids into human hamburger. [01 Nov 1985]

The second film, in which one teen- ager is possessed by the spirit of a murderer - this is a supernatural Jekyll and Hyde - sets horror film fans to laughing and eventually to booing.[20 Nov 1985]

To Live and Die in L.A., for all its amorality and downright immorality, is a cracker-jack thriller, tense and exciting and unpredictable, and more grimy fun than any moralist will want it to be. It has big hit written all over it: the premise, Miami Vice Meets The French Connection, may be perverse, but it's also inspired. [1 Nov 1985]

Except for The Fat Boys, who have some deft comic passes, nobody is required to act, or seems capable of it. But for what Krush Groove is - an unambitious film directed at a black teenage audience - it has its good points. [26 Nov 1985]

Perhaps the major disappointment of Silver Bullet is that it never gets as bad as the beginning promises. From playing on the precipice of so-bad- it's-good, Silver Bullet bobs up to the level of conventionally mediocre- bad, and remains there until the closing credits. [12 Oct 1985]

And despite the technically impressive quality of the soundtrack, the movie, directed by Karel Reisz, misses the music. [4 Oct 1985]

Can a film that raises more questions about its subject than it answers be considered a masterpiece? If it can, that film is Paul Schrader's innovative cinematic biography of the Japanese novelist, essayist and actor Yukio Mishima, the man who in 1970 committed public seppuku (hara-kiri) in an unprecedented, grandiloquent attempt to turn his life into art. [12 Sep 1985]

A comedy boasting a gimmick worth a peek. For, into this remembrance of time past and youth altruistic, the script injects a heavy dose of up-to-the-minute pragmatism. [16 Aug 1985]

The Return of the Living Dead, a parody of George A. Romero's unforgettably frightening Night of the Living Dead, is not for everybody, but it's one of the funniest films of its kind ever made. [16 Aug 1985]

That the producer thinks Beals plus Sting equals big bucks at the box office may be the biggest contrivance of all. [19 Aug 1985]

Predictable and maudlin. [14 Oct 1985]

If Pee-Wee wasn't the most engaging physical comedian since Dick Van Dyke, it would be disastrous. As it is, the opening works well enough to have viewers completely hooked by the time he sets out on the road, like Huck Finn, with his clothes wrapped up in a handerchief on a stick. [10 Aug 1985, p.E9]

Though Candy greatly underplays Jack Chester, a beet-red seer-sucker summer renter, his genial humor and collaboration with Reiner make Summer Rental a small pleasure. [12 Aug 1985]

My Science Project leaves you wishing it was a better movie, and that's a commendation. It has something that allows you to hope for more, namely a performance by John Stockwell (Christine) that earns him a spot among the fine young actors in Hollywood. [13 Aug 1985]

Real Genius is great, the freshest, most insouciant Hollywood inspiration since Risky Business. Director Martha Coolidge was handed a fleet cast and a well- oiled screenplay and she plumb took off. The darn thing works so well it fairly sings. [12 Aug 1985]

Like a little boy playing with his first chemistry set, Hughes has thrown together the labelled contents of just about every teen-film cliche. And the experiment is a failure of excess - like a furious potion that bubbles up, fizzes briefly, and then fizzles out before expectant, and then disappointed, eyes. [3 Aug 1985]

Some of the special effects are chilling, but Fright Night lacks depth, wit and humor, and hence is neither absorbing, intelligent, nor funny. [08 Aug 1985]

National Lampoon's European Vacation is directed by Amy Heckerling, whose career began with the spunky if not inventive Fast Times at Ridgemont High and continued with the inventive if not spunky Johnny Dangerously; this time, she's responsible for a picture that's neither inventive nor spunky. [29 July 1985]

In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]

The Legend of Billie Jean is a ridiculous caper that borrows a snippet of the sublime only to make itself more ridiculous. [20 July 1985]

