Walter Goodman

The teaching of letters and numbers, for which Sesame Street is famous, is played down here in favor of messages about getting along.

The main characters tend to be either grotesques or stereotypes, who keep getting into incoherent arguments, composed largely of variations on America's favorite epithet...For a movie with pretensions to laying out political realities, the colorful Salvador is black and white.

For all those out there who can't get enough of Prince, Under the Cherry Moon may be just the antidote.

Written and directed by Frank Henenlotter, this oozer specializes in unspecial effects and unspeakable acting. Strictly for the brain damaged.

A denouement as clunky as the title.

The plots are fairly basic, but the direction by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper is droll, the effects are all a fan could ask for, and the playing is appropriately agitated. [06 Aug 1993, p.D15]

Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch director ("Soldier of Orange"), doesn't let the furiously futuristic plot get in the way of the flaming explosions, shattering glass and hurtling bodies.

This is one incoherent movie; I have a hunch that the writers could not figure it out, either.

Humor and horror make an uneasy combination.

Pirates is a Roman Polanski grossout. There's a rat in the soup and urine in the bath water and corpses all over the place. There's slipping and sliding and colliding, stabbings, bludgeonings and tumbles from the mast. Nothing is left underdone except the hilarity, the one good excuse for such low-jinks on the high seas.

THE muddy football game that concludes The Best of Times is such a rouser that it almost makes up for the incomplete passes and stopped runs that precede it.

Frank Deese's script is as rudimentary as the lyrics that pound through the hallways, and Christopher Cain's direction provides no surprises.

Now and then, there is some horseplay involving the whole group or an angry exchange between a couple of them, but mostly we're watching a set of shticks, some amusing, some not. It's like being at an Actor's Studio showcase.

A knockout scene by that grand old battler, John Huston.

The performers are as seductive as the script. It's quite an affaire.

The director, Jeff Kanew, does not have as steady a hand as the old-timers. What he does have is sense enough to let our memories of all those Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas movies work on us.

Mr. Edwards, who on happier occasions gave us the Pink Panther movies, piles on the pileups until you may suspect that he is trying to distract the audience from the absence of a diverting story or dialogue.

From its cartoony credits to its knish-and-cannoli close, Wise Guys is one funny movie.

Whatever shred of credibility the movie retains is dispersed by the final, dead serious directorial hocus‐pocus.

All the people and places in Demons seem imported. The dialogue is spoken in colloquial American and matches the lip movements, but it sounds dubbed. Nonetheless, there are some apt observations.

The excitement is switched off on landing. Once Top Gun, which opens today at Loews Astor Plaza and other theaters, gets back to earth, the master of the skies is as clunky as a big land-bound bird.

Richard Benjamin's strategy in directing Little Nikita seems to have been to paper over the holes in the plot with routine moves from spy shows past, in hopes of making the improbable passable.

The acting is finely modulated; Miss Andersson's flirtation with insanity is a ballet. And the austere beauty of Sven Nykvist's photography has an eloquence all its own.

And that's the problem. Despite strenuous efforts by Herbert Lom and John Rhys-Davies as a pair of comical villains who can't decide whether they are supposed to be funny or menacing, the story is lost in the effects. As Mr. Chamberlain remarks at one threatening moment, ''Boy, looks like they've thought of everything.''

Lewis Milestone's unsparing direction of the senseless slaughter more than makes up for the soft spots and does justice to Erich Maria Remarque's novel of a generation destroyed by war.

If the Food and Drug Administration labeled movies, the warning on ''Hamburger'' might be that it is likely to cause heartburn...The result is plenty of irreverence but not much fun. Somebody must have told the waitress to hold the laughs.

If you can resist seeing Cary Grant playing an angel, David Niven playing a bishop and Loretta Young playing Loretta Young, you're too tough a critic for The Bishop's Wife.

Alan Rudolph's latest movie seems to be striving to say something but isn't able to break through the fog of his script.