Fright Night is pleasantly, if effortlessly, well-acted and gently scripted. And when the ghoulish special effects and wry comedy aren't on screen, there's the occasional in-joke for viewer distraction. [06 Aug 1985, p.4C]

The script of Follow That Bird simply plays like a TV vignette blown up to movie size, failing to fill both the screen and our imagination. [06 Aug 1985, p.5C]

One of the most intriguing prison dramas ever put on film.

Too many scenes in European Vacation peter out about a gag or two short for the film to be as funny as it ought to be. But the basic amiability of the humor is as pleasant as it is surprising.

Teenage summer film trash such as The Heavenly Kid makes one root for the leaves to start turning brown.

The essential problem with The Black Cauldron is that the central human character in the story is a complete drip, making it difficult to root for his success at saving the world from ruination.

It's bankrupt in terms of imagination. All he (Romero) does is place his zombies in the basement of a missile silo and have a few crazed military types scream at the zombies and at each other. End of movie. [03 Sept 1985, p.5C]

Teenagers, who may not have seen this picture's many hero/outlaw predecessors, might like its the pop soundtrack, better-than-average acting and modest punk attire. Everyone else is likely to find Billie Jean the very thing that becomes a legend least. [22July 1985, p.3C]

Leave it to an American production team to remake the same premise into an inarguably worse movie. And this insufferable remake called The Man with One Red Shoe marks the second time in as many years that producer Victor Drai, a former estate developer, has taken a French movie and turned it into garbage. Last year he took the genuinely amusing ''Pardon Mon Affair'' and reworked it with the help of the increasingly annoying Gene Wilder into ''The Lady in Red,'' one of the year`s worst movies.

It ambles along gracefully, picking up points for subtle detail; but its conventions belong to light comedy, and they overwhelm most of the complexities the director has devised.

Explorers offers an attractive premise to a very small payoff.

Silverado is a completely successful physical attempt at reviving the western, but its script would need a complete rewrite for it to become more than just a small step in a full-scale western revival. [10 Jul 1985, p.5]

This middle portion of the picture becomes dangerously preachy, but just before we and Max are bored, director Miller returns Max to his roots, a screaming chase sequence through a desertlike Australian landscape.

So what we have in the middle of Back to the Future, this seeming kids' movie full of screeching cars, special effects and lightning storms, is nothing less than an adult reverie. And if families could be persuaded to see this film together, it might touch off a long night of sharing between parents and children. [03 July 1985]

This is going to be more of a consumer warning than a traditional film review, because Red Sonja is like a can of dog food covered by a label featuring a picture of a sirloin steak.

Pale Rider may be a risk simply because westerns are not in vogue right now at the box office, but fresh and challenging westerns with Clint Eastwood always will be in vogue.

Barely has there been a group of more smug and obnoxious characters in a single film than in St. Elmo`s Fire.

The Nome King looks like a moveable Mt. St. Helens and he alone is magical. In fact, he blows Dorothy and her tacky-looking friends off the screen. So we end up liking the Nome King and hating Dorothy and her crowd, which I doubt was the intention of the L. Frank Baum series. [21 Jun 1985, p.1]

My only major criticism of Cocoon is the ending, which needlessly places the film in familiar extraterrestrial movie territory. Without giving too much away, either most of the characters should have made a different decision or the film should have had courage to jump off into a completely different direction. Special visual effects are wonderful, but the human being is still the greatest special effect of all.

In film circles there's a name for pictures like Lifeforce. Film Comment magazine has dubbed them guilty pleasures, movies you're embarrassed to admit you like. Maybe somebody spiked my popcorn, but I can't deny that I liked Lifeforce.

This film would be a winner any time of the year. It`s a classic piece of moviemaking that I plan on seeing again very soon.

Everyone knows that unrequited love can be exquisite, and that`s why it`s a particular shame that ''Secret Admirer'' plays its twin-edged teen romance mostly for laughs. Blown is the opportunity to deal with the issue of what it`s really like to have a crush on someone who does not like you back as much.

As entertaining as The Goonies finally becomes--and its last hour is mostly one pleasure after another--it's a shame that Spielberg, writer Chris Columbus and director Richard Donner felt the need to take the low road in terms of language. [7 Jun 1985, p.A]

Perfect tries too hard to be perfect on too many fronts, and like a person who fine-tunes his or her body too much, Perfect ultimately seems brittle and less attractive the closer one looks. [7 June 1985, p.A]

Fletch is more than funny; it's funny and exciting.[31 May 1985, p.A]

With Sean Connery as Agent 007, James Bond was a human-scale figure, an exceedingly cool guy to be sure, but a guy nonetheless. With Roger Moore as Bond, we are simply watching a lightweight actor stroll through a role.

In short, Rambo is very good at what it does, but what it does isn't always that good. [22 May 1985, p.1C]

Brewster's Millions is a PG film, and the humor is sanitized. Pryor grins, Candy gurgles and we sit there stone-faced noticing all the holes in the plot. Once Pryor figures out a clever way to spend money by using rare stamps on letters, why doesn't he keep on doing it? Yes, that might make for a short movie, but given the way Brewster's Millions turned out, it would be no great loss. [22 May 1985, p.3]