Alternately superficial and profound, the film also enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles's principal collaborator after the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter, and briefer appearances by many other Welles cohorts. Michel Legrand supplied the wonderful score.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

Basically, the film is a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.

You can tell from the credit sequence—when Paul Newman takes four minutes to execute a simple expository gag—that this Stuart Rosenberg sequel to Harper is likely to be an interminable drag. And the opener is really the high point of an alleged thriller that wastes the talents of Newman, Joanne Woodward, Murray Hamilton, and Tony Franciosa, and telegraphs all its narrative twists with the subtlety of a Chicago building inspector explaining how to avoid a violation.

Some of the illustrious cast members were on their way up (John Travolta), but most of them were on their way down (Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn).

Uneven but generally funny.

Lifeless, uninspired, and crammed with enough hints of intellectual consistency to give the socially conscious critical establishment shivers of excitement.

Steven Spielberg's mechanical thriller is guaranteed to make you scream on schedule (John Williams's score even has the audience reactions programmed into the melodies), particularly if your tolerance for weak motivation and other minor inconsistencies is high.

A technical masterpiece replete with self-consciously allegorical overtones rising to a politically simpleminded din. A rare and puzzling movie: beautiful and cruel, passionate but strangely shallow.

A slick reprise of all the elements that clicked in the original with none of the seedy originality that made it work.

Redeemed a bit by Adrien Joyce’s Preston Sturges-inspired screenplay, Nichols’s film is nonetheless as unfunny as Carnal Knowledge, and just as vicious.

This 1975 satire about a “Young American Miss” beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves.

A painfully misconceived reduction and simplification by writer Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood in the late 30s.

Fine work carved from minimal materials.

Silly, sophomoric, and slapped together, but would you want it any other way?

This is really less fun than the more baroque Meyer outings, such as Up!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens—perhaps because too much routine violence and nastiness keeps getting in the way.

This 1975 film's inventiveness begins to flag about halfway through, but by then it's a relief.

One of Penn's best features; his direction of actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout.

Slick and often funny, but the smugness of the satire and the stunted emotions are finally wearying.

The cast—with the happy exception of the always delightful Paula Prentiss—is uniformly dreary; and by the time the mystery begins to take shape, it's hardly possible to care.

Roger Moore is a pastry chef's idea of James Bond; but Christopher Lee as the archetype of the evil antagonist makes this 007 outing just about bearable.

Canadian-made unpleasantness (1975) about a psychopath stalking a college town. Bob Clark's direction is enthusiastic but sloppy-a presaging of his later Porky's. [02 Dec 2010, p.52]

More about the myth of Karloff than the monster, this Mel Brooks pastiche is probably his best early film: within limits, it has unity, pace, and even a dramatic interest of sorts.

Three hours and 20 minutes of Al Pacino suffering openly, Robert Duvall suffering silently, Diane Keaton suffering noisily, and (every so often) Robert De Niro suffering good-naturedly is almost too much, but Francis Ford Coppola pulls it off in grand style.

Not always successful, but packed with energy and a lively Oscar-winning performance by Burstyn.

Dustin Hoffman is superb as Lenny Bruce, but he gives an actor's performance where a less declamatory, more comedic delivery would have worked better.

Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen.

This was one of De Palma's early efforts, and its excesses can be chalked up to youthful enthusiasm—the ideas seem appealingly audacious even when they misfire, which is more often than not.

The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.

This 1956 feature, a casual yet meticulously detailed reconstruction of Japan’s routinized white-collar milieu, was Yasujiro Ozu’s first film after the exquisite Tokyo Story, as well as one of his longest works.

So-so ecological SF thriller from 1974 about superintelligent ants.

You may find much of this, despite the apparent sincerity, too cutesy and self-satisfied for its own good.

Robin Hardy's 1973 cult horror film passed through several distributors, several versions, and several bankruptcies, picking up a powerful reputation along the way.

Certainly one of the director's most personal and obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its rather ghoulish lyricism.

