Taking It All In

Taking It All In is the seventh collection of movie reviews by the critic Pauline Kael and contains the 150 film reviews she wrote for The New Yorker between June 9, 1980, and June 13, 1983. She writes in the Author's Note at the beginning of the collection that, "it was a shock to discover how many good ones there were", as well as observing that only a very few of the movies she liked were box-office successes - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Tootsie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. She laments that, "in the '80s, films that aren't immediate box-office successes are instantly branded as losers, flops, bombs. Some of the movies that meant the most to me were in this doomed group - The Stunt Man, Pennies from Heaven, Blow Out, The Devil's Playground, Melvin and Howard, Shoot the Moon, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean."

The collection starts up after a gap of a year, part of which Kael spent in Los Angeles and what she learned during those months is summed up in the piece Why Are Movies So Bad? This essay, (in which she takes on the Hollywood money men whose love of swift and easy financial returns she believed led to the too many truly bad films on show at the time), is also included in the collection. ( "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or The Numbers").

The book is out-of-print in the United States, but is still published by Marion Boyars Publishers in the United Kingdom.

Movies reviewed

• The Shining - "Again and again, the movie leads us to expect something - almost promises it - and then disappoints us."
• Brubaker - "You're held by this movie, even when you're arguing with it, because there's power in the subject and in many of the performances.."
• The Blues Brothers - "Getting Aretha Franklin into The Blues Brothers was the smartest thing the director, John Landis, did; letting her get away after that one number - (she sings 'Think') - was the dumbest."
• The Blue Lagoon - "Watching them, (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins), is about as exciting as looking into a fishbowl waiting for guppies to mate."
• Urban Cowboy - "Much of the time Bud (John Travolta), is slackjawed and uncouth; then he has a speech explaining that he isn't dumb - and I think we're meant to take him at his word - because he has 'feelings'. Of course we think he's dumb: James Bridges and Aaron Latham have written him dumb. Worse, they've written him weak."
• Dressed to Kill - "Brian De Palma knows where to put the camera and how to make every move count, and his timing is so great that when he wants you to feel something he gets you every time. It's hardly possible to find a point at which you could tear yourself away from this picture." "What makes Dressed to Kill funny is that it's permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts."
• Honeysuckle Rose - "The music and the imagery move together. Jerry Schatzberg, who used to be a photographer, makes the people - all of them - look beautiful, in a special, transparent way. This isn't a picture with extras dressed up in somebody's idea of what Texas peasants wear. You feel that you're seeing regional Americans as they are, without awkwardness on their part. The color is realistic, yet so joyful it's almost hallucinatory."
• Willie & Phil - "This movie is a little monument to screwed-up notions of what women are."
• Airplane! - "The three writer-directors keep the gags coming pop pop pop..."
• The Great Santini - "warmed over and plodding"
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Special Edition - "I wish that Steven Spielberg had trusted his first instincts and left Close Encounters of the Third Kind as it was..the slightly different outtakes that Spielberg has substituted for the shots you remember keep jarring you."
• The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith - "The movie is about the cultural chasm that divides the natives and the European-spawned whites..The smooth high-strung tone is set right at the start, and I don't think there's an inexpressive frame of film in the entire movie."
• The Getting of Wisdom - "Having been through so many men's coming-of-age literary autobiographies on film, do we have to plow through the same tediousness with women? We always know the end: they go off to write the book."
• The Stunt Man - "Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross may be as definitive a caricature of a visionary movie director as John Barrymore's Oscar Jaffe in Twentieth Century was of theatrical genius."
• Those Lips, Those Eyes - " This picture wears its love of theatre like a shroud...it is every bit as tacky and enervated as the productions that are being staged."
• Melvin and Howard - " An almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination. I doubt if Jason Robards has ever been greater than he is here. Jonathan Demme shows perhaps a finer understanding of lower-middle-class life than any other American director."
• Ordinary People - " an academic exercise in catharsis; it's earnest, it means to improve people, and it lasts a lifetime."
• The Elephant Man - "John Hurt, using his twisted lips and his eyes, but mostly his voice and his posture and movements, makes of Merrick an astonishingly sweet-souled gentleman of his era."
• Stardust Memories - "In a Newsweek cover story in 1978, Woody Allen was quoted: 'When you do comedy you're not sitting at the grown-ups' table, you're sitting at the children's table.'.... Comedy doesn't belong at the children's table, but whining does."
