The thing about Godspell that caught my heart was its simplicity, its refusal to pretend to be anything more than it is. It's not a message for our times, or a movie to cash in on the Jesus movement, or even quite a youth movie. It's a series of stories and songs, like the Bible is, and it's told with the directness that simple stories need: with no tricks, no intellectual gadgets, and a lot of openness.

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye attacks film noir with three of his most cherished tools: Whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity.

Kennedy goes for silhouettes and, as I’ve mentioned, for the kind of carefully casual arrangements of figures we find in samurai films - the Japanese Western. The result is a movie that isolates the John Wayne mystique and surrounds it with the necessary simplicity and directness.

Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is one of the great emotional experiences of our time.

It's a comedy, but there's more in it than that; it's a movie about the ways we pursue, possess, and consume each other as sad commodities.

It's an incredible lapse in a movie of this size and ambition - but they've failed to make Judge Roy Bean interesting. He's one-dimensional, predictable, propped up by Paul Newman's acting style, with no personality of his own.

Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway is a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy. It's like one of those devices for executive desks, with the stainless steel balls on the strings: It functions with great efficiency but doesn't accomplish anything.

This is a wonderful formula. I love it. The Poseidon Adventure is the kind of movie you know is going to be awful, and yet somehow you gotta see it, right?

Tati is actually a silent comedian; his films are made with an amusing mixture of languages, but no one says anything very important and he doesn’t use subtitles because then we might read them and miss a sight gag.

Charles Bronson, who has recently started to enjoy a long-delayed superstar status, is very good and slit-eyed as the mechanic, and the movie's premise is a nice one with a lot of neat twists toward the end.

I think Bloch and Rosenberg should get organized and take on the cabbage. If nothing else, a horror movie about cabbages could help Rosenberg work through his obsession and save a lot of analyst's fees.

What brings the movie alive is the performance that Diana Ross and director Sidney J. Furie bring to the scenes.

A tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie that's about four times as good as you'd expect.

Sounder is a story simply told and universally moving. It is one of the most compassionate and truthful of movies, and there's not a level where it doesn't succeed completely.

This sort of stuff is magnificently silly, and Lee, to give him credit, never tried to rise above it. If a movie like this were directed seriously, it would be a disaster.

The problem may be that Bill Melendez, who directed, and Charles M. Schultz, who wrote the movie based on his own comic characters, couldn't decide whether to aim for kids or their parents.

Two men, barely 10 years apart in age, one with a lifetime of emptiness ahead of him, one with an empty lifetime already behind. This is what John Huston has to work with in Fat City and he treats it with a level, unsentimental honesty and makes it into one of his best films.

Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds and, indeed, all the members of the cast are finely tuned and very good. What the movie totally fails at, however, is its attempt to make some kind of significant statement about its action.

Late Spring is one of the best two or three films Ozu ever made.

The photography is undeniably beautiful, but there comes a point when we've had too many mountains and too little plot. All that holds the movie together is the screen persona of Eastwood, who is so convincingly tight-lipped that sometimes you have the feeling he knows what's going on and just won't tell.

The film is masterful in its control of acting and visual style.

This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn't commit.

Boxcar Bertha is a weirdly interesting movie and not really the sleazy exploitation film the ads promise.

The Other, which is based on the novel by former actor Tom Tryon (you saw him as The Cardinal), has been criticized in some quarters because Mulligan made it too beautiful, they say, and too nostalgic. Not at all. His colors are rich and deep and dark, chocolatey browns and bloody reds; they aren’t beautiful but perverse and menacing.

Maybe the movie has too much coherence, and the plot is too predictable; that's a weakness of films based on well-made Broadway plays. Still, that's hardly a serious complaint about something as funny as Play It Again, Sam.

The wedding sequence... is a virtuoso stretch of filmmaking: Coppola brings his large cast onstage so artfully that we are drawn at once into the Godfather's world.

John Waters' Pink Flamingos has been restored for its 25th anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won't have to see it again for another 25 years. If I haven't retired by then, I will.

Tokyo Story moves quite slowly by our Western standards, and requires more patience at first than some moviegoers may be willing to supply. Its effect is cumulative, however; the pace comes to seem perfectly suited to the material.