It's a pleasant, unprepossessing picture of gliding charm and buoyant silliness, a fragile craft unencumbered by the weighty sophistication of camp, and it's one of the nicest surprises of the season. [17 Dec 1982]

The plot makes the casting look inspired. More than inane, it's offensive. [14 Dec 1982]

A quick and clever thriller as nasty as a piece of shrapnel snapping the sound barrier, 48 Hrs. is as violent as it is funny. It is very funny. [03 Dec 1982]

The film is a respectable, claustrophobic and slick piece of work, and cinematographer Nestor Almendros' color strategies - Rembrandt-like light at night, lemony tones during the day, desaturated sepia at Auschwitz - are arty to a fault. [14 Dec 1982]

Gone from the glittering original are most of the charm and all of the humor, deflating a bright balloon into little more than the rubbery flatness of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Creepshow is probably not everything the fans of each horrormeister hoped it would be (it is not, for example, in the same league as Cavalcanti's great anthology film, Dead of Night), but it's probably enough.[10 Nov 1982]

A sadly miscalculated affair, a frigidly uninvolving interlude of torpid romanticism: welcome to Shivering Heights. [08 Nov 1982]

First Blood is a gung-ho action flick fast enough and brutal enough to become Stallone's first non-Rocky hit; on the profound sympathetic levels it seeks to address, however, it is an emission of profound stupidity. [22 Oct 1982]

Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace is not, as can be gathered, a born auteur, but he is crafty at timing the jumpies - despite a silliness that increases as the movie goes on, there are enough left-field shocks to please even the most discriminating fan of what American Film has dubbed the "genre non grata. [25 Oct 1982]

When the picture is good, it inspires hope and affection; when it's bad, it calls forth sighs and whispers. Lookin' To Get Out is a failure, but it's the kind of failure you feel sorry for. [11 Oct 1982]

There is one egregious misstep: the photographs of mutilated Vietnamese bodies which appear on the screen during the song, Time Is On My Side, which is grotesque and fundamentally dishonest. No major band has been less interested in politics than The Rolling Stones, and that's what makes Let's Spend The Night Together so infuriating. It purports to be about something momentous, but has absolutely nothing to say. In that, at least, Ashby's film captures perfectly the spirit of the Stones' 1981 tour. [11 March 1993]

O'Toole's performance transforms a mundane movie into one of the most scintillating, enjoyable comedies of the year. [01 Oct 1982]

The picture is an inventory of film noir effects and attitudes, but Wenders has nothing new to say about the style, about the period, about Hammett or about the creative process. The Hammett case can be closed: a case of massive esthetic masturbation. [18 Sep 1982]

You will die at the hands of Zed's unborn son. Shucks, those wicked witches sure had a way of taking the fun out of life. Luckily for scheming kings, sadly for blameless movie-goers, such party-pooping prophecies are now mainly confined to formulaic flicks like The Beastmaster. [23 Aug 1982]

If the publicity release can be believed, he worked an entire year "undercover as a student to research teenage life". On the basis of what surfaces here - one stock phrase (the kids say "Go for it]" a lot) and a multitude of stock characters - Crowe might better have spent the time curled up with re-runs of Ozzie and Harriet. Give this intrepid researcher 12 months at General Motors and he might just discover the wheel.

There is precious little story. Instead, there is a promiscuous profusion of images, a rant of optic free association that makes Ken Russell's Tommy appear a marvel of well-rounded narrative... A trip movie, in the old sixties sense, but it's a bad trip, a numero uno bummer. [17 Aug 1982]

There must be a musical somewhere in the musty vaults of movie history as bad as The Pirate Movie, but I'm at a loss to recall it - speaking comparatively, this unclean thing imparts to Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu the delicacy and charm of a moment with Fred Astaire. It makes you long for The Blue Lagoon. It encourages you to baste yourself in that masterpiece of oily ennui, Summer Lovers. It makes an evening with Kate Smith look good; hell, it makes an evening with Margaret Trudeau look good. [9 Aug 1982]

With Things Are Tough All Over their once well-oiled comedy has rusted firmly into place. Now, the erstwhile darlings of the counter-culture seem about as raucously rebellious as a senescent Lucy Ricardo. [2 Aug 1982]

A mish-mash that is further hindered by Howard's trite ideas of directing. Plot and camera moves are entirely predictable, with Howard so out of his depth that he often resorts to blackouts, or rather greenouts, when he doesn't know how to curtail a scene.

From its title on down, An Officer and a Gentleman (at the Plaza) is both a thoroughly rousing crowd-pleaser and a shamelessly manipulative banner-waver, a homage to the never-practiced ethics of a non-existent era. [28 Jul 1982]

Writer Tesich, previously responsible for Four Friends and Breaking Away, serves Irving's material straight up - the adaptation is thorough and four-square and seemingly unconscious of the bizarre nature of Garp's odyssey through modern mores. The strategy works. [23 July 1982]

Entertainments like this are what Hollywood is said to be all about: larger than life personalities redeeming material smaller than a breadbox. [23 July 1982]

If the title is half-familiar, the contents are wholly surprising. Happily, all of the bitterness is gone. Sadly, so has most of the humor. What remains is a conclusion startling but unmistakable - Woody Allen has grown bland. [16 July 1982]