• Private Benjamin - "Goldie Hawn demonstrates what an accomplished comedienne she is - she carries Private Benjamin on her back."
• Divine Madness! - "Bette Midler - like a Betty Hutton with brains."
• Used Cars - " has a wonderful, energetic heartlessness. Its premise is that honesty doesn't exist. Everybody in the movie is funny - even Toby, Luke's dog. Used Cars is a classic screwball fantasy - a shaggy celebration of American ingenuity."
• Every Man for Himself - "Godard's political extremism has been replaced by a broader extremism - total contempt shaded by masochism. This film says that we don't care about him, nobody cares about anybody, and he has given up on us."
• Raging Bull - "Scorsese loves the visual effects and the powerful melodramatic moments of movies such as Body and Soul, The Set-Up, and Golden Boy. He makes this movie out of remembered high points, leaping from one to another."
• Heaven's Gate - " a numbing shambles."
• The Idolmaker - "Taylor Hackford doesn't work up an indignant head of steam about unscrupulous promoters who exploit teen-agers' sexual fantasies - he sees the comedy in it."
• Resurrection - "The director, Daniel Petrie, does some very polished, fluid work, but you're always aware of the planning and calculation. Mysticism doesn't come easy to him."
• Popeye - "The picture seems overcomplicated, cluttered, and the familiar Popeye phrases and situations barely emerge. Shelley Duvall's an original who has her own limpid way of doing things..takes the funny-page drawing of Olive Oyl and breathes her own spirit into it. Duvall may be the closest thing we've ever come to a female Buster Keaton."
• Flash Gordon - " a piece of comic-strip bravura...the shots are like the comic-strip frames enlarged by Lichtenstein, with the addition of crude, bright skyscapes. The whole movie is painterly."
• Altered States - "it's a bellicose head horror movie, probably the most aggressively silly picture since The Exorcist. Ken Russell doesn't seem to have the ability to create believable representations of human behaviour; The attraction of the film is in its psychedelic sound-and-light shows.."
• The Competition - "as the silver-haired maestro of the symphony orchestra that performs with the finalists, Sam Wanamaker tucks the picture in his vest pocket and struts away with it. Wanamaker shows up Amy Irving and Richard Dreyfus by not tearing himself apart in anguish over whether we'll like him."
• Tess - " This Tess isn't a protagonist; she is merely a hapless,frail creature, buffeted by circumstances. The picture is tame, it's artistic - a series of leisurely Barbizon School landscapes. Roman Polanski's Tess is Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles under sedation."
• Kagemusha - "The film doesn't seem contemplative - just uninvolving and spiritless."
• Napoléon - "Abel Gance has a nineteenth century theatrical sensibility, but he's also obsessed with the most avant-garde film techniques, and he uses these advanced methods to overpower you emotionally. You applaud, you cheer, because the exhilaration of his technique freshens the stale, trashy ideas, gives them a grand lunacy."
• Fort Apache, The Bronx - "Paul Newman throws himself into the role of Murphy, a veteran of eighteen years on the New York police force..There's no star self-protectiveness, no holding back; He has fun with who he is in a scene; he dances, he shuffles. Theres a beautiful hamminess about his work: he's scratching an itch and getting a huge kick out of it." "the movie is an attempt to show urban crisis in extremis"
• All Night Long - "is an idiosyncratic, fairy-tale comedy about people giving up the phony obligations they have accumulated and trying to find a way to do what they enjoy " " The director Jean-Claude Tramont, is a sophisticated jokester. There may be a suggestion of Lubitsch and of Max Ophüls in his approach,and there is more than a suggestion of Tati"; - "Gene Hackman gives one of his most likable performances."
• Caddie - "The lovely toothy Helen Morse is the heroine of the 1976 Australian movie Caddie, which has just opened here..The picture often has the charm of photographs of the past, but that's all it has. It doesn't dramatize..Jack Thompson's brash, flippant [bookie] Ted, gives the film a burst of energy."
• The Incredible Shrinking Woman - "a light, satirical fantasy starring Lily Tomlin..Even after Pat (Tomlin) starts to shrink, she tries to see the bright side of things. She goes on valiantly shopping and cooking, even when she has to climb up to the sink...It's an amiable sloppy film."
