Dave Kehr

The `burbs'' doesn`t quite go the distance, but for most of its length it is a superbly inventive, insightful and funny black comedy. For director Joe Dante, ''The `burbs'' is...

Of one of the functions of art is to explore emotions, one of the functions of entertainment may be to improve emotions-to recreate them in a cleaner, clearer, more convenient...

''Her Alibi'' is full of holes, and the most conspicuous of them is named Tom Selleck. Spurred on by the unlikely success of ''Three Men and a Baby,'' Selleck here...

Burt Reynolds, a born film actor, deserves much better than ''Physical Evidence,'' a feeble thriller that won`t do anything to help his flagging career. Reynolds is Joe Paris, a down-and-out...

The gangster film, with its morbid romanticism and unbridled violence, seems to be a relatively recent development in the Hong Kong cinema, though it already has produced one of the...

Dangerous Liaisons,'' set at the decadent height of pre-revolutionary France, begins with the elegant Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) being dressed and made up by a squadron of servants, a...

''The Accidental Tourist'' is not a completely successful movie, but it seems a necessary step in the slow process of reconstructing an adult consciousness in American movies. Working from a...

There are very few actors who can be said to constitute a genre of their own. Charlton Heston, for better or worse, was one-a ''Charlton Heston movie'' meant very specific...

Alan Parker`s ''Mississippi Burning'' has its shortcomings as a film, but it could be the greatest TV movie ever made. It`s as finely wrought a superficial treatment of a significant...

For the last few years, Australian filmmaker Fred Schepisi has been on a Hollywood detour, turning out a number of polished, professional films-among them, ''Iceman,'' ''Plenty'' and ''Roxanne''-that have never...