Dream a Little Dream

The movie is just self-conscious enough to get some bad reviews, and it's going to draw some walkouts. Pay no attention. There's something wonderful here...It's a fascinating film. [3 March 1989, p.6]

A nice little dream, too, hardly epic but weirdly satisfying, the kind you wake up from and dearly want to re-enter, just for another drowsy moment or two. [3 March 1989]

The story is an uneasy mix of adult dreams of immortality and adolescent anguish. [3 March 1989, p.A]

This unbearable cross-generational fantasy, with Coreys Haim and Feldman, has one bit that sums up its overall ineptitude. It's a romantic interlude featuring the great Sinatra standard Young at Heart; instead of the 1954 hit version on Capitol, the filmmakers use the 1962 Reprise remake - photographed on a revolving turntable (and with the wrong label) as a 78! A 78 in the era of Gene Pitney? - what preschool did the filmmakers graduate from, anyway? [8 Sept 1989, p.3D]

It's not, however, a particularly pleasant surprise. Directed by 25-year-old Marc Rocco (son of actor Alex Rocco, who appears in the film), Dream a Little Dream places the usual plot inanities of the genre in the context of a wildly ambitious, baroque-surrealist style. The effect is a little as if the late Russian mystic Andrei Tarkovsky had directed "Police Academy VI." [9 March 1989, p.6]

Dream a Little Dream is so murky and convoluted that it just comes off as being tired. [10 March 1989, p.3F]

You could call it a nightmare but that would be an insult to Elm Street. Read full review