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]

It's an archetypal '70s political movie: hard-core melodrama wedded to an important social issue, with slick direction (James Bridges) and big stars (Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas) playing valiant underdogs and reporters. [29 Oct 2004, p.C3]

Norma Rae is not a bad film, just one that made me angry for what it might have been. Imagine another, more skillful actor, say Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, in Leibman's part; then strip away some of the more broadly drawn scenes, and Norma Rae could have been yet another fine film by director Martin Ritt ("Hud," "Sounder," and "Conrack"). [2 March 1979, p.4-12]

What distinguishes The Deer Hunter most is its many rich characters and the size of its vision. This is a big film, dealing with big issues, made on a grand scale. Much of it, including some casting decisions, suggest inspiration by "The Godfather." [9 Mar 1979]

A hideously violent shocker about a woman who is repeatedly raped and castrates her victims. [18 July 1980, p.8]

There's a certain quirky charm to the young Hopkins in his creep-out role as Corky, a shy, failed stand-up magician. [25 Apr 2006, p.3]

Don't see Halloween in an empty theater on a weekday afternoon. See it on a weekend night in a packed house. Halloween is a film to be enjoyed with a boisterous crowd; it's an "audience picture," a film designed to get specific reactions from an audience at specific moments. With Halloween, the most often desired reaction is screaming. It's a beautifully made thriller -- more shocking than bloody -- that will have you screaming with regularity. Halloween was directed by John Carpenter, 30, a natural filmmaker and a name worth remembering. [22 Nov 1978]

The protracted scenes of eating, cooking and cleaning carry neo-realism to its end point -- and to a violent climax which emerges logically and terrifyingly from the welter of daily trivia preceding it. [24 Oct 1997, p.L]

Days of Heaven is the grand climax of the whole "Bonnie and Clyde"-"Badlands" tradition of outlaw-lovers-on-the-run movies. Shot by Nestor Almendros and the uncredited Haskell Wexler, it's a cinematographic masterpiece. [20 March 1998]

there are times when Grease really kicks in. I'm fond of Channing singing "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, rotten with virginity" and then telling an imaginary Troy Donahue, "I know what you wanna do." And most of the big musical numbers work, especially the showstopper: the sunlit Danny-Sandy duet to "Summer Dreams." Greasy kid stuff it all may be, but just like rock 'n' roll, it'll probably never die. [27 Mar 1998, p.A]

For a film about deep water terror, Jaws 2 is really quite shallow. [16 June 1978, p.3-2]

Early in the movie, Hal Holbrook (as the paranoid NASA administrator who sets the fake-out in motion) unloads an expository speech on Brolin (as one of the astronauts the administrator needs to convince to go along with his insane ruse). Is it a long speech? Dear reader, “long” doesn’t quite measure it. It’s endless. It’s an event horizon of a monologue and by the time it’s over, you can’t believe the coronavirus hasn’t left yet.

One of the most engaging rock biographies ever filmed. [31 Jan 1988, p.18C]

The greatest rock concert movie ever made -- and maybe the best rock movie, period.

What makes Eraserhead great-and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision; Lynch's complete control over this material, where, working on a shoestring, he served as director, producer, writer, editor and sound designer.

One minute into Saturday Night Fever you know this picture is onto something, that it knows what it's talking about. [15 Oct 1999, Siskel Years, p.6]

Like a Visconti epic gone mad, explosive, beautiful, unforgettable. [08 Dec 2006, p.C8]

This is a Wenders masterwork--a chilling tale of painting, crime and forgery. [19 Jan 2007, p.C5]