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]