This richly remembered tale of Christmas past, with writer Jean Shepherd recalling the days when a Red Ryder BB gun really meant something, is already something of a Christmas perennial.

You know the drill: Seven gates of hell. The walking dead. Blood and spurting eyeballs. Strictly for horror mavens hungry for kitsch. [03 Jul 1998]

Testament does manage to convey in its surprisingly quiet and non-theatrical way the very point that its creators surely wanted to make: that human stupidity can destroy the world, but it cannot erase human dignity. [08 Nov 1983]

The Mirror may not be the easiest place to start your Tarkovsky education, but its sublime images (including a memorable shot of a burning barn in the rain), are sure to whet your appetite for more. [26 May 2000, p.M]

There are two, maybe three, good gags in National Lampoon's Vacation, which otherwise is poorly paced, sloppily put together, and full of inept, ill-conceived performances.

Sniggery sex, adolescent male-bonding, casual drug use, the agonies of growing up, mistrust [to put it mildly] of the adult world, a yearning for material success and a corresponding distaste for anything that smacks of the "committed" 1960s - it's all here, supporting a plot so lunatic that it could have been assembled only in the backwards fashion outlined above. [22 July 1983, p.3-3]

A typically weak sequel that has no legitimate artistic reason for being. [July 22, 1983]

A mixed bag of four short films done in the style of famous '60s TV show. Two work; two don't. [July 22, 1983]

An amateurish sequel to one of the most repulsive movies in years, a teenage sex comedy with horrific caricatures of women. This time the nudity is diminished, but in its place are tasteless high jinks iwth the Klu Klux Klan [22 July 1983, p.3-10]

It's the funniest new movie on town. [July 22, 1983]

A thoroughly entertaining thriller about a teenage video game freak who almost starts World War III. A clever warning against nuclear weapons and too much reliance on computers. Only a preachy scientist hurts a fine entertainment. [22 July 1983, p.3-10]

But with 'Jedi,' listen to the creaking, huge metal door that opens and leads the androids C-3PO and R2-D2 to the cave of Jabba the Hutt, where, at the beginning of the film, good-guy space pilot Han Solo is frozen in a carbonite mold like some kind of nouvelle cuisine side dish. It will remind old-time radio listeners of the creaking door of the 'Inner Sanctum' show, and it serves the same purpose. Both are doorways to adventure...And before this portion of the 'Star Wars' saga is history, let us take time to praise the principal performers.

John Badham's exciting thriller about an L.A. detective (Roy Scheider) who battles against the government creeps who have created a monstrous helicopter to be used for 1984-style crowd control. Great action in a David-versus-Goliath story. [22 July 1983, p.10]

The dance sequences are sexy and energetic, more than compensating for a love relationship in the film that is thoroughly illogical and wooden. [22 July 1983]

This overrated backstage TV nostalgia comedy, set in 1954, does boast standout performances by Peter O'Toole and Joseph Bologna as characters modeled on Erroll Flynn and Sid Caesar. [07 Nov 1997]

Carelessly digressive and stylistically muddled. [22 Mar 2016, p.C3]

Most important, several elements -- the film's tough, new ending; a sly, fleeting dissolve of a unicorn, not in the original; and a brilliant, trompe d'oeil flicker of life in a shot of a still photograph -- bring Deckard's existential dilemma into focus. [11 Sept 1992]

I have written elsewhere that love stories seem to be in short supply these days, as they have been in the last decade of American movies. . . . But the hunger for love on the screen is there, and director Spielberg gives it to us in "E.T.," and because the lovers are a little boy and a little creature, we accept it. Of such simple concepts, timeless entertainments are made.

The beautifully told but predictable story of two athletes who competed in the 100-meter dash for England in the 1924 Olympics...The film has received choruses of praise prior to its nationwide opening this week. Although it is extremely well made, I frankly don't understand what the shouting is about. Good, yes; great, no. [25 Dec 1981, p.56]

There's also nothing here that has much to do with what makes Prior such a powerful artist. [2 Apr 1982, p.3-6]

Ambitious but hokey melodrama...It's a beautiful looking film, but only the supporting characters are believable. Beatty and Diane Keaton are miscast and never disappear into their characters. [25 Dec 1981]

A wildly overwritten melodrama about the sins of the press. Newman's character is compelling, but Field's reporter is such a lamebrain that we know she would be fired at any major newspaper. [25 Dec 1981]

Burt Reynolds stars as a Dirty Harry-style detective who chases after a high-powered pimp in Atlanta. When Reynolds stays in character, the film works well as a straight thriller. When he winks at the audience with his dialog, the film falls apart. [25 Dec 1981, p.12]

The biggest surprise with On Golden Pond is that the best performance in the film is not turned in by a Fonda. Rather, it is Katharine Hepburn, in a performance without gimmicks or "great scenes," who communicates so much of the film's emotional power as a portrait of the serenity and anger associated with old age.

An uneven special effects extravaganza about a little boy who winds up traveling through world history along with five midgets. Together they meet and frustrate the great and the near-great. Including Napoleon, Robin Hood, and the devil. Unfortunately, there are just too many visits to famous people. The film was created by some of the people responsible for the Monty Python comedies. [25 Dec 1981, p.12]

A picture that represents so much of what I want and rarely get from a movie -- a couple of hours filled with characters who are as exciting as the people I know in real life. [11 Dec 1981]

A town where tourists and hapless visitors are murdered, and the dead are revived by a big band-loving mortician, descends into gore and madness. [16 Mar 2007, p.C5]

Sometimes raunchy, but always well-acted. [25 Dec 1981]