• Nine to Five - "this piece of strong-arm whimsy..is a leering, doddering movie.."
• La Cage aux Folles II - "as Albin, the female impersonator star of a gay night-club revue, Michel Serrault doesn't make the mistake of acting like a woman - he acts Albin like a transvestite's idea of a woman - he is obsessed with how he looks, and is terified of aging - that is, of no longer being loved. He's a heavyset middle-aged man trying to be a sex goddess in chiffon."
• The Dogs of War - "Without anything being made explicit, the film indicates that it's more than money that impels these mercenaries to fight..This is the first feature by John Irvin [and he] has studied a master; some of the most feral images are almost direct quotations from Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch."
• Eyewitness - "Just about no one is believable in this movie. Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich have put an eighties woman into a claptrap forties-movie situation. Eyewitness is moderately enjoyable to watch, but when you think about it, it gets weirder and worse."
• Atlantic City - "Burt Lancaster plays Lou, an old-timer who tries to keep up appearances; when Lancaster was working with Visconti or Bertolucci he wasn't afraid to be bloody and bowed. And that's how he is here, but more so, because this time he isn't playing a strong man brought down by age and social changes: he's a man who was never anything much ..Louis Malle has entered into the writer John Guare's way of seeing, and depth of feeling - [which is] what Lancaster, in the finest performance he has ever given..brings to the film."
• The Postman Always Rings Twice - "overcontrolled..the period detail makes it look studied and accurate, when what's wanted is impulsiveness and haste..Jessica Lange stands and walks with her rump out proudly, and it dominates the movie."
• Excalibur - "I would never have imagined that I could enjoy a retelling of the Arthurian legends which was soaked in Jung and scored to themes from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Wagner, but John Boorman's Excalibur has its own kind of crazy integrity."
• Thief - "Thief is all highfalutin hype..There's so much of the rainy-night-in-the-neon-city school of cinematography that the picture is close to being a parody of film noir....This is the first theatrical feature by the writer-director Michael Mann."
• The Howling - "The Howling doesn't take itself seriously, it's consciously trashy. The picture isn't afraid of being silly - which is its chief charm."
• Caveman - "Carl Gottlieb shows a veteran entertainer's gift for pacing... an original, consistently enjoyable comedy. If you've been searching for a comedy you can enjoy along with your children, this is the one."
• Knightriders - "the picture has a core of very crude, easy social satire, and an even cruder social message...there's no film craft, no kinetic drama in the hurtling bodies; its just an exhibition of stunt work..[It] isn't offensive; it's simpleminded, though, and inept."
• Dawn of the Dead - "just a gross-out"
• This is Elvis - "We witness the transformation of a young whirlwind performer into a bloated druggie with dead eyes...This Is Elvis is hair-raising because of what Elvis turns into: joyless stardom gives him the look of a mutant."
• Heartworn Highways - "an informal documentary about performers such as Guy Clark, David Allan Coe, Townes Van Zandt, and Steve Young - part of the seventies outlaw generation of country music - there are wonderful things in it, such as an image of car lights serpentining on a highway under a full moon.."
• Raiders of the Lost Ark - " an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, run through at top speed and edited like a great trailer - for flash...It gets your heart thumping. But there's no exhilaration in this dumb, motor excitement."
• Cattle Annie and Little Britches - "based on the lives of two adolescent girls (Jennie Stevens or Little Britches and Cattle Annie) in the late 19th century who became infatuated with the Western outlaw heroes they had read about in Ned Buntline's stories and left their homes to join them. There is everything here to make a classic comedy-Western except a script to give the potentially rich material shape and a dramatic centre." "Burt Lancaster looks happy in this movie and still looks tough: it's an unbeatable combination."
• History of the World, Part 1 - "an all-out assault on taste and taboo, and it made me laugh a lot."
• Outland - " is set in a morally grimy future..[it] recalls another hermetic sci-fi film - the somewhat more spirited Alien...it has a comparable grinding unpleasantness."
• Dragonslayer - " draws us into the mysterious world that it creates. It's a night bloom...Ralph Richardson's Ulrich is like a batty,drunken old Shakespearean actor; his Latin spells have a poignant lilt..Alex North's score is a beauty..."
• Superman II - "Christopher Reeve..brings emotional depth to Superman..It's largely his love for Lois Lane and his sense of responsibility toward her (and the whole country) which give this film its jokey yet touching romanticism."
