The Lonely Guy is the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen, and speculating about whether their manufacturers paid fees to have them worked into the movie.

The middle 100 minutes of the movie are charming and moving and surprisingly interesting.

This movie should have been struck by a lightning bolt.

The basic idea of Uncommon Valor is so interesting that it's all they can do to make a routine formula movie out of it. But they do.

To Be or Not To "Be works as well as a story as any Brooks film since "Young Frankenstein," and darned if there isn't a little sentiment involved as the impresario and his wife, after years of marriage, surprise each other by actually falling in love.

D. C. Cab is not an entirely bad movie -- it has its moments -- but if it had used more actual taxi-riding incidents and more recognizable driver types, it could have been a little masterpiece.

The movie is directed with efficiency by Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) who knows that pacing is indispensable to a procedural.

That could have been a good movie, but predictable. Mike Nichols' Silkwood is not predictable.... We realize this is a lot more movie than perhaps we were expecting.

Scarface is one of those special movies, like "The Godfather," that is willing to take a flawed, evil man and allow him to be human.

Christine is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But I enjoyed it anyway. The movies have a love affair with cars, and at some dumb elemental level we enjoy seeing chases and crashes. In fact, under the right circumstances there is nothing quite so exhilarating as seeing a car crushed, and one of the best scenes in Christine is the one where the car forces itself into an alley that's too narrow for it.

Sudden Impact is a Dirty Harry movie with only the good parts left in. All the slow stuff, such as character, motivation, atmosphere and plot, has been pared to exactly the minimum necessary to hold together the violence.

This is a wonderful film. There isn't a thing that I would change.

It is pitch-perfect, telling the story through the enthusiastic and single-minded vision of its hero Ralphie, and finding in young Peter Billingsley a sly combination of innocence and calculation.

It's the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.

I think this is an important movie. Devastating, violent, hopeless, and important, because it holds a mirror up to a part of the world we live in, and helps us see it more clearly. In particular, it examines the connection between fame and obscurity, between those who have a moment of praise and notoriety, and those who see themselves condemned to stand always at the edge of the spotlight.

Alexander's performance makes the film possible to watch without unbearable heartbreak, because she is brave and decent in the face of the horror. And the last scene, in which she expresses such small optimism as is still possible, is one of the most powerful movie scenes I've ever seen.

The Dead Zone does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: It makes us forget it is supernatural.

Two people finally tell each other the truth. This is, of course, an astonishing breakthrough in movies about teenagers, and All the Right Moves deserves it.

Kaufman's love for the Yeager character pays off in the magical closing sequence of the film, when the "best pilot in the world" eyeballs anew Air Force jet and says, "I have a feeling this little old plane right here might be able to beat that Russian record."

Under Fire surrounds these performances with a vivid sense of place and becomes, somewhat surprisingly, one of the year's best films.

I thought Rumble Fish was offbeat, daring, and utterly original.

What makes Never Say Never Again more fun than most of the Bonds is more complex than that. For one thing, there's more of a human element in the movie, and it comes from Klaus Maria Brandauer, as Largo. Brandauer is a wonderful actor, and he chooses not to play the villain as a cliché. Instead, he brings a certain poignancy and charm to Largo, and since Connery always has been a particularly human James Bond, the emotional stakes are more convincing this time.

This is a good idea for a movie. Unfortunately, in Brainstorm it remains basically an idea. The characters take such a secondary importance to the gadget that we never feel much for them.

The Big Chill is a splendid technical exercise. It has all the right moves. It knows all the right words. Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts and ambitions. But there's no payoff and it doesn't lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it's the movie's message.

Eddie and the Cruisers is all buildup and no payoff.

Educating Rita, which might have been a charming human comedy, disintegrated into a forced march through a formula relationship.

It's awkward, not because of the subject matter, but because of the contrasting acting styles. Here are two men trying to communicate in a touchy area and they behave as if they're from different planets.

They had a great idea here. It's too bad they didn't follow it through on a human level, instead of making it feel made up and artificial and twice-removed, from the everyday experience it pretends to be about.

Easy Money is an off-balance and disjointed movie, but that's sort of okay, since it's about an off-balance and disjointed kinda guy. The credits call him Monty Capuletti, but he is clearly Rodney Dangerfield, gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we are likely to get to W.C. Fields in this lifetime.

The very best thing about the movie is its dialogue. Paul Brickman, who wrote and directed, has an ear so good that he knows what to leave out.

The Star Chamber works brilliantly until it locks into a plot. Then it stops dancing and starts marching.

The movie's not without charm. There's a fresh, sweet relationship between one of the girls (Phoebe Cates) and her boyfriend, in which she is permitted to have the normal fears, doubts and reservations of anyone her age. I'm not sure how that plot got into this smarmy-minded movie, but it was like a breath of fresh air.

Class is a prep-school retread of "The Graduate" that knows some of its scenes are funny and some are serious, but never figures out quite how they should go together. The result is an uncomfortable, inconsistent movie that doesn't really pay off -- a movie in which everything points to two absolutely key scenes that are, inexplicably, the two most awkward scenes in the film.

