Force 10 is funny, but not quite funny enough: too often one laughs at its implausibilities without knowing if the filmmakers are in on the joke. The old-fashioned script by Robin Chapman has just enough tongue in cheek so that the cliches can be taken as irony, but Guy Hamilton's direction tips the balance toward cliche. An old hand at engineering actors in and out of impossible pickles, Hamilton keeps the action going, but the surprises are so mechanically executed that they rarely amaze. [18 Dec 1978, p.85]

Rosen's film has none of Baskshi's visual razzle-dazzle, but it is loaded with character, and it has the relentless momentum of a good war movie. [20 Nov 1978, p.79]

A schlock horror movie made for a pittance by 30-year-old John Carpenter, which happens to be the most frightening flick in years. Halloween is a superb exercise in the art of suspense, and it has no socially redeeming value whatsoever. Nasty, voyeuristic, relentless, it aims at nothing but to scare the hell out of you. [4 Dec 1978, p.116]

Droll, sweet-tempered and lackadaisical, it's a shaggy-dog story with Nicholson playing the shaggy dog. It turns Western conventions on their heads not out of satirical anger but simply to charm the pants off the audience. A little less coyness, and a lot more John Belushi (as a Mexican deputy), would have helped. Still, at a time when most comedy comes straight out of the bathroom, the quirky, civilized pleasures of Nicholson's film are not to be sneezed at. [09 Oct 1978, p.94]

In Parker's hands, Billy's story has become a virtuoso horror show-an exercise in emotional manipulation designed not merely to arouse chills but to turn the audience into avengers. Despite the remarkably controlled, honestly conveyed performance of Davis, Billy finally seems far less vivid than his prison friends-Randy Quaid's highly combustible American roughneck, the superb John Hurt's strung-out English junkie. Parker captures their camaraderie well, but he fails to convey any sense of day-to-day prison life-so keen is he to get to the assaultive highlights. [16 Oct 1978, p.76]

This movie's got a real story to tell, and the sheer urgency in its voice wins you over. [02 Oct 1978, p.85]

Paradise Alley lacks Rocky's primal simplicity: It's a parade of outrageous ploys that come pelting at you from all angles. [13 Nov 1978, p.106]

Unless you are suitably bent, you might notice that the movie has little continuity and a plot that is no more than a grab bag of familiar Cheech and Chong routines. If you're suitably prepared, probably none of this will matter. There is something irrepressibly good-natured about the peppery Cheech and the zonked-out Chone as they low-ride through East Los Angeles and Tijuana in pursuit of the eternal high... In this funky, slapdash and occasionally very funny movie, dope is not an issue, it's a way of life. [2 Oct 1978, p.86]

Days of Heaven is a big advance, hauntingly beautiful in image, sound and rhythm, unashamedly poetic, brimming with sweetness and bitterness, darkness and light. [18 Sept. 1978, p.97]

Interiors has the look of a Bergman film, helped by Gordon Willis's Nykvist-like cinematography, but it does not have the creative elation that triggers elation in the audience, no matter how dark the artist's vision. Woody gives us his dread untransfigured and it's hard to swallow. [07 Aug 1978, p.83]

Almost perversely, Laura Mars breaks the easiest of movie promises: here is a movie about the Beautiful People that hasn't bothered to make them beautiful. [14 Aug 1979, p.62]

Judged purely as an adventure story, it delivers enough thrills and violence to keep the action crowd engrossed. It also has enough social resonance to take us right back into those dark; schizophrenic years. [21 Aug 1978, p.66]

If Animal House lacks the inspired tastelessness of the Lampoon's High School Yearbrook Parody, this is still low humor of a high order. [7 Aug 1978, p.85]

Hooper doesn't dig very deep into its Hollywood subject, but it's a good example of decent, no-frills filmmaking that lets a surprising amount of feeling seep through the cracks of its all-action formula. [21 Aug 1978, p.67]

As ludicrous as the dialogue by screenwriter/director Walter Hill may be, the film's visual scheme is hypnotic. Dark, moody and muscular, its style gets under your skin even if your brain rebels. [21 Aug 1978, p.66]

