The year’s most razzle-dazzling family movie, an exuberant and technically astonishing space adventure in which the galactic tomorrows of Flash Gordon are the setting for conflicts and events that carry the suspiciously but splendidly familiar ring of yesterday’s westerns, as well as yesterday’s Flash Gordon serials. [22 May 1977]

These are so good, and so winningly narrated by Sebastian Cabot, that you can't not be delighted. [05 July 1996, p.F1]

A luminous, ambitious but only fitfully alive adaptation (by Harold Pinter) of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished Hollywood novel. Robert De Niro is wonderful as the extraordinarily complex, subtle and perceptive Monroe Stahr, whom Fitzgerald based on Irving Thalberg. [01 Oct 1989, p.7]

In the highly suspenseful 1976 Two-Minute Warning, directed with terrific energy and control by Larry Peerce, a football game takes on a subtly symbolic aspect as the cops pursue a mad sniper on the loose in a packed football stadium. [05 Jun 1988, p.2]

A dazzlingly imaginative work with awesome production values and special effects that bear comparison to those of "2001."

The strongest asset is the film's setting, a splendid re-creation of Buffalo Bill's famous tent show. [26 Feb 1989, p.4]

Narrator-hosts Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly offer more than routine continuity with their timeless class and superb timing in their first film appearance together since the 1946 Ziegfeld Follies. [26 Jun 1992, p.F22]

Though some of the chase sequences aren't bad, it's pretty silly. [27 Jun 2002, p.22]

James Goldman's script is razor-sharp, treating all characters, major and minor, with intelligence and compassion. The movie is shot in subdued hues, making the film more of a motion painting than picture. It is quite simply a film that must be seen -- and once seen, treasured. [29 Jul 1994, p.21]

An exceptional film that makes for the perfect home-video experience: It gets better upon repeated viewings. [03 June 1990, p.77]

Another indictment of pervasive corruption and perhaps Sembene's most celebrated film, it was heavily censored in Senegal on its release in 1974 and it is not difficult to see why. [01 Jan 1995, p.30]

The best possible face that can be put on things is that Big and Little Edie (the mother died two years after the film was released, the daughter is still living) made an unconscious, unsavory, mutually advantageous bargain with the filmmakers: Make us famous and we'll return the favor. In retrospect it's clear that both parties lived up to their parts; only the audience got shortchanged. [14 Aug 1998, p.F20]

It's got the smoothest, glossiest finish imaginable, but something inside it doesn't jell. [15 July 1988, p.26]

While I have no doubt that Jaws will make a bloody fortune for Universal and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, it is a coarse-grained and exploitive work which depends on excess for its impact. Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written.

Long before David Lynch mined the seedy underbelly of small-town life for the film "Blue Velvet" and the TV series "Twin Peaks," Michael Ritchie directed Smile, one of the smartest, most-biting satires on the glossy veneer of middle-class America ever put on film. [18 Oct 1990, p.7]

There's vivid period atmosphere and similarly vibrant performances from a cast headed by Karen Black and Donald Sutherland. [24 Mar 1985, p.5]

Has a sense of humor that is intellectual, even academic, at heart.

A stunning, stylish detective mystery in the classic Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald mold. [02 Sep 1990, p.72]

Private and odd, archly dreamy and intimate, A Bigger Splash remains one of the more uniquely hypnotic movies about the connection between presented life and pulsating art.

This film has qualities of feeling and insight that set it apart from most movies about cantankerous coots. [18 Jun 1995, p.6]

An odd, one-of-a-kind little film that features an involving plot by Anthony Shaffer and a performance by Christopher Lee that the iconic actor declares is his best. It also features paganism. Lots and lots of paganism.

You have to love a movie where a car gets title billing. [30 Nov 2000, p.F16]

A hysterical farce about a Sicilian laborer (beagle-eyed Giancarlo Giannini) who gets himself in political and sexual trouble. [31 Jul 1997, p.F39]

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell and Captain Kronos -- Vampire Hunter, were made during the studio's waning years and neither is on par with Hammer's best films produced in the late '50s and early '60s. [29 Oct 2003, p.E5]

The heart of The Conversation’s appeal, then and now, is the way it combines an exceptional character study, a thriller plot and an ability to superbly convey the unease of a society where blanket surveillance is getting to be the norm.