Beginning with almost no dialogue at all, Le samourai unfolds like a poetic fever dream.

Redford's inability to suggest any irony about himself finally sinks it—it's the only sanctimonious satire you'll ever see.

This turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film (1972), though there's no sign of the serenity and settledness that generally mark the end of a career. Frenzy, instead, continues to question and probe, and there is a streak of sheer anger in it that seems shockingly alive.

It's not done in a way that suggests a fully formed talent—"promising juvenilia" is about the most one can say for it.

A marvelous sense of detail and spectacular effects--good fun all the way.

The dialogue is spare, the scenery the real star. Satisfying and impressive.

Ralph Bakshi gathered retired animators from all over the world to work on his 1972 film, misleadingly billed as the first feature-length cartoon for adults. The results, inevitably, were disappointing; Bakshi just didn't have the money to make it right.

Sharp, entertaining, and convincing--discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that Coppola hasn't achieved since.

George Roy Hill's very professional, very entertaining 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's time-traveling novel, with the pseudoprofundities nicely tucked into place as peppy one-liners and narrative tricks.

A masterpiece, minimalist cinema at its finest and most complex.

Despite the triteness of the theme (Dern is in charge of maintaining the last remnants of the earth's vegetation), the film is enjoyable for its intimacy, seriousness, and intelligent character work, virtues not perpetuated by the subsequent new wave.

Streisand sings a fabulous version of “You’re the Top” behind the credits, and the busy script by Buck Henry, Robert Benton, and David Newman keeps things moving, but the spirit of pastiche keeps this romp from truly rivaling its sources.

It's entertaining and stylish, though maybe not quite as serious as it wants to be.

One of the few Romero films written by someone else (Rudolph J. Ricci), it has a good eye for the kind of unglamorous middle-class life seldom seen in American movies.

A crisp, beautifully paced film, full of Siegel's wonderful coups of cutting and framing.

Straw Dogs has the heat of personal commitment and the authority of deep (if bitter) contemplation. It is also moviemaking of a very high order.

It’s a funny film, and it’s even charming in a shaggy way, but there isn’t a light moment in it—Cassavetes demands that comedy be played as passionately as drama.

A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

Hal Ashby's 1972 cult film may be simpleminded, but it's fairly inoffensive, at least until Ashby lingers over the concentration-camp serial number tattooed on Gordon's arm. Some things are beyond the reach of whimsy.

Assorted ladies, a few quick lines, and one good chase, making for a mediocre entry in the series.

It's more sophisticated than the usual run of Disney product, but it lacks the inventiveness that could endow it with genuine charm.

One of the best of a bad genre, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Sweeping Historical Romance manages some moderately intelligent historical observations amid its lavishly re-created period decor and the puppy-dog pathos of the two central characters (Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman).

Made-for-TV eyewash for disheartened Bears fans to drown their sorrows in.

The existential allegories are pretty blunt—star Dennis Weaver’s character, a symbol for all mankind, is literally named Mann—but the filmmaking is electric, an early testament to Spielberg’s prowess.

Clint Eastwood wisely chose a strong, simple thriller for his first film as a director (1971), and the project is remarkable in its self-effacing dedication to getting the craft right—to laying out the story, building the rhythm, putting the camera in the right place, and establishing small characters with a degree of conviction.

Zappa's most ambitious compositions (performed by the London Philharmonic) share screen time with nostalgic freak humor. [26 Dec 2013, p.30]

Norman Jewison's literal-mindedness actually helps squeeze some of the goo from the material.

It's an intimate psychological story laced with references to Hollywood movies.

Harry Kumel's stylish Belgian vampire film with a cult reputation (1971) is worth seeing for several reasons, not least of which is Delphine Seyrig's elegant lead performance as a lesbian vampire who operates a luxury hotel. The baroque mise en scene is also loads of fun.

This 1971 thriller about a heroin bust is solid, slick filmmaking, full of dirty cops, shrewd operators, and slam-bang action. Friedkin's close study of Raoul Walsh pays off in the justly celebrated chase sequence.

The fusion of European and Afro-Brazilian elements–dialogue, exquisite black-and-white images, and music by Villa-Lobos–is startlingly original and poetical in conveying the hope and despair of the oppressed.

Not bad, but far from a classic.