Shorn of its inside references, it's a very mixed bag - pleasant but overlong, funny when Steve Martin is on hand and stultifying when Frankie Howerd goes into his Mean Mr. Mustard routines, full of wonderful music that too rarely reaches the boiling point and pathos that sinks to bathos. [31 Jul 1978, p.42]

Peter Sellers's marvelously inept French Inspector Clouseau takes his fifth bow in Revenge of the Pink Panther - and you can't help loving it. Sellers and writer-director Blake Edwards clearly have no interest in tampering with their pat, profitable formula. They give us what we have come to expect from the series: a slapstick farce with raucous sight gags, wild chases and crass jokes that must be inspired by Playboy cartoons. [24 July 1978, p.59]

To anyone who has seen half the movies he appropriates, and can therefore guess every twist of the plot miles before it happens, Foul Play's frenetic eagerness to please is about as refreshing as the whiff of an exhaust pipe on a hot city afternoon. [24 July 1978, p.59]

Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait is the most delightful movie the year has offered. Funny, fantastical, fast on its feet, this romantic fantasy comes closer than any film of the past decade to capturing the ingenious, madcap spirit of '30s comedies. [03 July 1978, p.90]

When a director as gifted, personal and eccentric as Peckinpah makes a film as gaseous and ludicrous as this, the temptation is to laugh, but the spectacle of his continuing skid is a sad one. [10 July 1978, p.83]

Jaw 2 is not a shipwreck of a movie; it'll make you jump now and then, like a boring guy tickling your ribs. But it lacks the style and intelligence that director Steven Spielberg brough to the original "Jaws". Jennot Szwarc, a French-born teveision specialist, come nowhere near Spielberg's blend of kinetic drive and comic touch. [19 June 1978, p.74]

Damien is a strikingly handsome film - full of plush offices and country homes reeking of Old Money, all lovingly captured in Bill Butler's burnished-gold cinematography - but it hasn't an ounce of suspense. There's really no story here, just a catalog of increasingly baroque murders. [19 June 1978, p.75]

Since we've lost our innocence, our "fun" movies have to be smarter than they used to be. Now that we're so much better informed and more miserable than we were a generation ago, dumbness is no longer charming for its own sake. But CAPRICORN ONE is just too dumb to be fun. We know too much about space shots, astronauts and moonwalks to swallow the dopey implausibility with which writer-director Peter Hyams tells his story of how sinister forces fake the first manned landing on Mars... But Brolin, Waterston and Simpson are just jump-suited dummies. O.J. displays more style, wit and grace in a one-minute Hertz commercial than he's allowed to show in this entire flick. [19 June 1978, p.75]

The whole movie has the air of a sermon delivered over an empty grave. In surfers' terms, Big Wednesday is a wipe-out. [14 Aug 1978, p.62]

This unpretentious, affectionate biography of the horn-rimmed Texas boy who changed the course of rock 'n' roll is a real movie, with a firm grasp on its characters, an honest-to-god plot and an old-fashioned heart. [26 June 1978, p.79]

The End initially promises to answer in disturbing comic form, mixing pathos and pratfalls to fashion a pitch-black comedy about a man freaking out on the edge of oblivion. But in the face of such a risky subject, director-star Reynolds and writer Jerry Belson get cold feet. [22 May 1978, p.72]

The wrong people made this movie, and its failure rankles. It's a handsomely designed, beautifully photographed production full of good actors who have been asked to play their roles in unfailingly hackneyed fashion. [01 May 1978, p.89]

A rousingly funny slapstick comedy about the day John, Paul, George and Ringo set off a tidal wave of adolescent hysteria in New York City. Surprisingly, nostalgia accounts for very little of the movie's charm. [01 May 1978, p.91]

In a project laden with pitfalls, Malle has kept his balance and produced an elegant, ironic and poignant film about our troublesome hearts, minds and bodies. [10 Apr 1978, p.106]

Small in scale, grittily realistic, charged with a fierce intelligence about how people live on the other side of the law, the film makes few concessions to an audience's expectations, but it has an edgy, lingering intensity. [03 Apr 1978, p.91]

