The script is funny and observant, full of shocks of recognition, but for all his progress as a writer, Allen's direction remains disconcertingly amateurish. Still, it remains perhaps the only film in which Allen has been able to successfully imagine a personality other than his own.

Photographed in murky yellows and browns by John Alonzo, this 1979 film is sluggish and vague, trivializing its subject in a wash of unearned sentimentality.

Walter Hill's existential action piece, rendered in a complete stylistic abstraction that will mean tough going for literal-minded audiences. Not quite the clean, elegant creation that his earlier films were, The Warriors admits to failures of conception (occasional) and dialogue (frequent), but there is much of value in Hill's visual elaboration of the material.

Director Peter Weir struggles to create an atmosphere of mystical languor, dissolving his actors in blinding sunlight and filling his sound track with the faintly ominous rustles of nature. But the deenergized drama leads only to anticlimax, as Weir suggests much more than he shows and invites the audience to fill in the meanings.

Phil Kaufman's version of the Don Siegel SF classic is good as remakes go, but not as good as the original. Where Siegel was swift, compact, and efficient Kaufman tends to be slow, garrulous, and needlessly baroque. Ideas that Siegel knocked off in a few shots are expanded to fill entire sequences—but they're good ideas, and can stand a little stretching. Good allegories never die; they just expand and contract to fit the times.

Half the film passes while Pierson fumbles with the exposition—setting up an intricate internecine war for control of a Gypsy clan—and then he fumbles the action. Pointless, messy, rambling; no atmosphere and no energy.

The film is best when it takes itself seriously, worst when it takes the easy way out into giggly camp--as it does, finally and fatally, when Lex Luthor enters the action; Gene Hackman plays the arch-villain like a hairdresser left over from a TV skit.

While the results are far from unprofessional--the cast is uniformly good, including a characteristically slapped-around Meryl Streep...The male self-pity is so overwhelming that you'll probably stagger out of this mumbling something about Tolstoy (as many critics did when the film first came out in 1978) if you aren't as nauseated as I was.

I wouldn’t call it an overlooked masterpiece, but it’s eccentric studio filmmaking of a tall order (not to mention hilarious in spots). It certainly looks like nothing else coming out of Hollywood at present.

John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath seems like the obvious inspiration here, in both its proletarian sentiment and its primal arrangement of characters against the harsh landscape.

The film is flat, dull, and sloppy.

Rosen goes out of his way to avoid Disney's stylized movements and character touches, but ends by making his characters all look, sound, and act alike—conditions hardly hospitable to dramatic involvement. The animation may be naturalistic, but the fallacy is as pathetic as ever.

Carpenter displays an almost perfect understanding of the mechanics of classical suspense; his style draws equally (and intelligently) from both Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock.

A lot to look at, little to contemplate, and nothing to hum.

Self-conscious camp, the lowest artistic category known to man.

Franklin J. Shaffner's deadpan adaptation of Ira Levin's silly story about Hitler clones. The plot is less suspenseful than the overacting contest between the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, who spend most of their screen time one-upping each other in affectations.

By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt over, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.

In some ways this 1978 Cheech and Chong effort, their first feature, is the perfect doper movie—no one's straight enough to remember the punch lines. Director Lou Adler (the record producer) finds a few chuckles, but mostly it's amateur night.

The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece.

While the low comedy is undeniably effective, the film leaves behind a bad taste of snobbery and petty meanness.

A casually assembled Burt Reynolds vehicle, sloppy and loose in an amiable way.

Indescribably awful—a serving up of Beatles tunes by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with the ugliest visuals imaginable, directed with more glitz than good sense by Michael Schultz.

Director Colin Higgins plays foul with the audience, constructing some of the most dishonest suspense sequences ever filmed, and ends with a thriller that is obnoxious and manipulative in the extreme. If it were exciting, I suppose it wouldn't matter, but it's not: Higgins can't be bothered to bring the slightest bit of conviction to his plot, which takes nearly two hours to run its unimaginative course.

It looks like a potboiler: only a few of Peckinpah's themes are present, and they're mostly left undeveloped. But Peckinpah can still stage a fight scene better than anyone, and the film establishes its own crazy rhythm as it runs off wildly through most of the southwest.

A limp, cheaply made version of the Broadway. Director Randal Kleiser shows no real sense of how a musical is constructed: the songs are bunched together, the production numbers don't move, and the whole project shifts awkwardly between naturalism and stylization.

Milius can be faulted for reviving a number of ostensibly dead macho myths, but in the context of the subculture his film deftly re-creates, they take on the aura of eternal values. The breathtaking surfing footage, rather than the slightly stunted characters, makes his most eloquent argument.

The plotting of this 1978 biopic is contrived, and director Steve Rash's feeling for Buddy Holly's time and place is virtually nil, but Gary Busey's performance is astonishing—less as an interpretation than as a total physical transformation.

