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.