It's strange energy - sexy, morbid, not quite human. There's an awful lot of blood in the movie and a lot of flesh, but there's little flesh and blood. The Fury is the work of a brilliant, droll, sadistic puppeteer. [20 Mar 1978, p.93]

In snuggling up so close to his heroine, Mazursky sacrifices some of the wild satrical highs we expect from him - the andante pacing could use a little more allegro (and a little less help from Bill Conti's overdone score). But we are more than rewarded by Muzursky's generosity and insight. He's burrowed deeper into the upper middle-class psyche than ever before, and if it's sometimes uncomfortable there, the unease is one we recognize as our own. [13 Mar 1978, p.75]

Admirable in many ways, Coming Home succumbs to the same American lust for romance and heroism for which it implicitly condemns its doomed Marine captain. [20 Feb 1978, p.87]

At first, Blue Collar looks like an interracial buddy movie. Then it shows signs of becoming a caper comedy. Finally - and powerfully - it turns out to be that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genuinely political film. And a damned good one at that. [13 Feb 1978, p.98]

Lynch comes amazingly close to the logic of dreams and nightmares, in which successive layers of reality seem to dissolve, sucking you into a terrifying vortex. [11 Sep 1978, p.95]

The period details are dryly elegant and painstakingly authentic. Yet the film feels underfed - there's not enough meat on the bones of the plot to warrant such opulence. [30 Jan 1978, p.55]

Shorn of its medical shock value, Coma is nothing more than Nancy Drew Goes to Surgery, a creaky blend of red herrings, ominous stares, stale cliff-hangers and doom-laden music. [06 Feb 1978, p.86]

[Aldrich's] aiming so low in The Choirboys that he's even lost his technical competence; the movie's not just fetid, it's inept. [02 Jan 1978, p.59]

For all its violence - the movie has an almost fetishistic fascination with the destructive power of gunfire - the mayhem in The Gauntlet is as harmless as a comic book. You don't believe a minute of it, but at the end of the quest, it's hard not to chuckle and cheer. [02 Jan 1978, p.59]

It's precisely at the finish line that Simon's calculations misfire and The Goodbye Girl collapses like a house of cards. The movie could have told us something about the wrenching collision of careers and romance, but it plays it safe, and in the end pays for it. [05 Dec 1977, p.109]

With such a broad satirical target, it's a shame that Ritchie's aim goes awry. Because Semi-Tough covers fresh territory, you keep rooting for it to connect. [28 Nov 1977, p.98]

The Turning Point has its flaws - some overwritten scenes and lapses into staginess and sentimentality - but they are those of heady excess and are easily forgiven. One has the sense of a project perfectly matched to the people who made it. [28 Nov 1977, p.97]

Both Henry Winkler and Sally Field have talent to spare, but there's just so far you can go with roles like these, and director Jeremy Paul Kagan, unable to settle on a tone, isn't any help. Winkler is too fresh and appealing by half - he acts like a man who's seen combat only on TV; he can't take us inside his pain. Field has to push her gamin charm to make up for the holes in her character, and she comes off actressy. When Ford is onscreen, the tinny echoes of old movies die away and Heroes takes on - briefly - the resonance of real life. [14 Nov 1977, p.78]

A genuine work of the popular imagination. It's the first true populist science-fiction film, a blend of the most startling, far-out special effects with the most ordinary human material of the American Heartland. [21 Nov 1977, p.88]

Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been just another sensationalist movie version of a shocking best seller. But Richard Brooks has filmed it with power, seriousness and integrity. [24 Oct 1977, p.126]

Coming from director Carl Reiner, whose Where' poppa? had flashes of real comic fire, one expects more than Hallmark platitudes wrapped in Vegas banter. [24 Oct 1977, p.126]

Even though Alvin Sargent's script lacks both grace and plausibility and director Sydney Pollack has succumbed to pretentions of European artiness, star chemistry might have made this love story catch fire. [03 Oct 1977, p. 71]

