SOURCE: "Childhood of the Dead," in The New Yorker, Vol. LVII, No. 38, November 9, 1981, pp. 170-84.

Kael was a widely-read and respected film critic for The New Yorker until her retirement in 1991. In the following excerpt, she unfavorably reviews Looker, focusing on Crichton's "cold" direction, the lack of character development, and the weakness of the film's plot.

Michael Crichton directs like a technocrat. This ties in with a small problem he has with his scripts: he can't write people. His new film, Looker (it's his fourth), gives the impression of having never been touched by human hands; it's a shiny, cold job of engineering that manages to turn even Dorian Harewood, as a Los Angeles police lieutenant, into a piece of furniture. The plot is pseudo-scientific piffle about the machinations of the head of a conglomerate, played by the now completely white-haired James Coburn in the desiccated-amoral-old-bastard manner of...