Brad Laidman

Their drugs are Cigarettes, Television, and Hostess Cup Cakes. In the end, if I am ever reincarnated and I have my choice between hating my White Trash Mom or hating my movie star Mom. I'm picking the movie star Mom every time.

Mister Roberts is a movie dedicated to anyone with a boring dead end job who wants to be a hero and has to decide whether to live honorably anyway.

Even the harshest critic has to recognize the sheer unbridled joy of their ignorance.

I got my first date because of this movie so you won't see me giving it any less than three stars.

What could have been a cool concept movie buckles under an uninspired script and some treacherous miscasting.

An effective comedy, an interesting bedtime tale, and one of the greatest date rentals of all time.

If anyone can figure out the cosmic significance of the film's omnipresent pine tree car fresheners, you're a better man than me.

Sean Penn's scenes are still so stunning...His Jeff Spicoli is an unabashed kick every second he is on the screen.

This could have been an unmitigated disaster, but Hughes' way with the material ensured it a special place in the heart of just about everyone who happened to be in high school while Ronald Reagan was President.

If you're in the right mood this movie will bring a tear to your eye. If you're not you're probably already watching "Reservoir Dogs".

This is John Hughes' best teen film, and it's a call to arms to everyone in the world who doesn't want to follow society's lame-ass rules at the expense of living a cool life.

If you get half of the jokes flung your way, and laugh at half of those you’re still in much better shape than the very best episode of Three’s Company. If you truly study this movie and love it all, you probably haven’t done much with your life, but at least you’re smiling.

A towering achievement in cinema, music, and life art. Funnier and more prescient every time I see it.

The first masterwork of the post-modern pop culture generation...gets better with every viewing, and like good rock n' roll, needs to be played loud!

Forest Whitaker is the perfect guy to play Parker, Diane Venora is hotly sympathetic to Parker's genius as his last wife Chan, and Eastwood's intentions are pure and golden, but Bird is a solid base hit on a hanging curve ball that should have been knocked well out of the Park. It's a powerful Heroin parable, but it could have been so much more.

The film is one chillingly authentic scene after another... In the end it's more of a war movie than "Saving Private Ryan" ever was.

The guys in Ishtar are the boring wallflowers of the world. They probably shouldn't be mocked, disgraced and beaten, but who really wants to spend close to two hours with them.

The best movie ever made about baseball, and it's not even really that close... "Major League" was funny, but Bull Durham is funny, literate, romantic, and overwhelmingly adherent to the idiosyncracies of the game.

Higher Learning is John Singleton's interracial state of today's campuses version of School Daze minus the musical numbers. Surprisingly, it's just as much a gang movie if not more than Boyz 'n the Hood.

Eddie Murphy does everything in this movie successfully. Coming To America remains his most personal work and a great argument that a movie can be decent and wholesome despite having enough profanity to make Bill Cosby lose sleep. A perfect argument for Eddie Murphy as decent guy even without the fame and fortune. Not that he's planning on giving it back though.

The funniest buddy movie ever and a generally daffy one at that. It features some of the most genuinely stupid and amusing tough guys in the history of cinema, and a tantalizing slow burn by Deniro.

Mrs. Doubtfire is overlong, barely funny, and a surprisingly bitter movie especially for a film aimed at children.

To me, Say Anything is without a shadow of a doubt the most rewarding, funny, and likable romance of the last twenty years. It heralds the decency of romantic love against the gears of a cold, grinding mechanical world.

The truth is that for all the controversy there really isn’t that much violence in Reservoir Dogs. The reason people were so affected was because the film shows you the true impact of its violence.

Grade A propaganda of the first order.

This is Dirty Harry's greatest hits, which is a little fun and a little embarrassing. The best part of the film is a warped version of "Bullitt"'s San Francisco car chase through Pacific Heights.

Rebel Without a Cause has such beautiful color photography that it seems almost impossible to conceive of the fact that they initially started filming it in black and white. Dean is every bit as tormented here as he was in East of Eden, but it’s more of an existential torment this time.

This is an amazing black satire filled with vicious biting words that snap like firecrackers.