An efficient, cold-blooded sci-fi splatter movie that never makes the mistake of forgetting that on some level it is deeply ridiculous.

The trouble with Body Double is not that it sets "new lows" in the treatment of women or anything else, but that a stunningly original talent has willingly hitched itself to a derivative vision. The person De Palma really degrades is himself. [26 Oct 1984]

The first half of Firstborn is a first-rate domestic melodrama, faultlessly acted by all concerned, though you may wonder if the interactions would not have been a bit more compelling had the invading force been a bit less obviously, obnoxiously evil. The second half goes over the edge into a Hollywood hell. [26 Oct 1984]

A bouillon cube, a bland and boring thing with only a meagre resemblance to its source. [23 Oct 1984]

Sweet and relatively simple, a classic episodic melodrama of unabashed tenderness and unapologetic warmth, but it's not sentimental, and its offhanded explication of racism in rural Texas in 1935 is integrated so seamlessly with its dramatization of the widow Spalding's crusade to keep her farm, that the dark undercurrents of the film are easy to overlook.

The British crew here, headed by writer Barry Hines and producer/director Mick Jackson, accomplish what would seem to be an impossible task: depicting the carnage without distancing the viewer, without once letting him retreat behind the safe wall of fictitious play. Formidable and foreboding, Threads leaves nothing to our imagination, and Nothingness to our conscience. [02 Mar 1985]

Amadeus needs an additional 20 minutes running time like "The Magic Flute" needs a drum solo. Though the production is gussied up with more frills and decoration than a Viennese dessert trolley, Forman is generally workmanlike in his visual style and very uneven with his handling of actors.

There are two ways to look at Tightrope: as a Clint Eastwood Hollywood vehicle, or as a world-class movie that deserves to be judged with the best. By the first standard, Tightrope is an exceptionally realized thriller; by the second, it is an interesting failure, a movie that loses its nerve and resolves its contradictions in the slam-bang heroics of formula moviemaking. [18 Aug 1984]

Much less painful than a walk in the summer heat, but not quite as pleasant as a swim in a cool pool. [15 Aug 1984]

Phar Lap is another Australian horsy movie starring an American actor, Ron Leibman (Norma Rae), but this time the American's performance is the only redeeming feature in this otherwise tedious, slow-moving Down-Under tale about a fast-moving horse that should have been named Rocky. [20 Jul 1984]

The film Cloak and Dagger is like a visit to the midway; fast and noisy and a lot of unsophisticated fun. [10 Aug 1984]

It's pure American corn but expertly and entertainingly harvested. The casting is excellent, the performances are so good and the emotional thrust of the film so strong that it is impossible not to enjoy. [10 Aug 1984]

The Bostonians, from the novel by Henry James, is the story of their relationship, one of the strangest in literature. Unfortunately, that strangeness has survived the transfer to the screen less than intact, and satiric oddity has been replaced by romantic banality. Redgrave's performance - red-eyed, quivering, opalescent - is peerless, the one incontrovertible reason to see the film. [23 Nov 1984]

Purple Rain is not a revolution. It's not even a good movie. What it is, is a cosmic letdown. [27 Jul 1984]

There is no pot smoking, no pill popping, no booze guzzling and decidedly no laughs...Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong can be skilful comedians. They should stop wasting their talents writing and directing this "more-adventures-of" dross. [31 July 1984]

From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell. [16 Nov 1984]

Petersen seems to be holding back, telling us about the liberating power of the imagination but never really showing us. Of course, to show us would be to spoon feed the audience, thereby blunting the message and defeating the point. [20 Jul 1984, p.E9]

Revenge of the Nerds has some very funny moments and sturdy premise, but the revenge, when it comes, is not nearly as definitive as even the non-nerds in the audience would hope for. [25 July 1984]

Sitting through this 100 or so minutes of painfully loud sound, and ham-fisted editing might best be likened to being slapped about the head repeatedly. It is insulting; it will give you a headache; and it should make you very angry. [21 Jul 1984]