• Stripes - "The picture is not an aesthetic object; its just a flimsy, thrown-together service comedy..But it has a lot of snappy lines, Ivan Reitman keeps things hopping.."
• Blow Out - "De Palma has sprung to the place..where genre is transcended and what we're moved by is an artist's vision. And Travolta makes his own leap - right back to the top where he belongs...Travolta and Nancy Allen are radiant performers..Nancy Allen gives the film its soul; Travolta gives it gravity and weight and passion...It's a great movie."
• Arthur - "is about a drunken millionaire playboy; it harks back to the screwball comedies of the thirties, but its attitudes are vaguely contemporary...Considering that Arthur..is a very thin comic construct, Dudley Moore does an amazing amount with the role. Arthur has a mad sparkle in his eyes and there's always something bubbling inside him.."
• Zorro, the Gay Blade - "a joyously silly farce"
• Mommie Dearest - "Faye Dunaway gives a startling, ferocious performance. She becomes as grim and harsh as the actual Joan Crawford was .."
• The French Lieutenant's Woman - "For the movie version of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman to set our imaginations buzzing, the one essential is that the distraught heroine, Sarah Woodruff, who keeps a vigil on the stone jetty of an English seacoast village in 1867 and, motionless, looks out to the gray sea, must be alluringly mysterious...We never really get into the movie, because, as Sarah, Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance, but she isn't mysterious."
• So Fine - "Andrew Bergman, and his cinematographer James A. Contner seem to have only one thought: to get a reaction from us... This picture works too hard at being funny..."
• True Confessions - "the idea is to take the lovable Irish brothers of thirties films - James Cagney and Pat O'Brien are the protytypes - and turn them inside out..The movie is in a stupor; you have to put up a struggle to get anything out of it."
• Chariots of Fire -" The effects calculated to make your spirits soar are the same effects that send you soaring down to the supermarket to buy a six-pack of Miller or Schlitz or Löwenbräu. The film is full to bursting with the impersonal, manufactured go-to-the-mountains poetry that sells products. It's retrograde moviemaking, presented with fake bravura."
• Rich and Famous - "Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen can't dip into themselves and bring out characters; they're simply art objects rattling off lines, and they rattle incessantly in this remake of the 1943 film Old Acquaintance, which starred Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins."
• Pixote - "As the director, Hector Babenco, sees it, there's something essential missing in Pixote; no one has ever made him feel that his life had any value...Babenco is wildly ambitious, in the manner of gifted young artists:... After I saw Pixote, I had an opportunity to speak with Babenco, and since the street kids in the movie are all boys, I asked, "What of the girls?" His answer was "Their lives are ten thousand times as bad."
• Looker - "Albert Finney gives what looks to be the laziest performance by a star ever recorded on film. Boredom seems to have seeped into his muscles and cells; he's sinking under the weight of it...Thinking about this movie could give you frostbite of the brain."
• Continental Divide - "..there's a single plot thread,... with almost no subsidiary characters..There's no subtext, either - just nothingness, with this tidy, old-fashioned structure laid on top of it."
• Body Heat - "William Hurt..gives his least entertaining screen performance yet. I never thought that I'd compare anyone unfavourably with Fred MacMurray, but MacMurray in Double Indemnity made a better chump."
• Southern Comfort - " a survival-game movie - a variation on The Most Dangerous Game and Deliverance in which almost defenceless men who manage to lose their compass in the water, along with their map and their radio, become the prey of hunters. Walter Hill uses the Louisiana bayou country locale for its paranoia inducing strangeness (its like a landscape dreamed up by Max Ernst)...As an action director, Walter Hill has a dazzling competence."
• Ticket to Heaven - "could have used a better script and more taut direction, but a good subject does a lot for a movie - you don't feel humiliated by it."
• Ragtime - "Returning to the screen after a twenty year retirement, James Cagney, who was born in 1899, has the faint, satisfied smile of an old tiger, and it's a pleasure to look at him." "There is probably no American novel that would be more difficult for a European director to adapt to the screen than this one, which depends on the kind of background that we soak up unconsciously over the years..the Czech Miloš Forman,...simply doesn't have the storehouse of associations to make a Ragtime. (Could anyone besides Altman get the humor across..)"
