A handsome and intelligent piece of work: a faithful, well-paced, and carefully crafted dramatization of a very good story.

In the movie, Myers still boasts his inexplicably confident and cheery expressions -- he's a mischievous smile button. But Carvey overworks his twisted mouth.

There’s nothing derivative about Dash’s work; every image, every moment is a full creation.

Plenty of shrewd commercial calculation went into concocting the right sugar coating for this story of an 11-year-old girl's painful maturation, but chemistry seems right. Laurice Elehwany's script neatly handles a number of details but on larger matters falls into predictable patterns.

The film is filled to dazzling with the vitreous and the translucent; the flaw running down the window of a Polish train seems, in some mystifying way, as momentous as a rift in space-time. We see through a glass darkly, and often confusingly, but at least we see.

The movie keeps insisting that the gruelling experience it's putting us through is really meant to edify us; it drags us into the mud and then tells us that we haven't got dirty.

It's a beautiful disaster, like a bomb test out in the middle of nowhere. [7 Oct 1991, p.100]

The movie is a peculiarly irritating failure -- a leaden piece of uplift.

When it's time to wrap up the mystery, the movie leaves too many of the plot's enigmas unresolved, and Branagh's insouciance loses its charm.

It feels thin. It's an empty tour de force, and what's dismaying about the picture is that the filmmakers... seem inordinately pleased with its hermetic meaninglessness.

In the middle of this confident retread, the director, Peter Hewitt, and the writers, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, sandwich something far more free and funny--a slapstick version of "The Seventh Seal" in which Bill and Ted play games with Death.

Singleton's plot is disappointingly conventional; it obeys screenwriting-class rules. The experience he's dealing with here deserves something more than the tidy dramatic structure that he has imposed on it.

It's a pretty shameless outlaw fantasy; the feminist justification that the script provides for the heroines' behavior doesn't make their actions any less preposterous.

Gregory Widen's script is like a Mad parody played straight, full of "Scenes We Wouldn't Like to See."

Lightning didn't strike three times; the movie is lumbering... I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation, and it's too amorphous to damage our feelings about the first two. [1 Jan 1991]

When the picture stops being comic it turns into a different kind of kitsch... The material turns into cheesy plot-centered melodrama... Beetlejuice would have spit in this movie's eye. [17 Dec 1990]

Huston's power as Lilly is astounding... She bites right through the film-noir pulp; the [climactic] scene is paralyzing, and it won't go away.

The movie is childishly naïve... like a New Age social-studies lesson. It isn't really revisionist; it's the old stuff toned down and sensitized. [17 Dec 1990]

The scattered fine comic moments don't make up for the wide streak of fuddy-duddyism in the notion that the family used to be the bulwark of the nation's value system.

Dershowitz's life-enhancing scenes are flatulent, and they're dishonest: the movie seems to be putting us down for enjoying the scandal satire it's dishing up. [19 Nov 1990]

Eastwood’s subject is wasted lives and wasted talent; Wilson’s charisma and Hollywood’s money prove irresistible, and their sheer power brings noteworthy results—but they emerge from a needless vortex of ruin.

Is it a great movie? I don't think so. But it's a triumphant piece of filmmaking -- journalism presented with the brio of drama. [24 Sept 1990]

The movie doesn't have Dahl's narrative confidence and it goes in for a little sweetening, but it has major compensations.

This uninhibited and uproarious monster bash, directed by Joe Dante, is more quick-witted and ironic than the original; it sets forth a savvy, slaphappy agenda before the opening credits and follows it straight through to the end, and even beyond.

Lumet wrote the script alone, and he's so busy laying on the rancorous, bantering atmosphere that he waits too long to get to the plot; the movie becomes torpid.

Keene films the supernatural tale of timeless rusticity with fanatical attention to the barren and craggy seaside setting; her stunningly spare yet phantasmagorical images fuse the forces of nature with the spirit of mystery. Björk brings an otherworldly calm to her visionary role, and occasionally sings.

A tacky, lighthearted parody of crime-wave movies--camp for kiddies.

Although the script is a conventional melodrama, the director, Edward Zwick, has made something more thoughtful than that.

Bad fun. This sophisticated variant of the LA. cops-and-coke-and-art-world thrillers has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused.

Filmed in 1969 but unreleased until 1989, Michael Roemer’s dyspeptic comedy, about a small-time gangster newly freed from prison, bares unhealed and unspoken wounds of New York Jewish life.

Moore, a big shambling joker who's the director, producer, writer, and star, deadpans his way through interviews with an assortment of unlikely people, who are used as stooges. And he does something that is humanly very offensive: Roger & Me uses its leftism as a superior attitude.

Shelton doesn't quite engage with the material; the picture is lame and rhythmless. Still, it's never boring, and it offers a ribald view of Southern politics that contrasts with the stern melodramatic portrait of Earl's older brother Huey as a fascistic demagogue in the 1949 film All the King's Men.

Disney-style kitsch. It's technologically sophisticated, but with just about all the simpering old Disney values in place.