If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]

Conan the Destroyer is in a class below its predecessor. Director Richard Fleischer (The Vikings, Mandingo) has indeed made a dumb, ridiculous movie. [29 June 1984]

The Karate Kid is too long and lyrical, with several tedious scenes between Macchio and Morita as youth and experience. Avildsen is sometimes unsure whether he wants to be tough or forgiving, and the film has a big build-up for the fight scene, but an ending so abrupt it downplays the outcome. [22 June 1984]

With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]

Judged by the standards of the comedies that preceded it (and only by those standards), Ghostbusters is relatively sophisticated: it substitutes the silly for the gross, and even manages at the odd moment to take silliness into the sublime. [9 June 1984]

Kilmer is an improvement on Robert Hays of Airplane], but both gents perform with the facility you'd expect from a random sampling of Gentlemen's Quarterly models; like any svelte clotheshorse, Kilmer is good-looking yet self-effacing and he doesn't seem in the least perturbed that his wardrobe upstages him.[25 June 1984]

Star Trek III or The Search for Schlock: a mission that renders the eyelids heavy. What else can you say about a movie whose mechanically inept, gelatinous monsters out-act everyone on the screen and whose poignant moments are simply guffawful. Not to put too fine a Vulcan point on it, it was ba-a-a-d. [2 June 1984]

Walter Hill is a master moviemaker, and when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the minute the momentum slows, it's another story - a story about a movie with no story at all. [01 June 1984]

The heroic irony that was hilarious in Raiders is merely ridiculous here, and the half-tribute/half-parody of the adventure genre is toyed with to threadbare extremes. [23 May 1984]

Fortunately, he has an ace up his sleeve with 9-year-old actress Drew Barrymore: the movie might easily be retitled The Scene Stealer. Barrymore's performance as Charlie McGee has something of the pint-sized coquetry of a Shirley Temple, and something of the shoulders-back, chin- in-the-air hauteur of a Bette Davis, but she seems incapable of hitting a false, precocious or calculating note. She virtually acts her co-stars off the screen. [14 May 1984]

With Redford, less is not more, less is nigh on to nothing. He's natural in The Natural, but he's artless: it has been years since he played the politician in The Candidate, but he's still running for office on screen. The gig he wants is God, and that's what he gets to play in The Natural, a Greek deity with an arm made of home runs and a halo made of Sun-In. [11 May 1984]

There are individual sequences alternately amusing and touching. [08 May 1984]

The picture is slightly too long, there are some special effects (especially during a storm at sea) that don't come off, and Vangelis's electronic moans on the soundtrack are sporadically anachronistic, but The Bounty is otherwise a spectacularly sustained piece of epic filmmaking. [04 May 1984]

A cheap pickup from the Playboy Channel that was too soft for Playboy but appropriately raunchy for the college movie crowd. [27 Apr 1984]

The appeal of the Friday the 13th cycle is difficult for any one who has not seen the movies on a Saturday night in a packed theatre to understand: they are an exercise in collective adolescent camp. As each victim falls to Jason's wrath, the kids cheer and laugh, and the gorier the death, the better. By the standards of that audience, part four is perfection: there are more gruesome homicides than Pauline had perils. [17 Apr 1984]

Despite the quick succession of sight gags director Hugh Wilson engineers in the film, Police Academy has it weak moments, particularly with Steve Guttenberg and Kim Cattrall in the leads. [23 Mar 1984]

There is no psychology in L'Argent, no acting to speak of; every scene is a minimal sketch which drives the didactic story forward. This use of narrative may sound ordinary, but, in Robert Bresson's pure filmmaking, it becomes extraordinarily relentless. [20 July 1984]

A non-stop, shoestring trip with more adventures and a helluva lot more smarts than you'll find in most American movies...All in all, there's more plain fun to be had here in 10 minutes than in a whole hour on the road with that jerk Indiana Jones.