• The Devil's Playground - "I don't really see how this movie could be much better. Schepisi is a great filmmaker, with his own softly rhythmed style...this isn't an anti-Catholic movie. Far from it. Schepisi loves these tormented comedians. But he looks at them with humorous pagan eyes."
• On Golden Pond - "is the kind of uplifting experience that traffics heavily in rather basic symbols: the gold light on the pond stands for the sunset of life; ..Do you dig it? Do you have the stomach for it? .. This isn't material for actors, no matter what their age. It's material for milking tears from an audience...This twaddle is a pacifier - it's a regression to the movies with cute and wise old codgers."
• Pennies from Heaven - "is the most emotional movie musical I've ever seen. It's a stylized mythology of the Depression which uses the popular songs of the period as expressions of people's deepest longings - for sex, for romance, for money, for a high good time....there was never a second when I wasn't fascinated by what was happening on the screen."
• Reds - "When Warren Beatty (as John Reed), and Diane Keaton (as Louise Bryant), drop a bit of political information, their voices go dead, as if they didn't expect anyone to be listening. Beatty could be reciting from a manual, and Keaton might be dubbed - the words don't seem related to anything going on in her head."
• Four Friends - "The script is a semi-autobiographical account by Steve Tesich of the arrival in [America] of a Yugoslavian working-class boy, Danilo,...The story of Danilo's growing to manhood in the America he loves is - although Tesich would probably disagree - deeply conservative...Four Friends views the American sixties as a sturdy burgher from central Europe might: these kids don't appreciate their freedom; they have a lot of growing up to do."
• My Dinner with André - "a bizarre and surprisingly entertaining satirical comedy "
• Absence of Malice - " Paul Newman..seems to have transcended age. ..there's nothing stale or brackish about [his] acting these days - it's bilge-free."
• Shoot the Moon - "there isn't a scene in Alan Parker's new film, that I think rings false....This movie isn't just about marriage; it's about the family that is created, and how that whole family reacts to the knotted, disintegrating relationship of the parents...Alan Parker directs the actors superbly."
• One from the Heart - " this story being negligible, what we're asked to respond to is Coppola's confectionery artistry... The people in this movie are charming but not interesting...It's like South Pacific without the music."
• The Border - "Jack Nicholson...gives a modulated, controlled performance." "Tony Richardson..has developed a considerable body of skills, and this may be the most unobtrusively intelligent directing he has ever done for the screen. It's a solid, impressive movie."
• Personal Best - "a very smart and super-subtle movie, in which the authenticity of the details draws us in...This film celebrates women's bodies without turning them into objects; it turns them into bodies. There's an undercurrent of flabbergasted awe. Everything in the movie is physically charged."
• Quest for Fire - "Only one pleasant thing happens to the three Ulam (Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Nameer El-Kadi), on their travels: they encounter Ika (Rae Dawn Chong), of the highly developed mud-people tribe, the Ivaka...who wears nothing but body paint."
• Missing - "The Battle of Chile, which interpreted Salvador Allende's overthrow in much the same way, is far more manipulative, yet I think it's a great film. Missing isn't; it isn't even good." "Missing which was set in Mexico, has texture: it has the anxious, ominous atmosphere of a city under martial law..The visual details have something tangible about them; the plot points don't."
• Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man - "a movie about a father-son relationship and about the terrible generational split that has developed in Italy ...But none of the scenes go anywhere. Bernardo Bertolucci's vision is grayed out here and mediocre at heart."
• Three Brothers - "Francesco Rosi respects the perplexities of the three sons of an ageing farmer, and he's fair to their differing points of view...Rosi, whose earlier work was about the enigmas of power and corruption, has, as he has aged (he was born in 1922), become more interested in the powerless. ..Three Brothers is not as fine a work as Christ Stopped at Eboli...but is wonderful enough."
• Diner - "is a wonderful movie. Set in Baltimore, around Christmas of 1959, it's like a comic American version of I Vitelloni. "
• Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip - "a master of lyrical obscenity..Pryor is the only great poet satirist among our comics. His lyricism seems to come out of his thin-skinned nature; he's so empathic he's all wired up...When he becomes something or someone, it isn't an imitation; he incarnates the object's soul and guts."
• Deathtrap - "what this comes down to is a very broad, obvious movie that looks like an ugly play and appears to be a vile vision of life."