The funniest thing about this 1971 Ken Russell camp epic is probably the juxtaposition of its first-class production values (a good cast, great set design, marvelous photography) with Russell's no-class sexual fantasies—it's like a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos.

By their own admission, screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne spent only a day or so researching their assigned topic—New York junkies—and this early Jerry Schatzberg feature (1971) shows it, though Al Pacino plays one of the two romantic leads (along with Kitty Winn), and many of Schatzberg's fans have praised the mise en scene.

The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful.

Adapted by Ernest Tidyman from his novel, this suffers from some sluggish dialogue scenes, but the movie comes to vibrant life whenever director Gordon Parks hits the streets of New York.

The crazy color schemes and visual effects once made this a popular head picture, though you'd have to be stoned to tolerate the score, which includes The Candy Man.

The picture has its moments of chilling insight, though essentially it is one more quaint early-70s stab at an American art cinema that never materialized.

Donald Sutherland works small and subtly, balancing Jane Fonda's flashy virtuoso technique.

Still Robert Altman's best moment, this 1971 antiwestern murmurs softly of love, death, and capitalism.

It is a funny picture—not too consistently, and certainly not too coherently, but when it hits, it hits.

A shrewd and powerful mix of commercial ingredients and ideological intent.

Perhaps too simple and damply nostalgic to rank with Mulligan’s best work, but still illuminated by an intense identification with adolescent confusion, beautifully communicated by Mulligan’s subjective camera technique.

Often grim, sometimes nasty, but awfully interesting.

While Richard Sarafian's direction of this action thriller and drive-in favorite isn't especially distinguished, the script by Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante takes full advantage of the subject's existential and mythical undertones without being pretentious, and you certainly get a run for your money, along with a lot of rock music.

Robert Wise brings his Academy Award-winning sobriety and meticulousness to a pulp tale that cries out for the slapdash vigor of a Roger Corman.

The surprising thing about George Lucas's first feature (1971), a dystopian SF parable now digitally enhanced and expanded by five minutes, is how arty it seems compared to his later movies.

This 1970 animated feature is dull, careless, and all too typical of the Disney studio's slapdash output.

The dual point of view is used effectively, though it's less valid as social criticism (where Penn's observations tend toward facile revisionism) than as an index of the uncertainty that characterizes most of Penn's heroes.

One of Robert Altman's most charming exercises in cabaret humor and off-the-cuff modernism.

While no Hawks movie can be considered a total loss, this reductive replay of Rio Bravo and El Dorado is too peevish to qualify as tragic, and only occasionally funny.

More enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense.

This 1970 film is John Cassavetes's most irritating, full of the male braggadocio and bluster that mar even some of his best work. But it's impossible to dismiss or shake off entirely, and the performances—as is usually the case in his work—are potent.

A strong example of the cinema verite style at work, yet few films of the school show up the crisis of its "noninvolvement" policy more tellingly.

The cutting of more than 40 minutes from the original film hurts its initial continuity, but once the action begins, this takes on a magical quality that makes it one of Wilder’s best efforts.

This eroticized vampire tale resulted from the last significant surge of creative energy at Britain's Hammer Films, which thereafter descended into abject self-parody.

Provocative but never challenging.

The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.

One of Francois Truffaut's best middle-period films, albeit one of his darkest and most conservative.

Famous in its day for reuniting real-life former lovers Alain Delon and Romy Schneider on-screen, this forgotten 1968 psychological thriller by Jacques Deray deserves to be rediscovered for its darkly sensual story.

Woody Allen's first film as a director, in which he plays Virgil Starkwell, Public Schmuck Number One. This ragged collection of gags and sketch fragments was reportedly pieced together from an incoherent mass of footage by ace film doctor Ralph Rosenblum.

An attempt to blend the war epic and the caper film that doesn't quite come off.

It's quite funny at times, and the expert direction is never less than vigorous, though in retrospect it seems to have marked the end of Meyer's most appealing period—his comic spirit was more expansive before he learned the word camp.

This 1970 feature was the directorial debut of Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home, Being There), and for a first effort it isn't that bad.

Elliott Gould as a conscience-stricken graduate student in a radical chic exercise that seemed hilariously dated even at the moment it came out (1970).

Sanitized it may well be, but agonizing nonetheless—it's a domestic squabble that somehow touches history.

This wryly mordant film achieved many firsts for the illustrious father of African cinema.

