The one thing Sid and Nancy could not be convicted of was compromise and Cox has created a film true to that part of their spirit, but he has created something much more, a send-up and critique of the kind of cautionary celebrity biography exemplified by Lady Sings the Blues. [31 Oct 1986, p.D1]

Glamorously tragic, Betty Blue is sensually shot and persuasively performed, but a solitary thought dropped into boy genius Beineix's colorfully bedecked wishing well of a movie would echo emptily into eternity. [12 Sep 1986, p.D1]

The treat in Trick or Treat is that the film has a sense of humor about itself, and a genuine feeling for the travails that follow puberty. [29 Oct 1986, p.D10]

It may be true that in gambling money won is twice as sweet as money earned, but inart, only the earned has savor; The Color of Money earns enough of it to turn most other movies persimmon with esthetic envy. [17 Oct 1986, p. D1]

Peggy Sue is by no means a masterpiece of movie art, but it is an example of the sort of thoroughly enjoyable middle-brow Hollywood picture - clever, thoughtful, literate - that went missing about the time Peggy Sue got married. [10 Oct 1986]

The film would go nowhere without Hogan. He's a charismatic chap with a pleasantly minimalist approach to humor. [27 Sept 1986, p.E6]

Dick will probably lighten a general audience of some of the narrower cliches about the sordidness of a bought sexual transaction. [31 Oct 1986]

Photographed in stark black and white by Robby Muller with music by both Waits and Lurie, Down By Law (a slang expression meaning in control), more conventional and livelier than Stranger Than Paradise, and a lot less strange, is as up to date as tomorrow and as familiar as yesterday. [19 Sep 1986]

Stand By Me is not "a masterpiece," but it is an evocative and cheerily amusing movie about growing up male in 1959, a kind of pre-pubescent American Graffiti, the locker-room rejoinder to My American Cousin. [8 Aug 1986, p.D1]

Thanks largely to Petersen, Manhunter does occasionally evoke the peculiar pleasures of Harris's novel, and it does get under the skin, but only because the picture amounts to an aural mugging: the soundtrack, credited to The Reds & Michael Rubini, is Tangerine-Dream-styled electronic offal cranked up to rock concert decibels. [15 Aug 1986, p.D11]

The Fly is a mass-market, horror- film masterpiece that is also a work of art; it is the very movie the timorous feared "Aliens" would be - a gruesome, disturbing, fundamentally uncompromising shocker that accesses the subconscious. [15 Aug 1986]

Hired hand Lester made one of the worst films of the decade, Firestarter, and he's still getting his jollies by incinerating people on the screen. Last time it was supposed to be scary and this time it's supposed to be funny; both times it's been simply boring and somewhat offensive. [20 Aug 1986, p.C5]

There is so much action in the animated feature, The Transformers: The Movie, that you can't wait to get back into one of those Chrysler products whose vocabulary is limited to "A door is ajar," and "Thank you." [12 Aug 1986, p.C10]

Howard the Duck is the end of the line: any more infantile than this, and the filmmakers are going to vanish into the nearest womb. As a comedy, Howard the Duck is less humorous than that well- known Lucas laugh riot, Return of the Jedi, but it is good at one thing - wasting money. [02 Aug 1986, p.D9]

Nothing in Common does not have flawless courage - Hanks is too pumped-up, his fun scenes too tidily choreographed - but it has a heart and a mind and decent intentions. For coming out of today's Hollywood with these intact, the film deserves a medal. [1 Aug 1996, p.D1]

The script, based by Ephron herself on her own tua culpa memoir of her marriage, is spread wide, but the film never goes deeper into its subject - estrangement and adultery - than a bent dipstick. Heartburn is gentrified Neil Simon. [25 July 1986, p.D1]

A notice at the end of the movie assures audiences that the animals in the movie were not mistreated, but what about the animals in the theatre? Even connoisseurs of bloodletting and random violence will find Out of Bounds a poor excuse for escaping the summer heat. [29 July 1986, p.C8]

Essentially, it re-constitutes the war movie, and in so doing marries a feminist Rambo to Star Wars. [19 July 1986, p.D9]

The first hour of Club Paradise is enjoyable and more or less adult, thanks in large part to the comic contributions of Williams, O'Toole and the SCTV alumni. But he has not learned structure. Toward the end, the island having been tossed into a civil war invented solely to give the movie one of the helter skelter farcical endings Ramis and Reitman regularly affix to their films, Club Paradise falls apart like a piece of cheap luggage. [4 July 1986]

One of the most interesting, one of the most rewarding and one of the funniest films of the year. [4 July 1986]

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.