After the opening sequence, much of the action in The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth James Bond screen epic and the third starring Roger Moore as Bond, is somewhat downhill. [08 Aug 1977, p.77]

When the boys who play the Bears are on screen, which is often, their natural high spirits and spontaneity do much to enliven the tired script and soft direction. Kids will still find watching them vacation-time fun. But in the end, the Bad News Bears without Matthau, O'Neal and Ritchie is like the Mets without Tom Seaver - deep in the doldrums. [08 Aug 1977, p.77]

A patchwork affair held together by spit, a prayer and the volatile, baby-faced charm of Richard Pryor. [15 Aug 1977, p.77]

This lean, hard, ruggedly acted film is hardly ingratiating, but its clenched power has a cruel and compelling beauty. [04 July 1977, p.77]

Robert Redford need not worry that his golden-boy throne is in danger of being usurped by the ballyhooed newcomer Nick Nolte, whose performance here never transcends the boundaries of a Salem commercial...And anyone who can't help looking beyond the action for plausibility had better stay home. You're thinking too much if you can't accept Nolte's explanation for risking life and limb underwater: "I feel things, so I do 'em." And if you persist in wondering why no policeman ever gets curious about all these strange goings-on in sleepy little Bermuda, then you're nothing but a spoilsport. [27 June 1977, p.60]

This sequel is so laden with dubious, spurious, curious and tedious stuff about theology, parapsychology, entomology and speleology that it forgets to frighten you in its frantic concern with being hip in the fad world of the occult. The Heretic simply drowns in its own malarky. [27 June 1977, p.61]

An absorbing, well-crafted, honorable movie that seems almost as ambitious as the original operation itself. [20 Jun 1977, p.65]

I loved Star Wars and so will you, unless you're . . . oh well, I hope you're not...Star Wars is a hell of a lot of fun and Lucas makes fun a sparkling pop metaphor for the sheer joy of goodness that could even make friends out of men, mutations and machines.

Demme has lots of fun, and, aided by a fresh, talented cast, he artfully modulates his moods from raunchy farce to somber pathos. [17 Oct 1977, p.102]

Annie Hall is bracingly adventure-some and unexpectedly successful, with laughs as satisfying as those in any of Allen's other movies and a whole new staying power. Whether Annie Hall is autobiographical or not, it has enabled Allen to progress from the realm of simple self-representation to that of the artfully shaped self-portrait. [02 May 1977, p.78]

There's no suspense in either Demon Seed or Audrey Rose because their protagonists haven't got the resourcefulness of an acorn squash. [18 Apr 1977, p.64]

The movie's only real attempts to drum up excitement involve gratuitous violence. [04 Apr 1977, p.73]

The best thing about Black Sunday is its pulsating rhythm of suspense and the glittering texture of details it assembles as it drives its way toward its climax. [04 Apr 1977, p.73]

It had to happen. The most foulmouthed movie of all time has been written by a woman. Nancy Dowd's original screen-play for SLAP SHOT is a landmark. Like female jockeys, lesbian ministers and distaff sportscasters, this sharp-eared, engagingly impudent young writer has struck a blow for equal rights, a field that stretches from realms of the spirit to jock itch. The first in a coming avalanche of sports-oriented movies, this strenuously irreverent film about a minor-league hockey team in Middle America will set tongues wagging over every sports buff's beer glass, every culture-vulture's wine goblet, every pundit's brandy snifter. [7 Mar 1977, p.68]

Mary Rodgers's screenplay, based on her novel, supplies enough faintly Freudian undertones to pique a grownup's interest even further. Try to imagine how Annabel Andrews, a 13-year-old tomboy, must feel when she finds herself with a mature figure and a husband she suddenly starts calling "Daddy," and you begin to get the idea. [28 Feb 1977, p.72]

An offbeat, engaging little movie about the mad mad world of bodybuilders. [24 Jan 1977, p.61]

There is obviously a good deal of built in human interest in this material. But this movie squanders its most important resource - its people - by employing an all-star cast so huge and unwieldy that nobody is on hand long enough to exert much of an emotional tug. [27 Dec 1976, p.57]

