Chitty Chitty Bang Bang contains about the best two-hour children's movie you could hope for, with a marvelous magical auto and lots of adventure and a nutty old grandpa and a mean Baron and some funny dances and a couple of moments when you've just GOT to cover your face and peek between your fingers, it's so scary.

Sir Carol Reed's Oliver! is a treasure of a movie. It is very nearly universal entertainment, one of those rare films like The Wizard of Oz that appeals in many ways to all sorts of people.

John Cassavetes' Faces is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: "Here!" It would be a triumphant shout.

Perhaps because the Beatles were considered such a draw, perhaps because the songs were counted on to sell the film, there was no agenda to dumb down the material or hard-sell the story. Instead of contrived urgency, there's unpressured whimsy, and the movie exists as pure charm, expressed in fantastical imagery. And then there are the songs.

The Split is the first Hollywood film to deliberately, overtly exploit black-white tensions in American society. On another level, it's a first-rate piece of entertainment.

Ice Station Zebra is a movie so flat and conventional that its three moments of interest are an embarrassment.

Vixen is the best film to date in that uniquely American genre, the skin-flick.

McQueen is great in Bullitt, and the movie is great, because director Peter Yates understands the McQueen image and works within it. He winds up with about the best action movie of recent years.

The Boston Strangler requires a judgment not only on the quality of the film (very good), but also on its moral and ethical implications.

Finian's Rainbow is the best of the recent roadshow musicals, perhaps because it's the first to cope successfully with the longer roadshow form.

The costumes and everything else in the film--the photography, the music, above all Shakespeare's language--is so voluptuous, so sensuous.

Strangely enough, the long-awaited meeting between Connery and Miss Bardot is a flop. They look yearningly at each other a lot, and once he puts his arms around her and they fall out of camera range, but otherwise no sparks are struck.

The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.

Strangely enough, Ralph Nelson's Charly succeeds as a movie for reasons having little to do with the plot. As the story of a personality in crisis, it works. We care about Charly. But the whole scientific hocus-pocus, which causes his crisis, is irrelevant and weakens the movie by distracting us.

The trouble with Funny Girl is almost everything except Barbra Streisand. She is magnificent.

To be sure, Scorsese was occasionally too obvious, and the film has serious structural flaws, but nobody who loves movies believes a perfect one will ever be made. What we hope for instead are small gains on the fronts of hope, love, comedy and tragedy. It is possible that with more experience and maturity Scorsese will direct more polished, finished films--but this work, completed when he was 25, contains a frankness he may have diluted by then.

Begley and Stevens add tone to the cast, and Hingle comes over like an especially earnest Karl Malden. The moral of the story is vaguely against capital punishment, and there's a lot of that thin, windblown guitar twanging for you thin, wind-blown guitar twanging fans.

Clouseau is Alan Arkin this time, instead of Peter Sellers, and it's hard to say whether we gain or lose. Arkin flounders a little in the stiff French accent he inherited from Sellers. But in his movements and timing, he's Sellers' equal.

Possibly the most under-plotted, underwritten, over-photographed film of the year. Which is not to say it isn't great to look at. It is.

The brilliance of the film comes more from Polanski's direction, and from a series of genuinely inspired performances, than from the original story.

A funny screen version of a very funny (if not very significant) Broadway comedy. It does well as an evening's entertainment.

Sellers works. He develops a character and plays it, for better or worse, for the whole movie.

Planet of the Apes is much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don't get in the way. If you only condescend to see an adventure thriller on rare occasions, condescend this time. You have nothing to lower but your brow.

Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape...Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

This is one of the funniest movies ever made. To see it now is to understand that. To see it for the first time in 1968, when I did, was to witness audacity so liberating that not even "There's Something About Mary" rivals it.

The plot is completely confused, and kids, who are much better at these things than adults, will enjoy its twists and turns. Ustinov is fine as the rum swilling, yo-ho-hoing Blackbeard, and there are several good scenes as he invisibly meddles with the big track meet. Jones and Miss Pleshette are amusing without being insufferably sweet.

The tension we need to draw us into the story isn't there; things move at too leisurely a pace, and the movie, like the Jimmy Stewart hero, has to be dragged into the excitement against its will.

The funniest American comedy of the year.