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

This fictional "rockumentary" about a mediocre, aging heavy-metal band's last tour of America is surprisingly modest, subtle and funny. Not only is this the kind of satiric treatment rock music has been crying out for, it may be one of the most original film comedies in years. [20 Apr 1984]

Certainly, this is meant to be a bittersweet tale of the ties that bind the generations, of the love-hate relationship between a demanding Daddy and his amiable offspring. But nothing really develops, nothing ever connects. [02 Mar 1984]

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

Though it leaves no sex and danger cliche unturned, Lassiter is a lightweight, but briskly entertaining and stylish genre film. [20 Feb 1984]

Splendidly viewed through Gordon Willis' gleaming black and white cinematography, the story of Danny Rose, narrated by a group of aged comics reminiscing at the Carnegie Deli, becomes a bittersweet examination of dreams that don't come true. [27 Jan 1984]

Mostly I laughed at the idea that Steve Martin could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy, and that Arthur Hiller, who directed this, or Neil Simon, who adapted it, or Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels, who wrote it, could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy. [28 Jan 1984]

The Keep has opened just in time - if it had waited another couple of weeks, it would have been the worst horror movie of 1984 and there wouldn't have been anything to look forward to all year. [17 Dec 1983]

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

D.C. Cab is a high-energy comedy in desperate search for the big laugh. So desperate that the film has the manic pace of a sitcom gone bonkers. The score pounds, the cars careen, but the laugh is never found. And a few chuckles are a minor reward for a major assault. [19 Dec 1983]

Silkwood is a friendly, kooky and caring film. [09 Dec 1983]

Scarface is a B- movie with singularly silly psychological pretensions: its neo-primitivism is to the complex moral cosmos of Francis Coppola's "Godfather" saga as Disney is to Dickens. [09 Dec 1983]

When Christine's on the warpath, she foams at the grille. But her movie doesn't do right by her snottiness. Her movie, never scary but campily entertaining for about an hour, loses compression toward the end and the grumpy old thing finally sputters to a stall - gets flattened, poops out. [09 Dec 1983]

Wonderfully directed - the interiors are lit like Caravaggio, the action sequences are smooth as a well-oiled .38) - but is less than wonderful, unless you're the kind of moviegoer who loves to cheer when human "vermin" gets its guts blown out. [10 Dec 1983]

Terms of Endearment is the rare commercial picture that sets audiences to laughing hysterically and crying unashamedly, sometimes within consecutive seconds, and then shoos them out of the theatre in contented emotional exhaustion. [23 Nov 1983]

Needless to say, what's refreshing about A Christmas Story is subversive to the sepia-toned and loving references to the forties which director Bob Clark has provided for the film. The fictional Parker family that Shepherd has written about for 20 years is not as gentle or gauzy as they first appear. It's possible to imagine them so preoccupied with their own problems, whether dealing with the neighbor's dogs or winning a mail- order contest, that they could forget Christmas altogether. [25 Nov 1983, p.E5]

There is not really anything that could be called suspense in Amityville 3-D, at least, any more than the suspense involved in waiting for a pop tart to pop. [22 Nov 1983]

Fosse carries the movie to its conclusion steadily and superlatively, with a directness that is devastating and with a depth of insight that ameliorates, if only slightly, the ghastliness of the carefully choreographed images. [10 Nov 1983]

The Dead Zone, from the book by Stephen King, a horror novelist whose prolific output is the scariest thing about him, is academic filmmaking all the way, a crafty Establishment tour de force. [21 Oct 1983]

A surprisingly large portion of the picture is given over to a gritty and unexpectedly moving examination of a senseless but understandable feud between two wrongheaded, sincere people making all the wrong moves. [21 Oct 1983]

