John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King is swashbuckling adventure, pure and simple, from the hand of a master. It's unabashed and thrilling and fun.

So good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.

It's got a unique . . . well, I was about to say charm, but the movie's last scene doesn't quite let me get away with that.

A powerful, brutal film containing a definitive Charles Bronson performance.

Despite the rather washed-out color photography it's very much worth seeing.

Grey Gardens, one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing.

F For Fake is minor Welles, the master idly tuning his instrument while the concert seems never to start again. But it's engaging and fun, and it's astonishing how easily Welles spins a movie out of next to nothing.

Dr. Furter is played by a British actor named Tim Curry, who bears a certain resemblance to Loretta Young in drag. He's the best thing in the movie, maybe because he seems to be having the most fun.

A well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it's all too believable.

When a movie does have a lot to say – as, for example, “Nashville” did – it’s a relief when the director finds a way to say it through the characters, instead of to them. Still, “Swept Away” is an absorbing movie, it tells a story we get involved in and (despite all I’ve said) it’s often very funny.

There are shadings of comic meaning that could have gotten lost if all we had were the words, and there are whole scenes that play off facial expressions. It's a good movie to watch just for that reason, because it's been done with such care, love and lunacy.

Farewell, My Lovely is a great entertainment and a celebration of Robert Mitchum's absolute originality.

A confusing and not very exciting private eye caper.

The story is simple and obvious, but it's told with a lot of energy, and the cast is jammed, with character actors doing their things.

The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film.

Bite the Bullet finds the traditional power and integrity of the Western intact after all.

One of the most effective thrillers ever made.

After I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser. It's that good a movie.

Bronson is a first-rate action star with a catlike grace and a nice air of menace. But here, trying to land a helicopter after only a few lessons on how to fly it, or staging a phony rape scene to distract prison guards, Bronson is given a sort of incompetency he doesn't wear well. We believe him more easily when he's strong, silent and infallible.

There comes a time in some movies when sheer spectacle overwhelms any consideration of plot, and Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction is a movie like that. It has a plot so unlikely and confused that we can't believe it for much more than 15 seconds at a time, but its action sequences are so absorbing and its mountaintop photography so compelling that we don't care.

The plot, the pursuit, the quarry, are all forgotten during Hackman's one-man show, and it's a flaw the movie doesn't overcome.

Ritchie has so messy targets that he misses some and never quite gets back to others. But Smile does a good job of working over the hypocrisy and sexism of a typical beauty pageant.

The movie finally becomes just an exercise, then: a brilliant one at times, and with a wealth of sharp-edged performances, but without people for its things to happen to.

I was torn between walking out immediately and staying to witness a spectacle more dismaying than anything on the screen: the way small children were digging gratuitous bloodshed.

Brannigan isn't great, but it's a wellcrafted action movie and, besides, it's got John Wayne in it.

One of the nice things about the movie is the way it provides chills and thrills and still tones down the violence.

Russell doesn't give a damn about the material he started with, greatest art work of the century or not, and he just goes ahead and gives us one glorious excess after another. He is aided by his performers, especially Ann-Margret, who is simply great as Tommy's mother.