A the start, Lemmon has vanished almost totally into his role, but soon he's so insufferably perky and boyish and obliging that you feel he deserves the puling lines that Goldberg gives him.

A combination of raw pulp and gooey kitsch.

The director, Roland Joffe, and his co-screenwriter, Bruce Robinson, took this inherently dramatic subject and got lost in it; the script is a shambles.

A movie in which 80s glamour is being defined...The three stars seem perfect at what they're doing.

The only sanity here is in some of the acting. Rourke does a fine, competent job, but the movie is stolen clear away by Morgan Freeman and Forest Whitaker as antagonists -- a tough minded veteran police detective and a warm, idealistic prison doctor.

Marlon Brando is airily light and masterly as the veteran anti-apartheid barrister who takes the case even though he knows that he can't get anywhere with the rigged court. He saves the picture for the (short) time onscreen. But the director, Euzhan Palcy, seems lost; her work is heavy-handed, and the script (by Colin Welland and the director, from a novel by Andre Brink) is earnest and didactic.

A great, intense movie about war and rape...Directed by Brian De Palma, the movie is the culmination of his best work. Sean Penn gives a daring performance as the squad's 20-year-old leader; Michael J. Fox is impressive as the solider who can't keep quiet.

Lee is nimble-witted, and he’s always on the offensive; he stays in your face until you’re too exhausted to resist. You have to watch your reactions closely or he’ll speed right past you, get you to nod assent to an argument you haven’t fully realized he was making. Most American movies just want to knock you senseless immediately and get it over with; Do the Right Thing tries to wear you down, and its strategies are fascinating.

It has so many unpredictable spins that what's missing doesn't seem to matter much. The images sing. [10 July 1989]

The picture draws out the obvious and turns itself into a classic. [26 June 1989]

The picture seems to crumble... because the writer and director don't distinguish Loew's fantasies from his actual life... But with Cage in the role we certainly see the delusions at work. This daring kid starts over the top and just keeps going. He's airily amazing. [12 June 1989]

The action simply doesn't have the exhilarating, leaping precision that Spielberg gave us in the past... The joyous sureness is missing. [12 June 1989]

The movie is never plain boring, but its comic pathos and Southern-gothic cuteness can grate on you.

As a wisecracking , intermittently violent lunatic, Michael Keaton electrifies this quirky farce. The film isn't the knockout it might have been if it had a few big wild routines. And yes, it's sentimental. But the sentimentality isn't overplayed, and Keaton's fast rap cauterizes much of it.

John Cusack and Mahoney have to carry the unconvincing melodramatic portion of the plot, but they carry it stunningly. [15 May 1989]

Yes, it's a collection of barbs and sick jokes, but it's not fun, and it lacks a punch line...The young, inexperience director, Michael Lehmann, doesn't find the right mood for the gags. [17 Apr 1989]

A crumbum farce.

Nichols must have a cummerbund around his head: the directing is constricted – there's no visual inventiveness or spontaneity. And in his hands the script has no conviction. [9 Jan 1989]

I found Tourist hell to sit through. [23 Jan 1989]

If you admired Bette Midler in The Rose and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, you may want to bash you head against the wall...The director, Garry Marshall, shows no feeling for the material - not even false feeling.

A first-rate piece of work by a director who's daring and agile... It's heaven – alive in a way that movies rarely are. [9 Jan 1989]

Everything in this movie is fudged ever so humanistically, in a perfuctory, low-pressure way. And the picture has its effectiveness: people are crying at it. Of course they're crying at it - it's a piece of wet kitsch. [6 Feb 1989]

Once you get past the clumsily antic early scenes, the moody texture can take hold of your imagination. At its best, the film is a soft Irish kiss.

The film is like an expanded, beautifully made TV "Movie of the Week."

There's nothing to look at except Gino and Jerry's mummified skits, which are directed at a deliberate and unvarying pace. Mamet piles on improbabilities in a matter-of-fact style; flatness of performance seems to be part of the point. This minimalist approach--it suggests a knowingness--takes the fun out of hokum. The result is like a Frank Capra--Damon Runyon comic fairy tale of the 30s in slow motion.

The bedgraggled plotting forces Hanks into maudlin situations, but he manages to get under some of his material and darken it.

This stylized movie of ideas is a lean, impressive piece of work.

With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder.

The film often looks third class, and the director, Jim Abrahams, doesn't have the knack of making the details click into place. You're aware of an awful lot of mistaken-identity plot and aware of how imprecise most of it is. Yet the picture moves along, spattering the air with throwaway gags, and a minute after something misfires you're laughing out loud.

This ghost movie has an overcomplicated plot, but it has a poetic feeling that makes up for much of the clutter.

The picture isn't terrible, just terribly dull. It feels dated, especially in the scenes that "explain" the hero and show his redemption - the banality comes down on you like drizzle.

The movie is wonderfully free of bellyaching; it's a large-scale comic vision, with 90-foot barrage balloons as part of the party atmosphere.

The director, Hector Babenco, treats William Kennedy's Albany novel, set in 1938, as a joyless classic; the movie has no momentum--the running time (144 minutes) is like a death sentence.

