The result is 50 percent more realistic than the average sports film.

None of these issues are fully resolved, but just enough ... and that’s what makes On Golden Pond cinema gold.

[Lange's] allure is staggering. If you've never seen her in this film - if you've never seen the young Jessica Lange, except in "Tootsie" - prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor.

“Meat’s meat and a man’s gotta eat” is the kind of line that makes this an offbeat horror treat. Some moments are satirical of other horror films, yet they carry a horrific impact, so you may not have much time to laugh before fright sets in.

It is filled with lavish battle scenes and sharply scripted intrigue, and is among Kurosawa's greatest triumphs. [17 Apr 2005]

The bloodshed is somewhat less gory than in many slasher films -- with stress on the "somewhat." [26 Sep 2004]

Unreconstructed fans of Chevy Chas, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight or Bill Murray might find something to guffaw at in this lamebrained movie that purports to be a satire on country club life but makes everybody look like slobs. Except - perhaps - a little Irish wench named Sarah Holcomb and the gopher who tears up the golf course. Should have put the gopher to work on the script.

The balance between action and mysticism in The Empire Strikes Back provides fascinating energy. It's as if the kids are given one set of delights, the bravado of battles and elaborate warships zooming through exotic space, and adults are given another, a layered explanation of what it all means in the grand scheme of things. [Special Edition]

Overall it's a remarkably eccentric work coming from a cagey old Hollywood hand who directed Bogart and Hepburn in their primes. [28 Jun 2009, p.Q30]

One of the most original thrillers of the 1980s. It's a lurid, twisted film that brings you into its world and completely works you over.

Starring Linda Blair and directed by Mark Lester, this 1979 film was made too late to cash in on the roller-skating craze that briefly swept parts of California in the 1970s. The story is inconsequential, but the camp value is high. [26 Nov 2000]

The Wanderer can turn an anxious tone to creepy and phantasmagoric. Kaufman's brilliant camera work relies on the exaggerated style of comic books, and the visual energy throughout is gritty.

Feels like a streamlined improvement on the original.

One of the most hauntingly beautiful mysteries ever created on film.

Days of Heaven is a visual poem. Slow and elegant, reverential in the way it celebrates the earth's contours and the play of light. [27 Oct. 1999, p.B3]

This movie borders on the ridiculous, but is pulled back by an aesthetic portrayal of the supernatural and by its stars.

Grease isn't a four-star musical. It's fluffy and unimportant, and it gets tedious toward the end with the car-racing sequence that Kleiser staged in the paved-in-concrete Los Angeles River. The friskiness of the performers, the choreography by Patricia Birch and most of all Travolta's phenomenal charm give it its value.

This is the defining feminist film of the decade and one of the most important women's vehicles in popular American cinema. [15 Jan 2006, p.28]

A forgotten masterpiece.

Star Wars, set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” is the most exciting picture to be released this year — exciting as theater and exciting as cinema. It is the most visually awesome such work to appear since “2001: A Space Odyssey,” yet is intriguingly human in its scope and boundaries.

Elaine May (left), known for making comedies, wrote and directed this brilliant crime film, which easily ranks among the best movies of 1977. [09 Jan 2005]

The drama surrounding the romance gets a little too precious -- though I loved it 15 years ago; maybe I'm getting cynical -- but everything else is excellent, including Jack Nicholson, who is subtle and sly in a small, key role. [18 Jan 2004]

A paranoid, prurient sexual nightmare.

Its deeply anarchic sensibility has kept Taxi Driver fresh all these years. [20th Anniversary Release]

The film's tone is extraordinarily flexible, holding within the same reality elements of the absurd, the ridiculous and the comic while sustaining a sense of tension and dread throughout. This is, of course, one of the classic Pacino roles - he's so appealing - but don't overlook the late John Cazale as his accomplice, who gives us a character who's stupid and scared, troubled and dangerous, and disturbingly inscrutable.

This is one of Kubrick's best, not gimmicky or arch, not somnambulant or mannered, just finely detailed, measured, richly photographed and, at every step of the way, entertaining and interesting.

Watching the film is like being at a freak show: You feel like a voyeur, yet you can't take your eyes off this Mommie Dearest or her childlike middle-aged daughter.

Bite the Bullet is epic Americana, gorgeously filmed, and a candidate for most underrated film of the 1970s. [10 Jun 2012, p.20]