Roger Corman's 1970 retelling of the story of Ma Barker and her three loony sons in Depression-era America is completely out of control, but the smash-and-grab stylistics are exhilarating.

William Friedkin's direction of this 1970 film adaptation (made the year before The French Connection) doesn't do much more than underline the flaws in the material: every scene is shaped to build to the same forced hysteria.

Patton's personality--conveyed with pointed theatrical flair by George C. Scott--is registered in rich tones of grandeur and megalomania, genius and petty sadism.

A curdled, unfunny satire made more painful by McGrath’s inappropriately jubilant style.

Leonard Kastle, a composer who turned filmmaker for this single feature, brings a spare dignity and genuine depth of characterization to his exploitation subject—the series of murders committed by Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck in the late 40s.

A somewhat adolescent if stylish antiauthoritarian romp about an irreverent U.S. medical unit during the Korean war

George Lazenby has so much reserve as James Bond that he makes Sean Connery seem almost frenetic by comparison. Director Peter Hunt manages to inject some life into this 1969 exercise with a wonderful ski chase, but otherwise the film is a bore.

Few directors are capable of this kind of structural experimentation so late in their careers, and Hitchcock deserves much credit for his audacity.

Gene Kelly directed, a long way from Terpsichore apparently, though not, alas, from the Thanksgiving turkey.

The material is simple and irresistible, and Sydney Pollack stages it well (though without transcending the essential superficiality of his talent).

Z doesn't communicate anything—except for the doubtful propositions that pacifists are more threatening to right-wingers than communists and that fascist terrorism and homosexuality go hand in hand.

George Roy Hill's 1969 film moves with steady, stupid grace from oozy sentimentality to nihilistic violence.

Director Alan J. Pakula’s first effort is so technically imprecise and understated that it has a kind of wistful charm—as if Wendell Burton, who plays the superstraight, mild-mannered preppie to Liza Minnelli’s sad, quizzical, freaked-out emotional loser, had directed and written it himself.

The results are pretty obnoxious and only intermittently funny, but certainly characteristic.

Medium Cool is also recognized as a pointed early critique of the news media, noting the amoral detachment of TV journalists and the collusion between their corporate bosses and the government to shape a political narrative. But for people who love Chicago, the film may be most valuable as a cultural document, recording a much younger city in the midst of a turbulent summer.

Like its main character, the movie hits the road with no final destination in mind, and the manic inventiveness that sustains the early passages becomes strained and weird by the end.

The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir - particularly in its narcissism and fatalism - of how the hippie movement thought of itself. [Review of re-release]

Apart from some psychedelic flashback sequences, this 1967 spaghetti western is highly familiar stuff, unlikely to interest anyone beyond fans of the genre.

The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling.

The director, Henry Hathaway, is another old veteran, and the cinematographer is the great Lucien Ballard, but somehow it comes off like a TV celebrity roast.

The acting, showy and instinctual, is most of the movie; the visual style is too forced and chicly distended to let the drama acquire much natural life of its own. It's a film that expresses a great deal of disgust toward homosexuals, while placing a sympathetic homosexual relationship at its core.

Beautifully edited by Charlotte Zwerin, this film is required viewing for anyone concerned with documentary.

Amiable comedy western, with James Garner expanding on his Maverick image as a boom-town sheriff who’d rather use his cunning than his guns.

The late 300-pound transvestite Divine, John Waters’s most enduring muse, makes his/her first star entrance in this 1969 feature—the first Waters movie to play outside Baltimore—driving a 1959 Eldorado to the strains of “The Girl Can’t Help It.”

What this autopopathism means in terms of American culture is a subject I neither understand nor wish to.

Routine war adventure, imitating the callousness of Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen but without Aldrich's nihilist zeal. Still, you have to admire any film that casts Clint Eastwood opposite Richard Burton; the real violence is in the clash of acting styles.

As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it’s a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism.

Carol Reed's careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed descended to in the last years of his career.

This is one of the most powerful and influential American films of the 60s.

This 1968 Beatles musical gets somewhat plot heavy near the end, but it's a marvel of innocence and free association, blending several animation techniques in a loose narrative full of gentle bad puns and flowing visual segues.

Russ Meyer's 1968 skin-flick is a hilarious, stylistically adroit compendium of middle-American preoccupations: breasts, fishing, anticommunism.