As in all Altman films, winning is losing; and the more Altman reveals, in his oblique, seemingly casual yet brilliantly controlled way, the more we realize that to love characters the way Altman loves his, you have to see them turned completely inside out.

A bit abstract, though gorgeously shot (by John Alonzo) and cleverly plotted (by Robert Towne), Polanski's film suggests that the rules of the game are written in some strange, untranslatable language, and that everyone's an alien and, ultimately, a victim.

As with Pakula's earlier suspenser, Klute, the eerie ambience of menace is coolly and smoothly handled, but for my taste the suspenseful set pieces go on much too long, and the message—that right-wing conspiracy is built into the American political and corporate structure—is overstated.

The film never moves far from the conventions of Italian sex farces—that is, it’s a comedy of embarrassment and frustration—but the flip Marxism adds a little flavor.

Surly, incoherent, and provocatively mysterious.

More mannered than stylish, more would-be tragic than comic, the film is all surface and comes up fatally short on warmth, humor, and insight.

Forgettable nostalgia trip from 1974, shot in 16-millimeter by the enterprising Stephen Verona and Martin Davidson. Somehow, this little exploitationer ended up launching the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler, Perry King, and Susan Blakely.

Jonathan Demme's debut film is campy, choppy, and generally immature, though his bonding themes are fitfully discernible amid the cartoonish action.

Gene Hackman excels in Francis Ford Coppola's tasteful, incisive 1974 study of the awakening of conscience in an electronic surveillance technician.

Gordon Hessler directed this 1974 British feature, whose main raison d'etre is some first-rate “Dynamation” special effects from Ray Harryhausen, including a ship's figurehead that springs to life and Sinbad crossing swords with a six-armed statue.

Carpenter creates a vision of the technological future that is both disillusioned and oddly affirmative in its insistence on the unscientific survival of emotional frailty.

A cool, at times unbearably objective look at the fragile relationship between two rather ordinary young people in Depression America (Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall), who happen to rob banks and get shot at a lot.

One of the funniest awful movies ever made.

Well-intentioned tripe, directed with made-for-TV solemnity by John Korty.

The Chicago locations are well used by veteran director George Roy Hill, and the wonderful 30s movie style (lots of horizontal and vertical wipes, flipping screens, irises in and out) enhances the sense of good, harmless, nostalgic fun.

An ungainly collection of one-liners and misdirected sight gags that hardly qualifies as a movie. But as a stand-up routine it's a scream.

No sense of complicity between filmmaker and spectator, no depth, no ambiguity, no production value spared, plenty of running time and pomposity, and a desperate sense of trying to do everything and please everybody.

A tough-talking, sparely directed effort by Hal Ashby, with an immaculate performance by Jack Nicholson as the arrogant and salty (but feeling) sailor who tries to stay in charge of the odyssey, and almost doesn't.

A frightening and consistently inventive horror story... It's busy on the surface and empty in the center, but somehow it works.

A virtuoso performance by Al Pacino and some expert location work by Sidney Lumet add up to a tour de force genre piece. (Review of Original Release)

The film has a flat quality that cannot entirely be overcome by the sensational animation and the obvious good intentions of its creators.

On the whole, enjoyable nonsense.

What sinks this one is the utter lack of the childhood insight and sympathy that really give the Disney films their staying power.

A stiff in spite of an interesting cast.

A film about marriage that works reasonably well as a star vehicle for Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, but fails resoundingly as the caustic social comment director Sydney Pollack and writer Arthur Laurents obviously intended.

This 1973 feature is one of the finest examples of action montage from its period, a dynamite piece of work.

Assisted by Gordon Willis's cinematography and John Houseman's performance as the demanding Professor Kingsfield, director James Bridges manages to do a fair job with the semihokey material.

A film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn. Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality.

Martin Scorsese's intrusive insistence on his abstract, metaphysical theme—the possibility of modern sainthood—marks this 1973 film, his first to attract critical notice, as still somewhat immature, yet the acting and editing have such an original, tumultuous force that the picture is completely gripping.

