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]

Cooley High is a less artfully arranged film than American Graffiti. But it has the same cultural exactness - without the smug assumption of shared nostalgia. It is a smart, very affecting movie. [21 July 1975, p.64]

Rollerball isn't a movie; it's a protest demonstration - producer-director Norman Jewison's feeble complaint about both the increasing brutality in professional sports and the increasing sterility of modern life. Trendy concerns, sure enough, but the movie's only contribution could well be the introduction of its brutal, eponymous game to an already sport-surfeited society. [07 July 1975, p.56]

With characteristic Hollywood hypocrisy, the movie sells male chauvinism as it knocks it and ridicules winning while it uses who's-gonna-win as its central energy. [14 Jul 1975, p.77]

Jaws is a grisly film, often ugly as sin, which achieves precisely what it set out to accomplish - scare the hell out of you. As such, it's destined to become a classic the way all truly terrifying movies, good or bad, become classics of a kind. [23 June 1975, p.54]

The comic heart of the movie lies in the absolute aplomb and imperturbable self-confidence with which Sellers, as Clouseau, confronts the catastrophes of his own making. [21 July 1975, p.66]

If the movie ultimately doesn't work, this can be said in Frankenheimer's defense: that, with every right and probably much pressure to do so, he refused to rip off The French Connection as so many films with other names already had. [26 May 1975, p.84]

One is left longing for Mike Nichols, the brilliant satirist who made us laugh at our foibles, but who seems to have given way to a cynical, grimly grinning moralist. [26 May 1975, p.84]

The movie begs comparison with the book only because every alteration has made the story so much less interesting and intriguing than its source. Obvious and mushy beneath its dazzling surface, the film fails on its own terms. [12 May 1975, p.104]

In Brannigan, John Wayne carries on his new career as an urban cop with all the ease of a corraled mustang. [14 Apr 1975, p.92]

Russell has created what is surely the loudest, most assaultive movie musical ever made and stretched the genre into a new realm - the phantasmagorical nightmare. [24 Mar 1975, p.24]

Shampoo achieves a fine comic distance by setting itself so specifically in the past, but it doesn't - to its credit - try to get you, in the present, off the hook. [10 Feb 1975, p.51]

A shallowly satiric suburban joke that says some ugly and unsupported things about what kind of women men really want. [03 Mar 1975, p.70]

The Wild Bunch still retains its sorrowful, fatal power because of the complexity of Peckinpah's attitudes about violence. He forces us to confront our own voyeuristic ambivalence; we're alternately horrified by the butchery and exhilarated by the orgiastic energy his balletic spectacles stir up.

It's at once an embittered lament and a poignant elegy, much like his masterwork Citizen Kane, which muses on a lost time.

Why is this movie Hitchcock's masterpiece? Because no movie plunges us more deeply into the dizzying heart of erotic obsession...The older you get, and the m ore times you see it, the more strange, chillingly romantic thriller pierces your heart.

But the thing about Carol Reed's 1949 The Third Man was that no matter how many times I saw it over the years its magic never failed. Its sophisticated, world-weary glamour never lost its allure. The movie only got richer as my own experiences got richer. I kept discovering dark new delights, and the classic moments remained every bit as classic.

The more fanatic Ozophiles may dispute M-G-M's remodeling of the story, but the average movie-goer – adult or adolescent – will find it novel and richly satisfying to the eye.