• Diva - "dashes along with a pell-mell gracefulness..It's a glittering toy of a movie...Beineix presents people who charm us because they arrange their reality to suit their whims. They're unself-conscious about being self-conscious."
• Victor/Victoria - "Julie Andrews is too infuriatingly sane and remote to be at the center of a farce."
• Cat People - "The dialogue that the actors are given to speak is dead. Eventually, Nastassia, who's in love with the zookeeper, pleads with him - "Kill me. You must free me." He says, "I can't", and you want to yell, "Oh, go ahead and kill her.""
• Mephisto - "an indictment of a morally bankrupt actor - Klaus Maria Brandauer, who has gleaming cat eyes and a seductive, impish smile, seems a startlingly right choice for the part.."
• Smash Palace - "is an amazingly accomplished movie...Roger Donaldson has the kind of neo-neo-realist technique that a viewer is unconscious of...It's a remarkable piece of work..."
• Annie - "Carol Burnett is at her most exuberantly macabre..As Miss Hannigan [the head of the New York City orphanage where Annie lives till the age of ten]..There's dementia in her when she's wriggling at men seductively. Pie-eyed, in ruffles and gathers and a long red necklace that beats a tattoo on her belly, she's both hag and trollop - a fit mate for W.C.Fields' Egbert Sousé up there in pickled heaven." " All the little orphans seem to have been trained by Ethel Merman; they belt in unison."
• Rocky III - " packaged hysteria "
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - "E.T. The Extrra-Terrestrial envelops you..It's a dream of a movie - a bliss-out. This sci-fi fantasy has a healthy share of slapstick comedy, yet it's as pure as Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion. "
• Poltergeist - "turns into a showcase for fancy opticals "
• The Escape Artist - "Griffin O'Neal is a geat-looking gamin daredevil...[but the film] is so misshapen that it's only intermittently affecting."
• Star Trek II:The Wrath of Khan - "invites you to have some wonderful callow, dumb fun. Shatner has probably never given as polished a performance ...Ricardo Montalbán may be the most romantic smoothie of all sci-fi villains. Khan's penchant for quoting Melville, and Milton doesn't hurt...Very quickly, you discover that even if you weren't a Trekkie you've been fond of this crew. Even if you hardly ever saw them, they took up lodging in your head; they put down roots there."
• Blade Runner - "a suspenseless thriller"
• A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy - "Julie Hagerty has a beautiful naïve deadpan and a way with lines ...she's the best thing in the movie."
• Author! Author! - "The script, by Israel Horovitz, has..some of the worst ideas and the most doddering, bonehead situations to be seen on the big screen in years...It's an indefensibly bad movie, but I didn't mind seeing it. There's something fascinatingly berserk in Horovitz's mixture of good and bad writing."
• Barbarosa - "The vistas are overwhelming - the landscapes have a near-hallucinatory, unspoiled dignity...Although this film is very different from Schepisi's Australian movies, it's similar in its feeling for landscape and its affection for the characters' individual, screwy ways of reasoning, and it shows the fullness of his approach to moviemaking....this is the most spirited and satisfying new Western I've seen in several years..."
• The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas - "dimples, wigs, bazooms, and all, Dolly Parton is phenomenally likable in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas ..the picture piles on the coy Americana."
• The World According to Garp - "a castration fantasy...John Lithgow..has more life in him/her than anybody else in the movie...he's like a bulkier Joyce Grenfell, but with a faraway look in his eyes.. it's a poison-pen letter to Mother and the feminist movement."
• An Officer and a Gentleman - "a slick, high-pressured, and well-acted variant of the picture that was made fairly regularly in the thirties and forties: the selfish or arrogant fellow with a chip on his shoulder who joins some branch of the military, learns the meaning of comradeship, and comes out purged - straight and tall, a better human being, one of the team...(the minor characters have tragedies so that the major characters can learn lessons..)"
• The Road Warrior - "The Road Warrior is intense, and it's all of a piece. The Australian director George Miller grabs you by the throat - or lower - and doesn't let you go until it's over...Set in a post-apocalyptic Wasteland....[it's] sappy sentimental, and, for all its huffing and puffing, it doesn't blow any houses down; it has no resonance of any kind."
• Tempest - "Susan Sarandon and a young actress new to films, Molly Ringwald, sport beautiful short haircuts in Paul Mazursky's Tempest. At one point, they also stand in the surf of a Greek island and sing Why Do Fools Fall in Love like carefree vaudevillians, and they're completely charming. Those are the two best reasons for seeing the film."