Staying Alive is a big disappointment.

Stroker Ace is another in a series of essentially identical movies he has made with director Hal Needham, and although it's allegedly based on a novel, it's really based on their previous box-office hits like Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run.

The beauty of Twilight Zone -- The Movie is the same as the secret of the TV series: It takes ordinary people in ordinary situations and then (can you hear Rod Serling?) zaps them with "next stop -- the Twilight Zone!"

There's a funny line or two, a fetching performance by Stacey Nelkin as a young wench, some nonsense about a buried treasure, and then Yellowbeard is soon over and soon forgotten.

Superman III is the kind of movie I feared the original "Superman" would be. It's a cinematic comic book, shallow, silly, filled with stunts and action, without much human interest.

But what's most visible in the movie is the engaging acting. Murphy and Aykroyd are perfect foils for each other.

I guess it's a tribute to The Man With Two Brains that I found myself laughing a fair amount of the time, despite my feelings about Martin.

There's not a scene here where Badham doesn't seem to know what he's doing, weaving a complex web of computerese, personalities and puzzles; the movie absorbs us on emotional and intellectual levels at the same time. And the ending, a moment of blinding and yet utterly elementary insight, is wonderful.

It's too heavy on plot and too willing to cheat about its plot to be really successful, but it does have its moments, and it's better than your average, run-of-the-mill slasher movie.

'Return of the Jedi' is fun, magnificent fun. The movie is a complete entertainment, a feast for the eyes and a delight for the fancy. It's a little amazing how Lucas and his associates keep topping themselves.

Kaprisky, as the young French student, is an unknown in a role too large and complex for her, and there are times when she seems lost in a scene, looking to Gere for guidance. The result is a stylistic exercise without any genuine human concerns we can identify with - and yet, an exercise that does have a command of its style, is good-looking, fun to watch, and develops a certain morbid humor.

There is very little comic invention in the idea for Doctor Detroit (the screenplay is Identikit sitcom), but there's a lot of invention in Aykroyd's performance.

This movie is a little treasure, a funny, sexy, appealing story of a Valley Girl's heartbreaking decision: Should she stick with her boring jock boyfriend, or take a chance on a punk from Hollywood?

The Hunger is an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene.

In its descriptions of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance.v

Koyaanisqatsi is an impressive visual and listening experience, that Reggio and Glass have made wonderful pictures and sounds, and that this film is a curious throwback to the 1960s, when it would have been a short subject to be viewed through a marijuana haze. Far out.

If Flashdance had spent just a little more effort getting to know the heroine of its story, and a little less time trying to rip off "Saturday Night Fever," it might have been a much better film.

This is an action movie. It makes no apology for that. But it's high-style action.

Screwballs opens outside the local hot dog stand, where a giant inflatable hot dog is swinging back and forth like a pendulum, gently nudging the backsides of two teenage girls. From such beginnings I suppose we should not anticipate a masterpiece, but the opening shot is the high point of this dumb movie.

A movie that seems consumed with a desire to push us too far. This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we're being One-Upped if we allow ourselves to be offended.

Coppola's teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling.

The performances are often good, including Reno's; he has an interesting, poker-faced way of underplaying scenes that keeps him from being a stereotyped kid.

Following the tradition governing such movies, the story eventually comes to a moral decision at which a bad boy has to decide whether to become a good man -- and that's too bad, because until the movie turns predictable, it is very, very good. The acting, the direction and the sense of place in Bad Boys is so strong that the movie deserves more than an obligatory right scene for its conclusion.

The lockstep mentalities who made this movie tell their story entirely from a boring male point of view, supply us with male wimps and studs who are equally uninteresting, and view women only as wet T-shirt finalists. What a letdown for horny movie critics.

An unconvincing, harmless action movie that at its best moments is a pale echo of "Raiders."

This movie indicates that Charles Bronson just doesn't care any more, and is just going through the motions for the money. I admired his strong, simple talent once. What is he doing in a garbage disposal like this?

When interesting people have little to say, we watch the body language, listen to the notes in their voices. Rarely does a movie elaborate less and explain more than Tender Mercies.

What is important about this film is not that it serves as a history lesson (although it does) but that, at a time when the threat of nuclear holocaust hangs ominously in the air, it reminds us that we are, after all, human, and thus capable of the most extraordinary and wonderful achievements, simply through the use of our imagination, our will, and our sense of right.

The King of Comedy is not, you may already have guessed, a fun movie. It is also not a bad movie. It is frustrating to watch, unpleasant to remember, and, in its own way, quite effective.

Here is a small film to treasure, a loving, funny, understated portrait of a small Scottish town and its encounter with a giant oil company.

The characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and the ending is bleak enough that when the screen fades to black it's a relief.. Videodrome, whatever its qualities, has got to be one of the least entertaining films of all time.

The Year of Living Dangerously is a wonderfully complex film about personalities more than events, and we really share the feeling of living in that place, at that time.

Coup de Torchon left me cold, unmoved and uninvolved. All I could find to admire was the craftsmanship.