A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film.

It’s a historical marker in a way that few other films are — not only the nail in the coffin of the French New Wave and one of the strongest statements about the aftermath of the failed French revolution of May 1968, but also a definitive expression of the closing in of Western culture after the end of the era generally known as the 60s.

A genuinely compelling film about athletics—and there haven't been many—based on a story by Mark Harris and directed by John Hancock. The material is trite, but Hancock's slow-motion treatment of the experience of athletic performance is adroit and graceful.

Full of delirious color symbolism and macho cruelties, but not without its humor as well. The story is pure dime-store allegory, but the director/star knows his western cliches and uses them like a master.

Ripping entertainment overall, with just enough meat for amateur sociologists.

The music quickly becomes monotonous, and the operatic dialogue is silly right from the start—but Carl Anderson as Judas and Joshua Mostel as an unbelievably campy King Herod almost make this 1973 film worth sitting through.

A brilliant work of popular art, it redefined nostalgia as a marketable commodity and established a new narrative style, with locale replacing plot, that has since been imitated to the point of ineffectiveness.

Terrific escapist entertainment...It's a polished and exciting thriller, mercifully unburdened with heavy political/philosophical digressions.

Jack Starrett's 1973 entry in the violent inner-city drug-bust genre is talkier and more subdued than the usual fare, with a surer technical polish.

Guy Hamilton's direction lacks enthusiasm and pace, while even the art direction—long the Bond films' real secret weapon—seems to have fallen to a shrunken budget. Not much fun.

The most visually inventive film of the 60s is also one of the funniest.

Uneven and slightly muddled futuristic horror story—not really science fiction, more like an antipollution PSA gone berserk.

Ryan O'Neal is a con man and Tatum O'Neal is the foundling who may or may not be his daughter. Though their relationship is conventionally drawn, it has a heart that Bogdanovich hasn't been able to recapture.

Jack Hill directs for maximal suspense, violence, and voyeuristic appeal (which Grier certainly embodies).

Gory, imaginative, wildly melodramatic—good fun.

At the time, its way of wringing thrills from genre conventions at the same time it mocked them seemed imaginative and original; but in the light of Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), and The Fury (1978), it seems more like a dead end—the mark of a superficial stylist unable to take anything seriously, including his own work.

The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings—the blunt ideas at its core—don't become apparent before several viewings.

It preserves some of the form and language of White's original but fattens and sweetens his lean and pungent prose with songs by Richard and Robert Sherman (Mary Poppins).

The surface plausibility is probably the contribution of Marlon Brando, whose performance has strength and detail enough to counterbalance Bertolucci's taste for pure psychological essence.

A failure of resolution mars it, but it is diverting enough for the first couple of reels to make it worth seeing.

Newman does a remarkable John Huston impression, and screenwriter John Milius demonstrates once again that he went to film school.

Traffic is a masterpiece in its own right—not only for the sharp picture of the frenetic and gimmick-crazy civilization that worships cars, but also for many remarkable formal qualities: an extraordinary use of sound (always one of Tati’s strong points), a complex interplay of chance and control in the observations of everyday behavior, and, in some spots, a development of the use of multiple focal points to articulate some of the funniest gags.

Frightening, funny, profound, and mysterious.

Clearly, it’s an affront to Holiday’s art, but just as clearly, it’s a good piece of low entertainment.

Ruthless, poundingly violent horror film, directed by Wes Craven. It isn't artistically adroit, but if success in this genre is counted by squirms, it's a success.

Moving without being mawkish, charming without being coy.

Roundly condemned as a glorification of drug dealing, it's actually an acrid film noir on a classic theme—the hood who must make one last score before he quits the business.

John Huston's 1972 restatement of his theme of perpetual loss is intelligently understated, though the recessive camera compositions put an unnecessary distance between the viewer and the characters.

John Boorman's 1972 film of the James Dickey novel has a beautiful visual style that balances the film's machismo message.