• Night Shift - "the film picks up at the end, and there are a lot of attractive performers - especially the one-time Second City comedienne Shelley Long."
• My Favorite Year - "..the first film directed by Richard Benjamin..the film has a bubbling spirit, and I was carried along by the acting and by Benjamin's near-libidinous reverence for his smartass characters...As the guest from Hollywood - O'Toole is simply astounding."
• Tex - "what Dillon does in Tex may not be the result of studying technique, but it works better on camera than most trained acting does.....[Dillon] has a gift for expressing confused and submerged shifts of feeling..there are little life lessons all the way through - this is an old-fashioned kids' movie.."
• Le Beau Mariage - "Éric Rohmer's Le Beau Mariage ended just when I started to get interested, and when I hoped we might find out something about the heroine (Béatrice Romand)..Serio-comic triviality has become Rohmer's speciality."
• Fitzcarraldo - "a leaden variation on Aguirre, the Wrath of God. It's Aguirre without the inspired images or great subject...Kinski's Fitzcarraldo isn't a man with a dizzy dream - he's a bored, fed-up actor eyeballing the camera."
• Burden of Dreams - "At one glorious point in his (Werner Herzog's) monologues to the camera, this humble fellow tells us that his dreams are the same as ours - that "The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them." This puts him in a class with the movie queen in Singin' in the Rain who dimpled prettily as she said, "If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes us feel as though our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High - "I was surprised at how not-bad it is..it's certainly likable..If the film has a theme, it's sexual embarrassment. Sex fouls the kids up..Sean Penn in the role of the surfer-doper, Jeff Spicoli - becomes the film's star.."
• Sweet Hours (Dulces horas) - "Carlos Saura has a feeling for dark, autumnal elegance, and a dexterous technique that he puts at the service of tired ideas... from time to time the images have an erotic tingle. In a Saura film, something more directly sexual is often impending; it hovers in the atmosphere."
• Jinxed! - "Midler has some lines that are real swifties and she turns even moderately amusing ones into zingers, but the situations don't go anywhere..Don Siegel..was never the right director for a musical-comedy star."
• Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean - "..the characters are warped by their illusions, but Altman has a poetic intuition of the way illusions wrap around people's lives, and his technique - all the artifice he brings to the staging - becomes one with the themes of illusion and deception."
• Leap Into the Void - "The movie is about family entanglements and the functions of madness....[It] is a film about people who are out of control made by a director (Marco Bellocchio) who's in as close to total control as a moviemaker is ever likely to be. I'm not sure if it should be considered a great movie, but there's greatness in it."
• By Design - "the director Claude Jutra ..has a light, understated approach to farce. His sensibility suggests a mingling of Tati and Truffaut...most of the time the picture has a freshness that's very surprising, given the subject: a couple who want a child."
• Eating Raoul - "is thin-textured - it's like watching a stretched-out, slowed-down episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman..Watching it, I felt as if I were experiencing sensory deeprivation."
• Heartaches - "As the brazen, pushy Rita of Heartaches, Kidder has the depth that was missing from her other roles; this is the first full performance I've ever seen her give, and she's something to behold...Heartaches..has some of the appeal of the Hollywood romantic comedies of the thirties in which a couple of working girls meet up and help each other out."
• Still of the Night - "is reticent and soft where it should be tough. The writer-director, Robert Benton, is unquestionably intelligent, but he doesn't seem to have the twisted savvy that's needed for the job at hand."
• Tootsie - "has what the best screwball comedies had:a Can-you-top-this? quality...In its final form, Tootsie is based on Dustin Hoffman, the perfectionist; he's both the hero and the target of this satirical farce about actors..."
• Gandhi - "Leaving the theatre where I saw Gandhi, I felt the way the British must have when they left India: exhausted and relieved...the film feels as if it were directed by a committee. The movies that Satyajit Ray has made and the ones that Louis Malle shot in India in the late sixties - the feature length documentary Calcutta and the seven-part series Phantom India - have the spirituality that this officially approved, laundered Gandhi doesn't have."
• Sophie's Choice - "an infuriatingly bad movie.."
• 48 Hrs. - "is excitingly paced; it hooks you at the start and never lets up. But I didn't enjoy it."
