The movie’s worth checking out for its collision of musical sensibilities, featuring the first screen performance by the Runaways’ Cherie Currie and an original score by disco kingpin Giorgio Moroder.

Demented disquisitions on Catholic theology vie for supremacy with camp humor and horror-movie conventions, leading to a conclusion that somehow manages to conflate The Wild Angels and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

This is arguably John Huston's best literary adaptation, and conceivably his very best film.

Miller's work has been compared to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, but where the Leone films are about amorality, the Mad Max movies are purely and simply amoral—some of the most determinedly formalist filmmaking this side of Michael Snow.

What's left is the framework for a graphic, brutal, sickening film (1980), without the violent effects that might have made sense (however illegitimate) out of the conception. Like The Exorcist, it alternates five minutes of shock with ten minutes of dull exposition, plenty of time to watch Al Pacino wrestle with his miserably conceived character.

The integrity of his performance overcomes the formlessness of the narration, turning this loose study into something solid and affecting.

Gary Nelson's direction is very bad, the writing is weak, and the acting campy at best—but Peter Ellenshaw's production design strikes the right balance of vastness and seductive detail.

Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease. This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry) - a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros's cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director.

The director, Hal Ashby, has affected a restrained, understated style to match the subtlety and precision of Sellers's performance. No one seems to know what to do with the allegorical undertone of Jerzy Kosinski's script, but as a whole this 1979 film maintains a fine level of wit, sophistication, and insight.

Graham Greene's impeccably plotted spy story serves Preminger's personal aims with a minimum of modification, as the film develops themes of loneliness, debilitation, and obsessive security—all centered on the tragic survival of moral feeling in a world drained by reason.

The verbal and conceptual gags, however, belong wholly to Martin's own brand of goofiness, and some of them are pretty funny.

This 1979 movie adaptation of the cult TV series is blandness raised to an epic scale. Robert Wise's bloodless direction drains all the air from the Enterprise.

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

Director Ronald Neame brings his impersonal British craftsmanship to this 1979 feature, so it isn't a complete bust, but it's a long way from the apocalyptic satisfactions of his Poseidon Adventure.

Imamura’s detached, almost scientific style forestalls any pat sympathy for the central character—he is not a sentimental “victim of society,” but the embodiment of its darkest Darwinian forces.

The film represents a studied, sophisticated approach to instinctual emotions: it's carefully, calculatingly naive, and amazingly it works.

The acting is too eccentric and the narrative drive too weak to satisfy fans of the genre, but Herzog's admirers will find much in the film's animistic landscapes and clusters of visionary imagery.

It lacks a certain grace in execution, but this SF/romantic comedy-thriller, directed by Nicholas Meyer from his own novel, is clever and well calculated.

[An] amiable, rambunctious New World production, aimed ostensibly at the teen trade but more obliquely and effectively at the new wave cult...It's more cleverly cut than shot—which means that it moves quickly and energetically even as the concepts and characters disintegrate.

Sluggish, repetitive, and strangely timorous, with little of the zap and imagination of the Pythons' television work.

The action and sentiments are familiar to the point of cliche, and there isn't much life in Gillian Armstrong's academic direction—she keeps pushing ideas over events, and meanings over emotions. But Judy Davis, as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman, grants the film much charm and passion.

What gives it the Cronenberg feel, in spite of the complete absence of his standard themes, is his manner of filming the dragsters: they become, like the horrible growths that usually dominate his movies, the physical projection of the characters' hostile energies, weapons they use to act out the psychological conflicts that torture them off the track.

The film was praised upon release for its hard-nosed look at big money in politics, though these days it seems positively dainty.

A tedious, lamebrained horror movie, which begins with the promising premise of a haunted house in the suburbs (poltergeists in the barbecue pit?) and quickly degenerates into a display of pretentious camera angles by director Stuart Rosenberg.

Peter Yates, previously typed as an action director (Bullitt, The Deep), lends the film a fine, unexpected limpidity, and the principals are mostly excellent.

More impressive than entertaining.

The film is generous and often gentle. With Bill Murray, very likable as a head counselor who gruffly plays Wallace Beery to an updated, angst-ridden Jackie Cooper (Chris Makepeace).