THE THREE hours and 10 minutes of The Right Stuff fly by faster than a plane snapping the sound barrier - there's never a moment that's not entertaining, and there are very few that are not wonderfully photographed and choreographed - but for the non-American, the excitement is confined to the filmmaking. [22 Oct 1983]

The film's dramatic and thematic ends could have been served just as well, if not better, by skipping the invention and sticking to the no less gripping figures and the no less wrenching dilemmas that history actually provided. [21 Oct 1983]

The most amazing thing about this amazing movie may be that in the end it communicates the large uncertainties and small hopes of a twisted, inarticulate adolescent boy perfectly, and wordlessly. [14 Oct 1983]

Except for the ending (more about that in a minute), Brainstorm is near the pinnacle of popular entertainment, just below "WarGames". [30 Sept 1983]

When The Big Chill is busy being funny, it's a great comedy, but when it goes for depth, it hits bottom an inch down. [30 Sep 1983, p.E1]

In the race to make that great rock and roll movie in the sky, Eddie and the Cruisers is a pit stop. [24 Sept 1983]

The achievement of Educating Rita is a function of the distinguished performances, the agreeably archetypal situation and the scissor-sharp lines. [23 Sep 1983]

The less-than-original theme is illuminated with grace and insight, with sensuality and spirituality, and Oshima stumbles only twice. Unfortunately, the missteps are major. [16 Sep 1983]

On his own, Dangerfield is still a buoyant presence. But the cliche tells us that movie-making is a collaborative exercise, and the price for Easy Money must be paid. Ultimately, Captain Rodney goes down with his film and sinks without a trace. [20 Aug 1983]

Is it possible for a horror movie to be too good? If it is, then Cujo is it: this is one of the few films on record where the combination of low shock and high style results in an experience that borders on the unbearably intense. The movie is spectacularly well-made, but it's nearly unwatchable. [29 Aug 1983]

All that's missing are the laughs. In their place, we get wall-to-wall predictability. [13 Aug 1983]

An adolescent-oriented farce so finely tuned it projects beyond its narrow intended audience - it's not only for adolescents, it's for anyone who remembers what adolescence was like. [05 Aug 1983]

As a story, The Star Chamber is a better comedy than mystery thriller. Even Yaphet Kotto's fine performance as the coldly objective homicide detective, Harry Lowes, can't save the film from its inherent absurdity. [5 Aug 1983]

The film is primarily an excuse for Chase to demonstrate that though he may be a movie star he has yet to learn how to create, let alone sustain, a character, and for director Harold (Caddyshack) Ramis and screenwriter John (National Lampoon's Class Reunion) Hughes to demonstrate that some movie stars get the colleagues they deserve. [2 Aug 1983]

Krull is only half bad, which makes it half good, which puts it a broadsword ahead of most films set in the land of the mightily mythic. [30 July 1983]

Often funny, always telling, this is the kind of not- quite-successful comedy that is fraught with not-quite-intentional meaning. From the pun in the title to the echoes in the script, Class is a pop sociologist's dream. [22 July 1983]

Stallone's sequel has almost nothing to do with the original film except that it's about dancing; otherwise, it's Rocky IV with legwarmers. [16 Jul 1983]

What Porky's II has gained in sophistication from its "expanded view" it has lost in raunchy, anarchistic energy. Who wants a socially respectable pig out? [25 June 1983]

The best way to approach it is not as a comedy but as a straight pirate movie with exceedingly odd twists. Certainly it makes better use of its sterling actors than The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), also co-written by and co-starring Cook, made of its sultans-of-comedy cast. [30 Jun 2006, p.R25]

There are two movies in Superman III, one a witless and obvious and often cruel comic strip, the other a blithe and subtle and often amusing exercise in middle-brow camp. Not only do the two halves never come together, they are in active opposition. [17 June 1983]

It soars, all right, but it does it on automatic pilot. [10 June 1983]

Trading Places, which is wildly funny at times, is Murphy's film. [10 Jun 1983]

