Pauline Kael

Spacious, leisurely, and with elaborate period re-creations of Louisiana in the 30s, this first feature directed by the young screenwriter Walter Hill is unusually effective pulp, perhaps even great pulp.

The material hasn't been paced for the screen; there are dead spots (without even background music), but there are also a lot of funny verbal routines and a musical burlesque of Carmen, and Harpo, as a fiendish pickpocket, is much faster (and less aesthetic and self-conscious and innocent) than in the Brothers' later comedies.

Gaudy black-exploitation film with explicit racism and some that's implicit. Partly slick, partly amateurish.

Marlon Brando is airily light and masterly as the veteran anti-apartheid barrister who takes the case even though he knows that he can't get anywhere with the rigged court. He saves the picture for the (short) time onscreen. But the director, Euzhan Palcy, seems lost; her work is heavy-handed, and the script (by Colin Welland and the director, from a novel by Andre Brink) is earnest and didactic.

Under the guise of a Socialist parable about the economic determinism of personal behavior (class interests determine sexual choice, etc.) the writer-director, Lina Wertmuller, has actually introduced a new version of the story of Eve, the spoiler.

There's so much going on you can't take your eyes off it, but none of it means anything.

The whole thing became amorphous and confused. Paramount did rather better by the romance than the politics; Ingrid Bergman is lovely and affecting as Maria.

The pictures is an almost total drag, though Agnes Moorehead, as the villainess, has a sensational exit through plate-glass windows.

The premise of this Hitchcock thriller is promising, but the movie, set in Quebec and partly shot there, is so reticent it's mostly dull.

This unapologetically grown-up movie about separating is perhaps the most revealing American movie of its era. Though the director, Alan Parker, doesn't do anything innovative in technique, it's a modern movie in terms of its consciousness.

Low-grade horror.

A classic screwball fantasy - a neglected modern comedy that's like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures...Set in the world of competing used-car dealers in the booming Southwest, this picture has a wonderful, energetic heartlessness; it's an American tall-tale movie in a Pop Art form. The premise is that honesty doesn't exist; if you develop a liking for some of the characters, it's not because they're free of avarice but because of their style of avarice.

There's a total absence of personal obsession - even moviemaking obsession - in the way Crichton works; he never excites us emotionally or imaginatively, but the film has a satisfying, tame luxuriousness, like a super episode of "Masterpiece Theater."

The funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen.

Martin and Tomlin are both uninhibited physical comics. They tune in to each other's timing the way lovers do in life, only more so.

People hadn't seen anything like it; that doesn't mean they needed to.

Directed by Bob Clark, this handsome Anglo-Canadian production features fine Whistler-like dockside scenes and many beautiful, ghoulish gothic-movie touches, but the modern political attitudes expressed by the writer, John Hopkins, misshape the picture.

You're entertained continuously, though you don't feel the queasy, childish dread that is part of the dirty kick of the horror genre.

Housebound and fearfully lofty.

Richard Thorpe directed this package, shrewdly designed to give satisfaction to the new raunchy rock generation. The story ends happily, and the movie made millions, though Presley never begins to suggest the vitality that he showed in documentary footage.

But the movie is in a stupor; everything is internalized. Duvall is locked in, and De Niro is in his chameleon trance - he seems flaccid, preoccupied...You have to put up a struggle to get anything out of this picture.

The picture is so cautious about not offending anyone that it doesn't rise to the level of satire, or even spoof.

The kind of uplifting twaddle that traffics heavily in rather basic symbols: the gold light on the pond stands for the sunset of life, and so on and so on...A doddering valentine.

The scattered fine comic moments don't make up for the wide streak of fuddy-duddyism in the notion that the family used to be the bulwark of the nation's value system.

It has a distinctive and surprising spirit. It's funny, delicate, and intense -- all at the same time.

As the teen-age small-town girl looking for excitement who joins up with a carnival that's traveling through, Jodie Foster has a marvelous sexy bravado. The dialogue, from Thomas Baum's screenplay, is often colorful, but the picture is heavy.

The picture is just a flimsy, thrown-together service comedy about smart misfits trying to do things their own way in the Army. But it has a lot of snappy lines (the script is by Len Blum, Dan Goldberg, and Ramis), the director, Ivan Reitman, keeps things hopping (it's untidy but it doesn't lag), and the performers are a wily bunch of professional flakes.

A high-spirited, elegantly deadpan comedy, with a mellow, light touch.