The premise of Explorers, directed by Joe Dante, who in the past (The Howling, the TV cartoon sequence of Twilight Zone - The Movie, Gremlins) has had style and ingenuity to spare, is equally promising, but it's worked out with the style and ingenuity of an indolent slug making its way across a slab of hot concrete in hell. [12 July 1985]

The manipulative Star Wars-style score is the only novelty on tap in Silverado, which has a plot too drearily complicated and arid to summarize and an attitude almost unbearable in its dryly smirky assurance that it knows what you want from a Western, which is to say, action that never quits, emotion that's never felt, characters that are never real and situations that are never sensible. [10 Jul 1985, p.S7]

Beyond Thunderdome is a masterfully directed fantasy, convincing down to the smallest detail in its vision of an alternate existence, and it has gone beyond the relentless sadomasochism of The Road Warrior; Max has now taken up with children, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is suitable for them. [9 July 1985]

Director Joel Schumacher has fashioned a film foul enough to qualify as an inadvertent satire - it's obvious Schumacher (D.C. Cab) wants the audience to care about the septet, but the writing is so rocky, the situations so contrived, the acting so awkward and the characters so self-centred, witless and amoral, it's almost as if St. Elmo's Fire had been conceived as a vicious anti-youth movie, a calculated attempt to destroy en masse the reputations of some of Hollywood's hottest young actors. [28 June 1985]

Dorothy's friends are as weird as her enemies, which is faithful to the original Oz books but turns out not to be a virtue on film, where the eerie has a tendency to remain eerie no matter how often we're told it's not. [22 Jun 1985, p.E3]

The people behind Cocoon have taken many of the weariest of the cinematic cliches of the eighties and invested them with hearts and minds; from an unsightly chrysalis, a thing of beauty has been born. [21 June 1985]

Silly, moronically entertaining horror film. [25 June 1985]

A work of crazed distinction. [14 June 1985]

The first 20 minutes owe too much - much too much - to Animal House & Co., and the last 20 to The Graduate, but in between there is an uproariously crude and vigorously funny effort to squish the teen genre into the confines of classic French sex farce.[14 June 1985]

The movie remains an embodiment of Spielberg's commercially cunning brand of clankingly retro filmmaking, despite the wit and charm brought to their Spiel-speak dialogue by the talented young performers, The Goonies is less a movie than an entertainment machine. [7 Jun 1985, p.E1]

Perfect betrays itself in the end, but until it does, it's an unexpectedly thoughtful consideration of "lifestyle" journalism, which by nature allots to the unknown a sudden but ephemeral celebrity, and which too frequently takes advantage of naive subjects eager to lower their defences. [7 June 1985]

A View to a Kill is much too long (nearly 2 1/4 hours); it cheats (a subplot involving the KGB comes and goes at leisure); and it has yet another extended section full of dumb cops and smashed cars. [24 May 1985]

The direction is dynamic, the cutting has verve. To confess, Rambo: First Blood Part II is unexpectedly taut and exciting, despite its sermonizing and predictable conclusion, assuming Stallone is accepted as that impossible creation, the one-man army. [23 May 1985]

Brewster's Millions never gets breathless, as it absolutely must. [22 May 1985]

Moving Violations is mentally inert, another sawdust-filled sausage for the adolescent market.

The Company of Wolves is a trifle long, but the sequences of bona fide scariness and beauty compensate for the occasional longueurs, and it's great to be a kid again, as the artists behind the film know; they also know it can scare the hell out of you. Always cry wolf. [20 Apr 1985]

Cat's Eye is a slickly efficient and very funny omnibus of tongue-in-cheek menace, reminiscent of the best Twilight Zone episodes. [20 Apr 1985]

The plot contracts classically as it approaches its delectably bizarre climax but Desperately Seeking Susan never achieves the hilarity it promises; it's a pleasant enough picture, and it has a bona-fide look, but it lacks a style. It also lacks the qualities essential to farce - pace, verve, timing, surprise. [02 Apr 1985]

As a movie for today's girls, it's more than offensive. It's cheap. [11 May 1985]