• The Verdict - "..the movie is so impressed by its own high seriousness that it has a hushed atmosphere. It strives for gloom...Paul Newman ..gives a fine performance...but..it's a bowed-down, sorrowful-sot performance - a tired old show-business view of a good man. "
• Coup de Torchon - "The longer the movie goes on, the worse it gets. First, it's a farce, then it's a Dirty Harry for liberals, and then it moves into Christ mythology, and it's so torpid that Isabelle Huppert's flitting about looks like energy."
• Best Friends - "The script probably reads fine, but it plays all wrong..The dialogue is too neatly worked out..Nothing in this picture really feels right; you sense the discomfort of honest effort going awry."
• The Night of the Shooting Stars - "is so good it's thrilling. This new film by Vittorio and Paolo Taviani encompasses a vision of the world. Comedy, tragedy, vaudeville, melodrama - they're all here, and inseparable."
• The Year of Living Dangerously - "Scene by scene, I was fascinated by Living Dangerously; I was held by it and had a very good time, though I didn't believe any of it."
• The King of Comedy - "The plot is small-scale - material for a sketch, dragged out... De Niro's performance - from the Nobody's Home school of acting...inspires no empathy."
• Lovesick - "As he did in his first film as writer-director, the 1980 Simon, Marshall Brickman parodies the craziness of the highly educated and compulsively self-aware....[Brickman] puts too much of a burden on Dudley Moore, who is always in danger as a performer, because he's so eager to oblige. Moore is too engaging here right from the start. The hero should be a Freudian pedant so the girl can humanize him."
• Local Hero - "Forsyth...he's an entertainer-filmmaker who gives free play to his own sense of the ridiculous and his own sense of beauty..[his] understatement..creates a delicately charged atmosphere."
• Tales of Ordinary Madness - "Every once in a while, the highly accomplished Ben Gazzarra gets a film role that he's itching to play and a director who's in love with that marvellous oily, enigmatic face of his...Ornella Muti's Cass is..mysteriously, uncannily beautiful.."
• La Nuit de Varennes - "it's almost the essence of the Old Wave..For two and a half hours, these people look knowingly at each other and talk literately....Ettore Scola is an accomplished, sometimes remarkable director, but he has got himself into an arch and soggy genre."
• Say Amen, Somebody - "features Thomas A. Dorsey, (he composed Take My Hand, Precious Lord), - George T. Nierenberg, the young filmmaker, is a very sensitive and talented documentarian, and this is a lovely piece of work, but he's too genteel for his subject."
• Bad Boys - "it's fairly proficiently made, in a brutal, realistic, neo-Warners style - the suspense is of a very primitive kind: you know early that things are going to get worse, and you have a fascinated dread of what's coming. But even when episodes are powerful, they're banal."
• The Flight of the Eagle - "an account of S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 undertaken by the Swedish engineer S.A. Andrée and two colleagues...Jan Troell brings these characters from another time so close that by the end they're like possibilities inside us... And the big, black balloon, which represents so much folly and hope..."
• Tender Mercies - "I kept waiting for Tender Mercies to get started - to get into something. I was still waiting when it was over and I was back out on the street...[It is] proof that a movie doesn't have to be long to be ponderous."
• Return of the Jedi - "an impersonal and rather junky piece of moviemaking..The scriptwriters (Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas), remove the trilogy's moral underpinnings when they tell us that you can become a Jedi knight, with the Force to do good, by heredity."
• Blue Thunder - "all stunt work and atmosphere..the city has a psychedelic, futuristic quality like Godard's Alphaville.. The picture is The French Connection without Gene Hackman and without dope. It's all technique - suspense in a void."
• Fanny and Alexander - "a festive and full-bodied dream play..If it calls any film besides Bergman's own earlier ones to mind, it's probably Children of Paradise - that other epic about life in the theatre. I don't think Fanny and Alexander achieves comparable romantic highs, but it's a cornucopia of a movie, with marvellous things in it."
• WarGames - " The first part is a sly, affectionate comedy....there are solemnities to come... There's no way for the halves of this picture to come together, because the first half is about how wonderful kids are and the second half is about how stupid and corrupt adults are. It's as if nobody had ever told the moviemakers where adults come from."

Editions

• Henry Holt & Co., 1984, hardbound (ISBN 0030693624)
• Marion Boyars, 1986, paperback (ISBN 0714528412)