Nickelodeon is Bogdanovich's sweet funny homage to the days before World War I when America played with its new toy, the movies, in those converted storefronts or jerry-built pantheons where for a nickel you could enter the new magic darkness of electric centuryIn that flickering, faintly salacious darkness, a new innocence was born. [27 Dec 1976, p.56]

Streisand is so overwhelming a presence that she can probably get away indefinitely with making movies as slipshod as this one. But it would be a shame if she were content to settle for that. [10 Jan 1977, p.64]

The updated King Kong doesn't really believe in itself; it snickers, straightens its face, roars and tramples, snickers again. Behind the bigness lurks a conventionality of spirit.It does have a certain thunderous fun from time to time, but that's not the stuff that dreams are made on. [20 Dec 1976, p.102]

The current installment is a bit funnier than its predecessor, but the success of the Panther series has never depended solely on laughs. Blake Edwards's slick, seamless directions makes even the flimsiest routines seem stylish; in addition to its comic virtues, this is one of the best-looking movies of its kind in recent memory. [27 Dec 1976, p.57]

Too halting and anecdotal to have much historical sweep, yet too broadly ambitious to achieve any biographical intimacy. [13 Dec 1976, p.104]

Rocky isn't really a movie about sports, but it works on the visceral level of a good sports event, generating blissfully uncomplicated excitement. [29 Nov 1976, p.113]

It isn't a comedy - it's a sluggish adventure movie about an L.A.-to-Chicago train trip that wastes two considerable talents. [13 Dec 1976, p.106A]

Peerce gives an unexpectedly sunny, picture-postcard feeling to a film that is rated R for violence. [22 Nov 1976, p.110]

Rohmer, whose films ("Claire's Knee," "My Night at Maud's") are all about desire chilled in the icebox of custom, has brilliantly reproduced the impact of this rationally irrational story: he captures Kleist's almost surreal effect of a grenade whose exploding fragments somehow arrange themselves into a classically formal pattern. [1 Nov 1976, p.83]

Using none of the sharp, ironic juxtapositions that lent its predecessors so much energy, Car Wash is content to be just a day in the life of the title establishment. [04 Oct 1976, p.89]

The movie merely piles on one special effect after another - none of them too special - and stalls for time. Even the title is a sham: nobody ever so much as lights a match. And nobody - not even the most gullible moviegoer - can expect to receive any present. [08 Nov 1976, p.108]

Marathon Man is an intelligent and largely satisfying thriller, written by William Goldman from his own novel, directed by John Schlesigner and photographed by Conrad Hall. But the most satisfying element is the work of Olivier, one of the few who turn acting into one of the great humane progressions of Western civilization. [11 Oct 1976]

A perversely appealing apotheosis of cuteness. Almost inadvertently, the film becomes an ultimate comment on American innocence that can only refresh itself by regression. The unseen patron saint of Parker's stylish movie is not Little Caesar but Humbert Humbert. [27 Sept 1976, p.89]

Gator is sloppily directed by Reynolds himself and filled with anti-ethnic humor that Reynolds has picked up from all those guest shots on the talk shows with Don Rickles et al. [13 Sep 1976, p.89]

Wayne's proud, quietly anguished performance, one of his very best and certainly his most moving, has a richness that seems born of self-knowledge; he lends the film a tremendous sense of intimacy and a surprisingly confessional mood. [16 Aug 1976, p.68]

The hinge of Lifeguard's almost nonexistent plot is whether or not Rick will decide to give up his beach whistle for a briefcase. But the film is also extremely well acted by a cast of little-known players who deserve to go on to better things. [02 Aug 1976, p.78]

The Omen is a dumb and largely dull movie. No true connoisseur of kitsch will confuse the work of writer David Seltzer and director Richard Donner with the masterpiece of psychic manipulation contrived by William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin in The Exorcist, not to mention what the diabolical Roman Polanski made out of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby. [12 July 1976, p.69]

Since this isn't one of your deep-think sci-fi movies, you look for the happy hardware to get you kicks. [4 July 1976, p.102]

