The remarkable thing about Wadleigh's film is that it succeeds so completely in making us feel how it must have been to be there. [2005]

On some dumb fundamental level, Airport kept me interested for a couple of hours. I can't quite remember why. The plot has few surprises (you know and I know that no airplane piloted by Dean Martin ever crashed). The gags are painfully simpleminded (a priest, pretending to cross himself, whacks a wise guy across the face). And the characters talk in regulation B-movie clichés like no B-movie you've seen in ten years.

Not a war film so much as the story of a personality who has found the right role to play. Scott's theatricality is electrifying.

We laugh, that we may not cry. But none of this philosophy comes close to the insane logic of "M*A*S*H," which is achieved through a peculiar marriage of cinematography, acting, directing, and writing.

The Reivers is a pleasant, wholesome, straightforward movie of the sort (as they say) they don't make anymore.

The three central performances (by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and -- wow! -- Goldie Hawn) are so engaging that we find ourselves, despite ourselves, involved in their story.

Marooned isn't very interesting from a stylistic point of view, and the actors tend to get buried beneath the technology, but it does tell an exciting story, And that, I imagine, was all Sturges (whose storytelling includes The Great Escape and Bad Day at Black Rock) was really trying to do.

It is a film of our time. It is about how even moral victories are corrupted. It will make you weep and will make you angry. It will tear your guts out.

There are good lines of Wayne dialog and good exchanges with Ben Johnson (as the cook) and some scenes in which you can see that even Wayne thinks Gabriel looks ridiculous as an Indian. And these scenes help pass the time and help you forget how wooden and uninteresting Hudson is. Which is pretty wooden and uninteresting indeed.

Some of the best moments in Downhill Racer are moments during which nothing special seems to be happening. They're moments devoted to capturing the angle of a glance, the curve of a smile, an embarrassed silence. Together they form a portrait of a man that is so complete, and so tragic, that "Downhill Racer" becomes the best movie ever made about sports -- without really being about sports at all.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips uses its budget quietly, with good taste, and succeeds in being a big movie without being a gross one. I think I enjoyed it about as much as any road show since Funny Girl.

This good movie is buried beneath millions of dollars that were spent on "production values" that wreck the show.

The writers never solved the problem of incorporating the top-heavy special effects into their thin little plot.

The Sterile Cuckoo is not as good as it should have been because it lacks consistency of tone. But parts of it are awfully good, and Miss Minnelli is one hell of an actress.

It doesn't even inspire a put-down. It just lies there in my mind -- a big, heavy lump. But in the midst of it, like a visitor from another movie, Lee Marvin desperately labors to inject some flash and sparkle. And he succeeds in bringing whole scenes to life. A good actor can do this, but it's a waste when he must.

The genius of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice is that it understands the peculiar nature of the moral crisis for Americans in this age group, and understands that the way to consider it is in a comedy.

Medium Cool is finally so important, and absorbing because of the way Wexler weaves all these elements together. He has made an almost perfect example of the new movie. Because we are so aware this is a movie, It seems more relevant and real than the smooth fictional surface of, say, Midnight Cowboy.

As for Coppola and his world, it's difficult to say whether his film is successful or not. That's the beautiful thing about a lot of the new, experimental American directors, they'd rather do interesting things and make provocative observations than try to outflank John Ford on his way to the Great American Movie.

Someday it was inevitable that a great film would come along, utilizing the motorcycle genre, the same way the great Westerns suddenly made everyone realize they were a legitimate American art form, Easy Rider is the picture.

A bad movie indeed.

The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.

One of the glories of True Grit is that it recognizes Wayne's special presence. It was not directed by Ford (who in any event probably couldn't have been objective enough about Wayne), but it was directed by another old Western hand, Hathaway, who has made the movie of his lifetime and given us a masterpiece. This is the sort of film you call a movie, instead of the kind of movie you call a film.

All of these criticisms exist entirely apart from the performances of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. It is a tribute to them, and to the core of honesty in the screenplay, that Ratso and Joe Buck emerge so unforgettably drawn. But the movie itself doesn't hold up.

Well of course he wins the race and gets the girl. You know that to begin with when you go to a movie named Winning that stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and is about the Indy 500.

Death of a Gunfighter is quite an extraordinary western. It's one of those rare attempts (the last was Will Penny) to populate the West with real people living in real historical time.

Unless a story has been introduced to make the shooting part of the plot, it can get pretty dreary. 100 Rifles is pretty dreary.

Support Your Local Sheriff is a textbook example of the evil influence TV has on the movies. It's essentially a lousy TV situation comedy dragged out to feature length for no good reason.

The weakness of Black Girl is in its slow, journeyman style; one feels that Sembene learned filmmaking by making this film. It also suffers from a kind of primitive naturalism, as if the script were by James T. Farrell out of Theodore Dreiser. Every motive is spelled out in unnecessary detail, and little attempt is made to get into the minds of the characters.