Stand by Me Review

Eighty nine minutes is the correct running time and part of why this holds. Reiner does not pad the journey with incident, so the campfire talk, the argument about a fictional dog and the silence after the leeches all get room, and the film accumulates rather than escalates. The four performances are startlingly good, particularly River Phoenix, who plays Chris as a boy already carrying an adult's understanding of how the town intends to treat him, and the scene where he cries about the milk money contains no performance of grief at all.

Wil Wheaton has the harder job as the observer and does it cleanly. Kiefer Sutherland's bully is the one broad element in the picture. What lifts the film above nostalgia is the narration's flat admission at the end that Chris is dead and that the friendship did not survive adolescence, which reframes everything preceding it as an elegy rather than an adventure. King wrote the source about writing, and Reiner keeps that thread without underlining it. There is almost no fat on this.