The film (especially the first half) seems padded, formal, discreet. It's like watching a faded French classic.

Glorious...touching in sophisticated ways that you don't expect from an American director.

In Godard’s “King Lear,” a single phrase, a single word, gives rise to an astonishing outpouring of visual investigation and invention.

The way the story line has been directed it's a clumsier versions of the plots of 50s musicals.

Moonstruck isn't heartfelt; it's an honest contrivance – the mockery is a giddy homage to our desire for grand passion. With its special lushness, it's a rose-tinted black comedy. [25 Jan 1988, p.99]

When Attenborough starts crosscutting from the escape to Woods' flashback memories (with bursts of choral music), the movie is dumbfounding. It looks as if Attenborough staged scenes and then didn't know what to do with them, so he stuck them in by having the escaping Woods think back. An every time Biko appears in a flashback our interest quickens; this man with fire in his eyes commands the screen -- Denzel Washington is the star by right of talent.

Made in a documentary manner as styled as a Hollywood musical, the movie is hyperconscious of art, of politics, of itself, and at times it's exasperatingly affectless.

Is there a piece of casting more ineffably Hollywood than Cher as a busy, weary public defender? She's all wrong for this role: her hooded, introspective face doesn't give you enough--she needs a role that lets her use her body.

Schroder inadvertently exposes Bukowski's messianic windbag sensibility at its most self-satisfied. You wouldn't guess at Bukowski's talent from this movie.

[Ridley Scott] draws you into a dull, sensual daydreaminess, but after watching Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers for a while, you look around for the stars. With so much buildup - so much terror-tinged atmosphere - you expect actors with some verve, and you wonder why the script doesn't sneak in a few jokes. (Has a good thriller ever been this solemn? Or this simple?)

The movie is ungainly – you can almost see the chalk marks it's not hitting. But it has a loose, likable shabbiness. [19 Oct 1987, p.110]

It's bright and blithe, like the sound of the 60s girl groups on the track; the flimsy plot hardly matters.

Most of the power of this scrupulously honest memorial isn't in the talk; it's in the terror and the foreignness - the far-from-home-ness - of the imagery. Directed by John Irvin, the film has great decency; it joins together terror and thoughtfulness.

The director, Claude Berri, who did the adaptation with Gerard Brach, aimed for fidelity to the novel; he said it was his task to give the material "a cinematic rhythm," but "there was no need for imagination." That's what he thinks.

Starts smart and ends dumb. [24 Aug 1987, p.79]

This is a film noir without malevolence or mystery. It's a Yuppie thriller: it has no psychological layers.

For all the nippiness in the dialogue (the script is by Jim Kouf) and the comic interplay of the actors, the picture doesn't leave you with anything.

Mostly it gets by on being good-natured enough for you to accept its being clumsy and padded and only borderline entertaining.

What happened to the Kubrick who used to slip in sly, subtle jokes and little editing tricks? This may be his worst movie. He probably believes he's numbing us by the power of his vision, but he's actually numbing us by its emptiness. [13 July 1987, p.75]

You want to go to the town; you want to go back to the movie. It has a mellow, dotty charm.

A first-rate, cunning, shapely thriller, directed by Joseph Ruben (Dreamscape), from a nifty screenplay by the crime novelist Donald E. Westlake.

The movie is constructed like a comic essay, with random frivolous touches, and much of it is shot in hot, bright color that suggests a neon fusion of urban night life and movie madness. The subtexts connect with viewers' funnybones at different times, and part of the fun of the movie is listening to the sudden eruptions of giggles--it's as if some kids were running around in the theatre tickling people.

When Beatty and Hoffman doe their (deliberately hopeless) singing numbers, jerking like mechanical men, phrasing unmusically, going off-key, they don't have the slapstick skills for it. That's when you long for Martin and Murray, or some other comics. [1 June 1987, p.102]

The film is honest and watchable. But, unlike Orton, it takes no real delight in misbehaving.

The film is far from being a seamless work of art, but it probably comes closer to the confused attitudes that Americans had toward the Vietnam war than any other film has come, and so its messiness seems honorable.

The picture is stupid and often perfunctory; at the same time it's moderately enjoyable.

Often underrated, Jerry Schatzberg can make viewers feel the beauty and excitement of everyday grit.

Raising Arizona is no big deal, but it has a rambunctious charm. The sunsets look marvelously ultra-vivid, the pain doesn't seem to be dry – it's like opening day of a miniature golf course. [20 Apr 1987, p.81]

The salesmen's scams are entertaining, but their spritzing is too tame, and the action is prolonged with limp, wavering scenes. Levinson wants to be on the humane side of every issue, The best work is done by the supporting players.

It all looks fussed over. Parker simply doesn't have the gift of making evil seductive, and he edits like a flasher.

It's pure nostalgia--the past sweetened and trivialized. The mood is soft regret: he treats the old songs as a value that we've lost.

With Arthur hiller in charge, much of the dialogue turns into squawking, and the movie is flattened out and rackety, with Midler doing her damnedest to pump sass and energy into it.