Most of the time the film is simply stupid; not offensive, just silly. [03 May 1983]

Instead of connecting the film's action with Murphy's personal crisis, director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) gives us several aerial dogfights which seem to be drawn out only for the sake of giving the audience a bigger bang for its buck. The pacing and camerawork are gripping, to be sure, but in the end Blue Thunder achieves only the excitement of a good action movie. [14 May 1983]

Still Smokin' is a shabby, cut-and-paste film. The only surprise is that the title does not refer to the pair's notorious predilection for good grass; it has, shall we say, a more scatological connotation. Cheech and Chong's unique kind of humor - poor taste for its own sake - might have touched a chord seven or eight years ago. But nobody's listening any more. [9 May 1983]

Dan Aykroyd has been consistently disappointing since he left the Saturday Night Live television show to work in feature films. His latest film, Doctor Detroit is more evidence that Aykroyd's comedic talent, which was brilliantly spontaneous when feeding off a live studio audience, isn't suited to the big screen. [9 May 1983]

This low-low-budget movie tells its little Romeo and Juliet story without pretension or condescension. In scratching at the surface of youth trends, Valley Girl manages to reveal the perennial innocence of teenage romance. And that, in the wake of such sexist teenage fare as Porky's and Spring Break, is a fresh and sweet achievement. [24 May 1983]

The stars are of the first magnitude, the direction is sharp as a scalpel, the premise (vampirism sans fangs, garlic and other Transylvanian paraphernalia) is only semi-silly, and the visuals are suitable for exhibition in a gallery specializing in high gloss S & M. [29 Apr 1983]

Cranked up at double speed, the plot of Flashdance could almost be a satirical fantasy about dance students. Although Flashdance doesn't admit it's a fantasy, neither does it succeed in looking realistic. [16 Apr 1983, p.E5]

Lone Wolf gets mad as a bee-stung boxer dog. [18 Apr 1983]

It is an agreeable example of how a picture conceived as "product" need not condescend to the audience it exploits. [11 Apr 1983]

This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]

The Black Stallion Returns is not a magic monument - it's only a terrific film for kids. [26 Mar 1983]

The violent but impressive Bad Boys doesn't waste much time getting down to business. Bad Boys is about a generation of teen-agers who have learned from television to want the biggest and the best, and it's about a generation in the process of angrily learning that it's going to be forced to settle for the littlest and the least. [22 Apr 1983]

The movie 10 to Midnight gives you two genres for the price of one. You get the reactionary vigilantism of Death Wish combined with the slice 'n' dice misogyny of low-grade horror films, the kind in which virginal female bodies are systematically bared to allow unobstructed ingress to knives and other instruments of brutality. All that and Charles Bronson, too: a weirdo jackpot. [15 Mar 1983]

This is a monument that should be visited, but it is a monument of importance only as a reminder of the thing it seeks to memorialize. Gandhi may not be a hagiographic embarrassment to its subject, but it's a waxworks movie, a victory for British reserve. [08 Dec 1982]

Forsyth's trademark surprises are a little less fresh and a little more predictable than in Gregory's Girl: the entire enterprise, while not stale, is labored. [04 Mar 1983]

The Year of Living Dangerously is chic, enigmatic, self-assured - and empty. [18 Feb 1983]

The plot creaks along reasonably effectively and Sellers' solo sequences - the disguises, the pratfalls and the speech mannerisms - are familiar, but fun. [18 Dec 1982]

The Dark Crystal sees through a dark crystal: There is much to marvel at, but there is much that is obscure, and much that may not be there at all. [17 Dec 1982]

The movie stands or falls with Newman, and it does neither: it coasts. His acting in the second half is safe and self-assured, while his acting in the first - watch for his announcement of his erupting integrity - is not only shy of good, it's downright bad. It would be ironic but predictable if he were to win an Oscar for his weakest performance in years. [17 Dec 1982]