This movie gets you coming and going.

Jessica Lange plays Frances Farmer in a performance that is so driven, that contains so many different facets of a complex personality, that we feel she has an intuitive understanding of this tragic woman.

The screenplay by David Mamet is a wonder of good dialogue, strongly seen characters and a structure that pays off in the big courtroom scene - as the genre requires.

A movie filled with moments in which we recognize not movie stars, but ourselves.

This is a sweet, whimsical, low-key movie, a movie that makes you feel good without pressing you too hard.

The first five or 10 minutes of Airplane II -- The Sequel are genuinely funny -- so funny I thought maybe this movie was going to work. That turned out to be a premature hope. The new inspirations quickly run out, and Airplane II turns into a retread, plundering the same situations and characters that made the original Airplane so funny.

What makes the movie special is how it's made. Nolte and Murphy are good, and their dialogue is good, too - quirky and funny.

Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie.

What they've done here is to recapture not only the look and the storylines of old horror comics, but also the peculiar feeling of poetic justice that permeated their pages. In an EC horror story, unspeakable things happened to people - but, for the most part, they deserved them.

It's corny in places, and kind of dumb, and its subplot about the romance between the boy and the girl seems plundered from some long-shelved Roddy McDowell script. But The Man from Snowy River has good qualities, too, including some great aerial photography of thundering herds of horses, and the invigorating grandeur of the Australian landscape.

Until the last twenty or thirty minutes, however, First Blood is a very good movie, well-paced, and well-acted not only by Stallone (who invests an unlikely character with great authority) but also by Crenna and Brian Dennehy, as the police chief.

The one saving grace in Halloween III is Stacey Nelkin, who plays the heroine. She has one of those rich voices that makes you wish she had more to say and in a better role. But watch her, too, in the reaction shots: When she's not talking, she's listening.

I could not for a moment believe that this movie was intended as a plausible portrait of how casinos work, how gamblers work, and especially of how casino managers work. To enjoy this movie, you need more than a willing suspension of disbelief. You need a faith in disbelief.

It all comes down to the difference between a "concert film" and a documentary. Let’s Spend The Night Together is essentially a concert film recording an "ideal" Rolling Stones concert, put together out of footage shot at several outdoor and indoor Stones concerts. If that's what you want, enjoy this movie. I wanted more.

There are some good performances here, by Jack Magner and Olson in particular, and some good technical credits, especially Sam O'Steen's editing. It's just that this whole Amityville saga is such absolute horse manure.

It is violent, funny, scary, contains boldly outlined characters, and gets us involved. It also has a lot of style.

Vulgarity is a very tricky thing to handle in a comedy; tone is everything, and the makers of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" have an absolute gift for taking potentially funny situations and turning them into general embarrassment. They're tone-deaf.

Those tensions and conflicts produced, I believe, the right film for this material. I don't require that its makers had a good time. I'm reminded of my favorite statement by Francois Truffaut: "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between."

The movie is so accurately acted, especially by Jim Metzler as Mason and Matt Dillon as Tex, that we care more about the characters than about the plot. We can see them learning and growing, and when they have a heart-to-heart talk about going all the way, we hear authentic teenagers speaking, not kids who seem to have been raised at Beverly Hills cocktail parties.

An Officer and a Gentleman is the best movie about love that I've seen in a long time.

The movie version of Garp, however, left me entertained but unmoved, and perhaps the movie's basic failing is that it did not inspire me to walk out on it. Something has to be wrong with a film that can take material as intractable as Garp and make it palatable.

If they ever give Dolly her freedom and stop packaging her so antiseptically, she could be terrific. But Dolly and Burt and Whorehouse never get beyond the concept stage in this movie.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is so low-key, so sweet and offhand and slight, there are times when it hardly even seems happy to be a movie.

The Secret of Nimh is an artistic success. It looks good, moves well, and delights our eyes. It is not quite such a success on the emotional level, however, because it has so many characters and involves them in so many different problems that there's nobody for the kids in the audience to strongly identify with. I guess you could say that the Disney tradition lives, but that the Disney magic still remains elusive.

Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun.

It looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story.

The Thing is basically just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen. There's nothing wrong with that; I like being scared and I was scared by many scenes in The Thing. But it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary.

I enjoyed the energy that was visible on the screen, and the sumptuousness of the production numbers, and the good humor of several of the performances.

Clint Eastwood's Firefox is a slick, muscular thriller that combines espionage with science fiction. The movie works like a well-crafted machine, and it's about a well-crafted machine.

Author! Author! is never even able to establish a consistent attitude toward its characters. It veers uneasily between slapstick and pathos, between heart-rending family conferences and a ridiculous final scene.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is a reminder of what movies are for. Most movies are not for any one thing, of course. Some are to make us think, some to make us feel, some to take us away from our problems, some to help us examine them. What is enchanting about "E.T." is that, in some measure, it does all of those things. [2002 re-release]

This movie just recycles "Grease," without the stars, without the energy, without the freshness and without the grease.