Despite the usual amounts of gore, this is a surprisingly tender, ambiguous, and sexy film in which Romero's penchant for social satire is for once restricted to local and modest proportions.

Despite Scorsese's efforts, there just isn't much to look at, and the film plays less like a movie than an illustrated record album.

Dull and lifeless.

Despite some signs of muddle and uncertainty, this is a surprisingly strong picture about a convict (Hoffman) on parole in LA learning what the supposedly “normal” world is all about.

Still reeling from the success of Carrie, De Palma turns this 1978 film into an endless series of shock effects, some of which work but most of which don't.

A New York movie with a California soul—superficially gritty but soft in the center, in a silly est sort of way.

The film has less to do with politics, women's or otherwise, than with a very conventional notion of the redemptive power of mother love. Which would be all right if director Hal Ashby had managed to mount it effectively—he hasn't though, and the results are dramatically incoherent.

The movie is affecting as a social portrait as well as a psychological drama.

Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.

The film comes closer to working than it has any right to, given the curious casting (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) and director Ridley Scott's inability to sustain dramatic tension or build a coherent scene.

Juggling onstage and offstage action, Cassavetes makes this a fascinating look at some of the internal mechanisms and conflicts that create theatrical fiction, and his wonderful cast never lets him down.

To my mind, this is one of Robert Aldrich’s worst films, but clearly not everyone agrees.

A small, solid film, made with craft if not resonance.

Standard Neil Simon stuff, full of cute grotesques, snappy one-liners, and cheap plays at pathos.

For a film ostensibly dedicated to physical grace, Ross's images are unforgivably clumsy. MacLaine and Bancroft, though, work up some sparks in the last two reels.

Some scenes are banal and offensively simpleminded. But patience, ultimately, is rewarded with a welter of detail and some mighty fine camerawork.

The gags are slighted in favor of John Denver-style homilies, mouthed by John Denver, while the film collapses under the weight of missed narrative connections, the apparent victim of excessive recutting.

The film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.

This incredibly odd Japanese horror feature (1977) is like a Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with bloody human viscera.

Dario Argento's grossly overstated mise-en-scene adds some perverse interest to this routine (if unusually gory) horror film from 1976. Argento works so hard for his effects—throwing around shock cuts, colored lights, and peculiar camera angles—that it would be impolite not to be a little frightened

A well above average sketch film from 1977, highlighted by a lengthy, hilariously deadpan kung fu parody, A Fistful of Yen.

It's the submarine barn and Richard Kiel's steel-toothed Jaws you remember from this one; the ostensible hero is just a fleshy blur.

William Friedkin's remake of the French thriller Wages of Fear represents an above-average effort by the director of The Exorcist—meaning it's marginally watchable. Friedkin senselessly complicates the simple story—four men drive a truckload of nitro through a South American jungle—with a lengthy exposition and some unfortunate existential overtones. The rhythms are all off—it's either too fast or too slow—but most of the set pieces are effective.

Visconti rolls out some heavy left-wing proselytizing in the last half hour, but what really hits like a hammer is Lancaster’s realization that these awful people are the only family he’s got.

The Walt Disney animators returned to top form with this beautifully crafted and wonderfully expressive cartoon feature, the first major work to come out of the Disney studios in a decade. There are limitations to Disney's naturalistic style, but for every failure of imagination there is a triumph of craftsmanship.

Not first-rank Scorsese, but still impressive.

Ousmane Sembene’s 1977 Senegalese film was attacked for daring to depict life in precolonial Africa as something less than paradisiacal.

Proof positive of just how mediocre 70s mediocrity could be—any quasicompetent Hollywood hack of the 40s could have gone to town with this story, but under Yates's direction it merely lurches along, from one predictable danger to another.

Boorman deserves credit for trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually, it's fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible, and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only out of curiosity.

This 1958 film by Yasujiro Ozu (his first in color) is gentle, spare, and ultimately elusive, in a quietly satisfying way. [07 May 2009, p.28]

An exhilarating update of "Flash Gordon," very much in the same half-jokey, half-earnest mood, but backed by special effects that, for once, really work and are intelligently integrated with the story.

Demme is satirical but never cruel, and sweet but never syrupy: this film marked the emergence of one of the most appealing directorial personalities of the New Hollywood.

As silly as it sounds, but strangely dull.

Visually and structurally it's a mess, but many of the situations are genuinely clever, and there are plenty of memorable gags. The perpetual problem is that Allen isn't nearly the thinker he thinks he is.

Three short films drawn from the Milne tales by the Disney studio, yoked together to make a feature in 1977. Their charm is undeniable, though it mainly resides in the source material: the late 60s, when these were made, were Disney's darkest days for craft and commitment.

Once again, violence (more than 30 on-screen deaths) makes a poor substitute for suspense, while sloppy, rear projection work drains most of the excitement from the climax.

