A high school version of A Chorus Line, following a half-dozen talented students at New York High School for the performing arts as they try to become show-biz stars. When the kids perform, the movie sings, but their fictionalized personal stories are melodramatic drivel. [11 July 1980, p.8]

A very Peckinpah-influenced film about the James Gang with four sets of real-life brothers playing the outlaw broods. [16 Jul 2004, p.C4]

A disgusting, artless shocker...A cruel film that offers teen-age girls in peril, as well as a gruesome beheading. Only for sickies. [11 July 1980, p.8]

The quality of a movie comedy varies indirectly with the number of times someone in it is punched or kicked in the groin. On that score alone, "The Nude Bomb" is a bust. [09 May 1980, p.29]

A thoroughly engaging version of country singer Loretta Lynn's autobiography. Sissy Spacek excels as Lynn and is assisted by two superior performances. Certain to be one of the year's best films.

The Ninth Configuration is neither frightening nor funny nor inspiring, although it strains to be all of these. [30 Sep 1985, p.3C]

This isn't a particularly great flick, but Pacino's performance is first-rate. [24 May 2002, p.C1]

It's an old, cliche-ridden story made fresh by Middler's energy.

The film with the year's funniest title turns out to be a basketball comedy about the Pittsburgh Pisces team transformed onto a winner by a young boy and an astrologer. Real-life basketball star Julius Erving stars in a trivial but entertaining picture filled with rhythm and blues pop music.

Let's face it, the bottom line on a disaster film is how special are its special effects. With Meteor, the answer is not very. [22 Oct 1979, p.6]

Icily brilliant.

Released one year after John Carpenter's Halloween, Nosferatu was a last gasp for the elegant horror film. It is deliberately paced and virtually bloodless. A feeling of inexorable dread is vividly etched in images such as a skeletal cuckoo clock, an army of rats invading a village, and plague victims enjoying "what little time we have left" by drinking and dancing in the square.

A freewheeling, up-with-kids-down-with-high-school picture featuring punk rock stars, The Ramones.

Justly renowned as the most realistic movie on pro football, this is the iconoclastic portrait of savvy, rebellious receiver Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte) who finds himself a target for coaches, owners, players and fate itself. [14 May 2000, p.33]

The 1979 crime melodrama boasts a literate John Sayles screenplay and breezy direction by Lewis Teague. Robert Conrad and Robert Forster epitomize the enduring '30s tough-guy mystique in supporting roles. [09 Jan 1992, p.6C]

An old nightmare, made shiny new.

Perfect for family viewing.

Usually I am so turned off by mayhem that I turn away from the screen during knife attacks and the like. But for some strange reason I wasn't sickened by the violence in Dawn of the Dead. Even when one zombie gets his head lopped off by a helicopter blade...Dawn of the Dead has some staying power. [4 May 1979, p.3-3]