Violence belongs in Dracula - the problem is simply that Badham is not good at it. Virtually every big action scene is confusingly staged and clumsily edited. It is particularly sad to report that Olivier is terribly misused. [23 Jul 1979, p.70]

Wilder is best at outrageous moments, teaching an impromptu hora to the Indians or babbling Yiddish to some Amish farmers he mistakes for rabbis. He is, in fact, an actor of moments, less likely to wear him when surrounded by the funny ensembles Brooks used to give him. Aldrich is not Brooks, but he has, in the past, made fine action films in which the male camaraderie was eloquently implicit. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a sledgehammer. [16 July 1979, p.93]

Price's vision was realistic and romantic at the same time, the violence painful but also sensual, the mood charged with a sweet hopelessness. Philip Kaufman's tough but tender film emphasizes this double vision. It's like Grease with brass knuckles. [16 July 1979, p.93]

Moonraker's only real imaginative surge comes in a rousing pre-credit sequence in which Bond is pushed out of an airplane and survives by deftly sky-diving to a parachutist and swiping his chute. After this, a bizarre blandness takes over. [2 July 1979, p.68]

This film has almost none of the scraggy, raunchy, irreverent anarchy that gave "Animal House" a kind of perverse anti-style. There's nothing at all perverse about Meatballs; in fact, it's so cutesy, squeaky-clean that it becomes Andy Hardy with a few extra belches. [9 July 1979, p.68]

Beautifully served by Eastwood's self-containment, which is less granitelike than usual (he has a soft spot for that mouse), Siegel sets these various escapes ticking like a time bomb. [22 July 1979, p.67]

Rocky II may be superfluous, but it works. And it's successful in exactly the same way the original was - as an adroit mixture of grit, guts and treacle that whips the audience into a frenzy of satisfied wish fulfillment. [25 June 1979, p.81]

The story is predictable, the science is dubious, the dialogue leaden and the acting indifferent. No matter. When Frankenheimer brings on his garish monster, it's as if the audience had never seen one before. Fear and tremblings shake the seats. [18 Jun 1979, p.54]

What makes The In-Laws so engaging is not simply the escalating madness of Andrew Bergman's story (such whimsy could easily grow tiresome), but the deadpan counterpoint supplied by the two stars, who navigate their way through mounting disasters with an air of hilariously unjustified rationality. Bergman's script was tailor-made for Falk and Arkin, and they make the most of it. [02 Jul 1979, p.68]

Lurid, illogical and utterly off-the-wall, this funny-scary exercise in low-budget schlock is a marvelous orgy of cheap thrills, including a supernaturally sinister mortuary, a hideously wriggling severed finger, one furry flying creature, dwarfs from the Undead, and the goriest - indeed the only - blood-sucking flying steel ball in movie history. [16 April 1979, p.86]

As tempting as it may be to herald Romero as the Swift of schlock, his shopping-mall metaphor is really little more than a clever gag. The director's technique has been refined since his "Living Dead" days, but his grasp of characters is still pretty crude, and he reveals himself to be an all-too-predictable liberal moralists when he singles out the woman and the black as the true heroes. These objections should not-and won't-keep Romero loyalists away. For blood, guts and chuckles, most horror fans will undoubtedly find Dawn of the Dead finger-lickin' good. [7 May 1979, p.90]

Over the Edge is a rabble-rouser--and a good, tough, darkly funny movie to boot. [28 Dec 1981, p.65]

It is perhaps not presumptuous to take the blind man as the director's image of his ideal viewer, but here, I think, Allen becomes overly cautious. Had the man been blind and deaf, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure would have achieved the stature of a true masterpiece. [11 Jun 1979, p.99]

In keeping with a morality tale on the excesses of wealth and power, it is extravagantly confusing, grandiosely paranoid, flamboyantly absurd and more than a little fun. Though it utterly lacks the internal consistency that "good" movies require, as a wild-goose chase it maintains a certain lunatic fascination. [04 Jun 1979, p.76]

In its sweet, witty and modestly sentimental way, it delivers the romantic frissons that many star-studded, would-be blockbusters of the heart lumber in vain to achieve. [30 Apr 1979, p.81]

Saint Jack should clear away all irrelevancies, reminding us that Bogdanovich is a gifted and distinctive director who should be making movies, not enemies. [07 May 1979, p.88]

The Champ is overcalculated to a fault. Like suspense, sentimentality should sneak up on you unexpectedly; when it's poured out like slop in a trough, it kills the appetite. This movie is so busy spilling its own tears that my own seemed quite superfluous. [09 Apr 1979, p.87]

The film is a class-act thriller, a fiendishly efficient example of emotional manipulation. But that's not all. With Jane Fonda heading the cast, it couldn't help but be a thriller with a very large social conscience, activated, of course, to warn against the dangers of nuclear power. As such, the movie is both ferociously effective and decidedly facile. Director James Bridge's suspense film is the most potent blend of tract and trash since the underrated "Three Days of the Condor." [19 March 1979, p.103]

Director J. Lee Thompson has come a long, depressing way since the days of The Guns of Navarone: his film is sloppily edited, murkily photographed and shot through with a mean streak of sadism unredeemed by its clumsy camp value. [12 Mar 1979, p.89]

Field comes off best under the circumstances - she has real spirit - but Leibman, too eager to be liked, hits all the stereotypes on the head and Bridges is saddled with an underwritten, utterly inexplicable character. What Norma Rae really tells us is that Hollywood is still capable of making condescending paeans to the "little people" with all the phoniness of yesteryear. [5 March 1979, p.105]

Director Walter Hill has only the faintest interest in realism. His New York City is merely the backdrop for a bone-crunching fantasy that has more to do with science fiction and musicals than social commentary. When it's good - which is not often enough - it suggests what The Wiz, under happier circumstances, might have been. [26 Feb 1979, p.81]

Until the very end, when the script turns to heavy-handed pontificating, writer John Hopkins and director Bob Clark spin a decent, gruesome yarn, tying together the Ripper murders, political radicalism, bizarre Masonic rituals, royal indiscretions and government cover-ups. [26 Feb 1979, p.81]

It's an engrossing tale, and Weir's languid, sun-dappled images are at once seductive and unnerving. Yet there's something hollow at the core, an unearned sense of importance, a reliance on mere mood to suggest mytsical depths. Why does Weir - and why should the audience - so easily accept these vanished schoolgirls as adolescent oracles, some sort of pagan Cassandras? The symbolic burden of Hanging Rock inevitably suggests the use of the Marabar Caves in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India," but the comparison only points up the shallowness of Weir's conception. His movie is stylish and entertaining, but what he is pushing as metaphysical profundity is closer to metaphysical mush. [5 March 1979, p.105]

For all its neon-lit expressionism and portentous, dread-inspiring music, Hardcore has almost nothing to say about its subject. Schrader doesn't explore any moral conflict, he just gives off attitudes - and banal, shopworn attitudes at that. [13 Feb 1979, p.57]

Director Donald Wrye handles this chestnut with restraint, scoring points about media madness and the fear of success without getting messagy. [05 Feb 1979, p.79]

There's not much depth to the charaterizations, but they're uncommonly vivid for a horror movie. You believe that these wildly disparate people are friends, and the growing sexual affection between Sutherland and Adams is conveyed with a nice, understated warmth. [18 Dec 1978, p.85]

One can forgive the orangutan's participation - he couldn't read the script - but what is Eastwood's excuse? James Fargo directed, every which way but well. [08 Jan 1979, p.60]