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.