Robert Moore, who has directed for the stage and television (Rhoda), in his feature-film debut has shown the good sense to give free rein to the inspired zaniness of his cleverest players. [04 July 1978, p.101]

Midway never quite decides whether war is hell, good clean fun, or merely another existential dilemma. This drab extravaganza toys with so many conflicting attitudes that it winds up reducing the pivotal World War II battle in the Pacific to utter nonsense. [28 June 1976, p.78]

The gags as usual vary in quality from gold to zinc, but what makes Silent Movie more than a string of gags is the comic sensibility of Brooks. [12 Jul 1976, p.69]

Penn and McGuane have made an intelligent, entertaining Western, nicely balanced between the protagonists and the well-woven, colorful tapestry in which they're placed. [24 May 1976, p.103]

The screenplay, by Rafelson and Charles Gaines from the latter's novel, has all the ingredients of an American Gothic, and that's what you get. But the theme of the young dropout who opposes the system with ironic apathy until something (usually something violent) needles him to action is moldy around the edges, and by now Jeff Bridges seems to be playing that role in his sleep. [17 May 1976, p.111]

Alan J. Pakula has succeeded brilliantly in converting that outworn myth into a brand-new myth that conforms to our time. Pakula drives moral and ideological meanings straight to your nervous system by the rhythms of his imagery and editing. But Pakula is subtler, less melodramatic. Redford and Hoffman really are ordinary guys doing an ordinary job. But film shows how their tenacity, their doggedness, become under pressure much more than mere professional virtues. [05 Apr 1976, p.85]

Because there is no point in worrying over hapless victims, the audience can devote its energies to trying to guess how the master will stage his next sneak attack. It's futile. At 76, Hitchcock is still one jump ahead. [05 Apr 1976, p.85]

Writer David Rayfiel and director Lamount Johnson are making murky connections between sex, religion, repression and the emotional sterility of avant-garde art. The result is both specious and seductive, a kitschy ode to the pervasive eroticism of contemporary culture. [12 Apr 1976, p.94]

The jaggedness will put many people off, which is a shame, because this is a rewarding film that asks only that you stay alert and use your senses. [15 Mar 1976, p.89]

Taxi Driver is a disturbing, frightening film, but it has the desperate excitement that goes with its vision of the city. Scorsese's verminous New York is a descendant of Baudelaire's "anthill" Paris, Eliot's "unreal" London, the nightmare Berlin of such German films as Fritz Lang's "M." In this vision the great modern city is the crossroads where fenced-off forces break loose and collide. The overworld and the underworld embrace each other in a dance of mutual lusts that can only lead to violence. [1 Mar 1976, p.82]

Sidney Lumet's film tries very hard to be an original blend of realism, black farce and probing comment on the McLuhanatic Age that creates instant show biz out of what used to be called life. [29 Sep 1975, p.84]

Seeking the sources of our alienation in the explosively random energies of the eighteenth century, Kubrick has created an epic of esthetic self-indulgence, beautiful but empty. He needs to come back to earth from the outer spaces of past and future. [22 Dec 1975, p.49]

The actors are wonderful, especially the women who play El Hadji's first two wives - ladies of magisterial personality, social shrewdness and sexual pride. The wedding sequence in Xala makes the one in "Godfather I" look like a wedding party at McDonald's. This allegory of impotence in the body politic shows Sembene on his way to becoming an African Moliere. [13 Oct 1975]

As a straight thriller Condor comes down to thrills that work and thrills that don't. [29 Sep 1975, p.84]

Perversely, it is a reverence for langauge - the most exciting aspect of Chandler's novels - that does the movie in. With a face like an old catcher's mitt, a beat-up bulk anesthetized by booze, Mitchum as Marlowe doesn't have to tell us a thing about himself. But tell us he does - in gumshoe-ese that echoes Chandler's language without its hallucinatory sparkle. [18 Aug 1975, p.73]

A tired piece of hackwork rescued only by the presence of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The whole enterprise moves in slow motion, with its programed music predicting each routine step. [07 July 1975, p.57]