The time Bogdanovich spends with Rusty and Rocky, and the time Rocky spends at a summer camp for the blind with a gorgeous blonde (Laura Dern) who falls in love with him, is time that is priceless. The time Bogdanovich spends with the cuddly bikers, especially the time he spends with Sam Elliott in a dismally ingratiating, cockeyed performance as Rusty's boy friend, is time that exacts a terrible toll: credibility. [08 Mar 1985]

Eventually, the film, shot on location in Spain by a director with an innate understanding of how to stylize without becoming self-conscious, asks to be seen as a comic but moving meditation on the ways we do, or do not, go gently into that good night. [05 Apr 1985]

ROB REINER'S debut as a feature film director with the mock "rockumentary" This Is Spinal Tap was as invigorating as his second film, The Sure Thing, is depressing: not since Michael Cimino followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven's Gate has there been such a dramatic comedown. [1 Mar 1985]

For all its contrivance, it's lively and amusing and occasionally disconcerting in its reproduction of what life was like in the mid-to-late teens.

It must be the only movie ever made in which the hero's immediate goal in life is to wrestle in a different weight class. The film treats this event with all the fake reverence tabloid feature writers use to describe disabled people who learn to paint with their feet or mother dogs who swim across lakes to rescue endangered litters. [15 Feb 1985]

The film's up-yours attitude toward authority is cheering, but as personified by Robert Culp (he's the mayor of New York), authority is so comic-strip in its hideousness that fighting it is beside the point. If the audience can't believe in the reality of the opponent, it can't believe in the reality of the fight. [15 Feb 1985]

Witness is satisfying on so many levels it stands with "Cabaret" and "The Godfather II" as an example of how a director in love with his medium can redeem its mainstream cliches. [07 Feb 1985]

In a performance that should earn him the Oscar nomination he has long deserved, Penn uncovers every slimy instinct that motivated Lee, but he never loses the audience's sympathy. Despite Hutton and Schlesinger, The Falcon and the Snowman does tell a terrific story, and the tale is sufficient to hold interest right up to the mishandled ending. [25 Jan 1985]

A modest and charmingly genuine youth movie. Mischief doesn't, to be sure, fall squarely into the latter, uncrowded category that includes Diner, The Flamingo Kid, and Puberty Blues. But it has a lot more going for it than Porky's.[9 Feb 1985]

As directed by Michael Dinner from Charles Purpura's script, the movie combines the anti-Catholic satire of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You with the rowdy sexuality of Porky's and the stereotyping of every mediocre teen film ever made. [8 Feb 1985]

What if Holden Caulfield turned into Charles Bronson? That piquant premise underlies the lively but confused teen exploitation film, Tuff Turf.

Johnny Dangerously belongs to the comic genre known as the Dumb Movie, but it's a pretty smart example of how to be stupid. [22 Dec 1984]

Runaway is a Dinky Toy of a film: tiny, shiny, and about half as well-made. [15 Dec 1984]

Cotton Club lacks the resonance of The Godfather; it's similar stylistically, but everything is coarsened, caricatured. What Coppola has achieved, however, is what Sergio Leone was after in Once Upon a Time in America when he tried to celebrate America by recycling the cliches of its gangster films. [14 Dec 1984]

When Dune is not inept, confusing, ridiculous or unpleasant, it's boring. [14 Dec 1984]

Sadly, 2010 is not going to make it any easier for the uninitiated to grasp the reasons its predecessor thrilled a generation: the only people 2010 is likely to thrill are the agents of the actors in the cast. [7 Dec 1984]

In Hollywood terms, Beverly Hills Cop harks back to the semi- good old days, to the studio era when stars were not always relied on to fix everything - this is unquestionably a star vehicle, but the star, an employee of his own production company, has been smart enough to surround himself with other, by no means lesser lights. [4 Dec. 1984]

Supergirl is made by people who can make a woman fly halfway around the world and can't get a plot to walk around the block. [22 Dec 1984]