First-rate schlock; overlong and incredibly stupid, but that's part of the formula by now.

The situation—a mother and daughter switch personalities for a day—is rife with possibilities, but since this 1977 comedy is a Disney film, said possibilities are scrupulously squandered...Not so bad as Disney goes, but it's better left to the kiddies and other forgiving types.

Bogdanovich is trying to do an interesting and commendable thing in dramatizing aesthetic passion; his failure is as noble as it is conspicuous.

One of the most innovative, engaging, and insightful films of that turbulent era of American moviemaking.

Reducing one of the most compelling cultural icons of the century to a comic book character, this $22 million project makes a passable kiddie show, and not much else.

Ashby is excellent on atmosphere but fair to middling on character. When the film makes a sudden transition from epic to melodrama, things fall apart.

I wanted to like it more than I did, but it'll do.

Harold Pinter's cold and gnomic script seems partly to blame, as well as interfering producer Sam Spiegel; but if you forget that you're supposed to be seeing something meaningful or important, this is pretty watchable.

Brian De Palma demonstrates the drawbacks of a film-school education by overexploiting every cornball trick of style in the book: slow motion, split screen long takes, and soft focus abound, all to no real point...He's an overachiever—which might not make for good movies, but at least he's seldom dull.

Good campy fun from the combined talents of Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet; Chayefsky was apparently serious about much of this shrill, self-important 1976 satire about television, interlaced with bile about radicals and pushy career women,

Critics seemed to like this less than audiences; personally I had a ball.

Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.

As usual, blood flows freely and gratuitously, but you could do worse.

A brilliantly crafted work and a remarkably moving experience.

There's nothing in the aesthetic and neo-Freudian delirium within hailing distance of Vertigo, and the plot's often more complicated than complex, but Herrmann's overpowering score and De Palma's endlessly circling camera movements do manage to cast a spell.

Almost an hour of self-indulgent psychedelics, it's nearly impossible to watch.

Although the last part of the film becomes repetitive and slightly confused, Eastwood manages the picaresque plot with skill, and his visuals have a high-charged, almost Germanic quality. Wales also possesses a touching emotional vulnerability that marks another significant step away from Eastwood's often-overcriticized macho image. All in all, a very creditable film.

Ambassador Gregory Peck finds that he's adopted the Antichrist (and he's a cute little feller too), in the slickest of the many demonic thrillers that followed in the wake of The Exorcist. Richard Donner directs more for speed than mood, but there are a few good shocks.

The end result is somewhere between Franz Kafka and William Castle, but still worth seeing.

The review format, intercut with demythicizing glimpses behind the scenes, aspires to a cynical Brechtian snappiness, but the drama is too thinly imagined, the meanings too familiar and heavily stated, for this 1976 film to gather any real interest.

A numbing combination of sloppy writing, vulgar art direction, high school acting, and bungled special effects—in short, par for the course for venerable hack Michael Anderson.

Even Neil Simon fans (and they do exist, believe it or not) will probably be bummed out by this stunningly unfunny 1976 parody of detective films.

It's a western, of sorts, and for the first half it's a lot of fun. But then things fall apart, and the film becomes fatally episodic.

Assembled by Gene Kelly, it jerks and sputters along through an overedited collection of songs, dances, comedy routines, and dramatic excerpts, with a strong tendency toward camp. Gene should know better.

Alan Pakula's pedestrian 1976 recap of Watergate is a study in missed opportunities.

Michael Ritchie keeps his dead-end cynicism in check and produces a genuinely funny comedy about a Little League team managed by a lovably drunken Walter Matthau. Sometimes Ritchie goes too far in avoiding the family-movie cliches the subject invites and indulges in some pointless vulgarity, but all in all, it's one of his best films.

Ingmar Bergman at his most painful, pretentious, and empty.

Deep down inside, a very good film.

Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in Saint Jack (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn't catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes's doom-ridden comedy-drama.

Perhaps the most formally ravishing-as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic-film ever directed by Martin Scorsese.

One of Sidney Lumet's best jobs of directing and one of Al Pacino's best performances (as a bisexual bank robber) come together in a populist thriller with lots of New York juice. Its details are stronger than its structure—the film loses some of its energy before the end—but it's an astonishing fusion of suspense and character, powered by superior ensemble acting.

The sinister mise-en-scene is compromised only by a few overripe lines from screenwriter Steve Shagan, and Reynolds reveals himself as an actor of depth and complexity.

Half self-parody, half deadly serious, The Killer Elite is an intriguingly enigmatic movie from one of our most committed and most maligned film artists.

Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The film has genuine wit, an appealing sense of grandeur, and very little of the overt "philosophizing" that marred much of Huston's previous work. His eye for the strong, clear lines of landscape had never been sharper, and Oswald Morris's photography has a fine sun-saturated brilliance.