The style here is so seductive and witty it's hard to pin down. It's like nothing else I've seen by Hill, and at times, it almost reminds me of Jacques Tati crossed with Robert Altman. It's good to get a crime movie more concerned with humor and character than with blood and gore; here's one, as we say, for the whole family.

The Laughing Policeman is an awfully good police movie: taut, off-key, filled with laconic performances. It provides the special delight we get from gradually unraveling a complicated case.

Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin trips on its own stylishness and tries so hard not to be a conventional science-fiction thriller that it fails, alas, to be anything.

Sleeper establishes Woody Allen as the best comic director and actor in America, a distinction that would mean more if there were more comedies being made.

An expensive, exhaustive, 150-mintue odyssey that doesn’t so much conclude as cross the finish line and collapse. It has been outfitted with expensive stars and a glossy production, but it doesn’t really make us care.

Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension.

For four hours we live in these two rooms and discover the secrets of these people, and at the end we have gone deeper, seen more, and will remember more, than with most of the other movies of our life.

Essentially just a love story, and not sturdy enough to carry the burden of both radical politics and a bittersweet ending.

What's best about the movie is that it considers interesting adults--young and old--in an intelligent manner. After it's over we almost feel relief; there are so many movies about clods reacting moronically to romantic and/or violent situations. But we hardly ever get movies about people who seem engaging enough to spend half an hour talking with (what would you say to Charles Bronson?). Here's one that works.

The movie makes no attempt to psychoanalyze its Kit Carruthers, and there are no symbols to note or lessons to learn. What comes through more than anything is the enormous loneliness of the lives these two characters lived, together and apart.

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets isn’t so much a gangster movie as a perceptive, sympathetic, finally tragic story about how it is to grow up in a gangster environment.

As a record of a kind of everyday Parisian life, the film is superb. We think of the cafes of Paris as hotbeds of fiery philosophical debate, but more often, I imagine, they are just like this: people talking, flirting, posing, drinking, smoking, telling the truth and lying, while waiting to see if real life will ever begin.

That the males play baseball and that sport is their work is what makes this the ultimate baseball movie; never before has a movie considered the game from the inside out.

A bright and sometimes breathtaking retelling of the rock opera of the same name. It is, indeed, a triumph over that work; using most of the same words and music, it succeeds in being light instead of turgid, outward-looking instead of narcissistic.

On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street.

Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal is one hell of an exciting movie. I wasn’t prepared for how good it really is: it’s not just a suspense classic, but a beautifully executed example of filmmaking. It’s put together like a fine watch. The screenplay meticulously assembles an incredible array of material, and then Zinnemann choreographs it so that the story--complicated as it is--unfolds in almost documentary starkness.

The movie is put together in a sort of disjointed way; there are too many characters, and some of them disappear for so long, we forget them. But that doesn't matter much; the idea is to string together scenes that entertain, and Cleopatra Jones does that nicely.

It has all the necessary girls, gimmicks, subterranean control rooms, uniformed goons and magic wristwatches it can hold, but it doesn't have the wit and it doesn't have the style of the best Bond movies.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle works so well because Eddie is played by Robert Mitchum, and Mitchum has perhaps never been better.

Scream, Blacula, Scream is just an interim exploitation effort, and a warm-up for the better vampires in Marshall's future.

Instead of plot it has a cascade of incidents, instead of central characters it has a cast of hundreds, instead of being a comedy it is a wondrous act of observation. It occupies no genre and does not create a new one. It is a filmmaker showing us how his mind processes the world around him.

Dillinger is the film, we may speculate, that John Milius was born to make: violent, tough, filled with guns and blood.

Battle looks like the last gap of a dying series, a movie made simply to wring the dollars out of any remaining ape fans.

The movie fails to work up much excitement, and the title song by Bob Dylan is quite simply awful.

A good, solid science-fiction movie, and a little more.

Tatum O’Neal creates a character out of thin air, makes us watch her every moment and literally makes the movie work.

Coffy is slightly more serious and a little more inventive than it needs to be.

When you wind a plot up as tightly as this one, it runs along nicely for awhile, but then the last half-hour has to be spent simply resolving everything.