Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

As I watched it, I felt a real delight, because recent Hollywood escapist movies have become too jaded and cynical, and they have lost the feeling that you can stumble over astounding adventures just by going on a hike with your Scout troop.

Of the three Jones films, The Last Crusade may well become the sentimental favorite, the Indiana to end them all.

You suspect this movie Is going to be a great deal of fun from the very beginning, when River Phoenix, as the young Indiana Jones, snatches a jeweled cross from grave robbers and flees with it.

You could play the cynic and say it is an outrageous piece of audience manipulation. Or, you could say that it is a thrilling exercise in pure cinema. Why not the latter?

Indiana Jones dishes out the action so generously and with such good- humored confidence you feel like an ingrate for carping. This thrice-told tale gives you your money’s worth. Now it’s time to hang up the bullwhip and move on.

On the whole, though, it is the mechanics of the piece which matter, and these Spielberg handles with the economy of a master.

...a rightfully beloved film, a classic story of humble, heroic virtues against moronic, hive-mind evil…Among the action-set-pieces and last-minute rescues, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade ingeniously has its cake and eats it when it comes to belief...

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade closed the decade in style.

An awfully good and deliciously watchable popcorn movie, made by probably the single most reliable director of popcorn movies in the history of American cinema, when he was still pretty close to the peak of his powers.

While the first instalment is a visceral and unexpectedly violent adventure, "The Last Crusade" is a gentler experience, more concerned with softening Indy's character through his relationship with his father. Full review in Spanish.