It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.

What the film gains at Bakshi’s hand is a very clever bag of animator’s tricks, most of which serve to make Tolkien’s characters palpable after all those years on paper.

Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to “Psycho.”

The movie has great moments and a lot of life, sensational special effects and costumes, and Ross, Jackson, and Russell. Why doesn't it involve us as deeply as The Wizard of Oz? Maybe because it hedges its bets by wanting to be sophisticated and universal, childlike and knowing, appealing to both a mass audience and to media insiders. The Wizard of Oz went flat-out for the heart of its story; there are times whenThe Wiz has just a touch too much calculation.

Parker succeeds in making the prison into a full, real, rounded world, a microcosm of human behavior; I was reminded of e.e. cummings' novel The Enormous Room. The movie's art direction is especially good at recreating that world, as in a scene where Hayes and his friends try to escape down an old cistern. And there are visions into the inferno, as in a scene in the madhouse where the inmates circle forever around a stone pillar. The movie creates spellbinding terror, all right; my only objection is that it's so eager to have us sympathize with Billy Hayes.

Above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. [7 Dec. 1997]

Interiors becomes serious by intently observing complex adults as they fend and cope, blame and justify. Because it illuminates some of the ways we all act, it is serious but not depressing; when it's over, we may even find ourselves quietly cheered that Allen has seen so clearly how things can be.

Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.

A well-assembled chase movie--a thriller, with a few existential notes left over from Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers the novel the movie's based on.

The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological. It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made "The Producers."

All of this could have been nice and juicy if Walter Hill had done a few more things with his screenplay, such as made the characters into people.

Somehow manages to combine the sweetness and innocence of the original with a satirical bite all its own.

No revival, however joyously promoted, can conceal the fact that this is just an average musical, pleasant and upbeat and plastic.

The movie gets the feel right, and there's real energy in the concert scenes, especially the tricky debut of Buddy Holly and the Crickets as the first white act in Harlem's famous Apollo Theater.

El sleazo profoundo trasho zilch.

The music probably sounds fine on a CD. Certainly it is well-rehearsed. But the overall sense of the film is of good riddance to a bad time.

Situations aren't explored, characters aren't developed, timing is ignored, but every 30 seconds there's a would-be laugh. Because all we're supposed to do is laugh, the movie is deadening.

Louis Malle's Pretty Baby is a pleasant surprise: After all the controversy and scandal surrounding its production, it turns out to be a good-hearted, good-looking, quietly elegiac movie.

The Fury is a stylish entertainment, fast-paced, and acted with great energy.

Mazursky's films have considered the grave and funny business of sex before (most memorably in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Blume in Love). But he's never before been this successful at really dealing with the complexities and following them through.

It confronts the relationship between Fonda and Voight with unusual frankness -- and with emotional tenderness and subtlety that is, if anything, even harder to portray.

It is an angry, radical movie about the vise that traps workers between big industry and big labor. It's also an enormously entertaining movie; it earns its comparison with On the Waterfront. And it's an extraordinary directing debut for Paul Schrader, whose credits include Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder.

[Furie) retains the ability to make a picture move, grow on us and involve us. That’s what happens during The Boys in Company C.

One of the problems with Mel Brooks's High Anxiety is that it picks a tricky target: It's a spoof of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitchcock's films are often funny themselves. And satire works best when its target is self-important.

Gena Rowlands plays the role at perfect pitch: She is able to suggest, even in the midst of seemingly ordinary moments, the controlled panic of a person who needs a drink, right here, right now.

The Gauntlet is classic Clint Eastwood: fast, furious, and funny. It tells a cheerfully preposterous story with great energy and a lot of style, and nobody seems more at home in this sort of action movie than Eastwood.

It's also interesting to see how little screen time the final disco competition really has, considering how large it looms in our memories.

A funny movie with its heart finally in the right place, but all sorts of unacknowledged complications lurk just beneath its polished surface.