A bouncy, witty, pleasurably scary children's movie that adults will enjoy more than they may care to confess. [02 July 1982]

In the end, this musical is not a disgrace - Huston has too much experience to let the thing die. But he cannot summon the magic required to let it live. Watching Annie is like being buried alive in balloons. [21 May 1982]

When the plot isn't lagging, it displays holes sufficiently gaping to accommodate a whole squadron of Firefoxes. [19 June 1982]

It's one modern film worthy of being called a contemporary classic. [2002 re-release]

The one surprise, in a product purposely designed not to surprise, is the performance of Connie Stevens as Yvette Mason, the good-looking but aging and overweeningly vain "fun" teacher every high school student has run across ("I love your hair, Miss Mason," cracks one of the coeds, "all 300 pounds of it"). Somehow, Miss Stevens pulls a character out of cotton candy. [11 June 1982]

A funnier, faster, altogether more energetic film than Star Trek I, The Wrath of Khan doesn't linger over its modest special effects. This is really down-home week with Captain - now Admiral - Kirk and the boys. [5 June 1982]

For Steven Spielberg, who confines his Midas touch here to the roles of co-writer and producer, has refreshingly set out to reverse the standard ratio of the standard scare flick - that is, to frighten us a little and charm us a lot. Even more refreshingly, he succeeds. [4 June 1982]

Rocky III, unlike its twin predecessors, is a charmlessly manipulative movie. The magic is kaput. [28 May 1982]

The Escape Artist looks as if it may be intended for children, but it's so fuzzy in detail and character that it fails in its premise as either adventure or fantasy. [29 May 1982]

Just as John Carpenter seems to generate box-office smashes incidentally to his search for intriguing shades of blue, Miller is so enthused with his camera angles that the movie has ended before he's aware there's only 20 lines of dialogue in it and not a single character better defined than Max's mutt. [22 May 1982]

An excessively brutal adventure comic book is exactly what it has set out to be - a medieval Heavy Metal. [14 May 1982]

Wrong Is Right shows the comic subtlety of The Jeffersons on a slow night. Everything else may be topsy-turvy in the world, but unfunny still isn't funny even in the Oval Office. [15 May 1982]

Even if your idea of a good time is watching a man dressed as a malevolent oak tree extend his branches and literally tear a woman's heart from her chest, I think you ought to pass on The Sword and the Sorcerer. [26 Apr 1982]

This film is all shiny inspirational veneer. It leads you to issues but it won't let you think...It may be good for you, but it's not entertainment. And it may not be good for you: lurking at the penumbra of the film's sunny celebration of brotherhood is the faint but unmistakable shadow of anti-Semitism. [26 Sept 1981]

Cat People, a remake by the not noticeably gifted director Paul Schrader, of a 1942 RKO mood piece about a lady who thought herself capable of turning into a panther, is many things, not every one of them bad: as a B-movie, this fantasy of a young woman who develops the distressing habit of changing shape after sex is moderately entertaining. [05 Apr 1982]

It's obvious Some Kind Of Hero was never meant to be more than what it is - a cute "uplifting" comedy - but Pryor's performance pushes your expectations. It makes you wish someone would give him an honest dramatic part, and that he could work with a director who wouldn't let him get away with his transparent heart-tugging tricks. Director Michael Pressman has a good touch with his actors, but falters structurally to accommodate Kirkwood's script. [3 Apr 1982]

Eating Raoul is often very funny, but it guns down its targets (hot tubs, taco stands) without revealing anything new about them - it's broader than parody, less pointed than satire - and it crudely manipulates the audience into congratulating itself on its own hipness. [15 Oct 1982]

Porky's is crafty, offensive retro-fantasy for one gender. [20 Mar 1982]

As a psychological thriller, it's not so much either thrilling or psychological as it is wonderfully absurd. [25 Mar 1982]

There may be almost nothing about this comedy that is new; but there is almost nothing about this comedy that is not funny...Victoria/Victoria is marvellous vaudeville. [19 March 1982]

Missing, which should easily turn out to be one of the year's best films, is essentially the taut, moving story of three people, two countries and one institution. [13 Feb 1982]

A serious and funny and subtle work - a work of art - that was easy to confuse with exploitation teeny-bopper quickies because it did what the quickies had tried to do. But Diner did it right. [22 Apr 1982]

The Loveless is neither trashy nor fun. It's art - or so it thinks, but its self-consciousness is grating and its congratulation of the audience for getting the camp is patronizing. [10 Sep 1982]

Deserves - to be "watched" with steam on the windshield and passion in the air. When the monster in a monster flick packs all the fearsome wallop of an overripe avocado, one needs some diversion.[8 June 1982]

While no classic, this yarn, directed by Australian Fred Schepisi, is solid entertainment. [30 Jan 1988]

The title is a tease: Quest For Fire is the quest for understanding, the quest for an answer, the quest for The Answer. Quest For Fire maintains that in the space of 80,000 years we have walked a long, long way, and have come scarcely any distance at all. [12 Feb 1982]

A tough, effective, socially conscious melodrama in the old Warner Brothers tradition. [15 Feb 1982]

This is insubstantial stuff, light as laughter, and every bit as fleeting. [13 Feb 1982]

One of the gorier and more witless horror films in recent memory. [19 Apr 1982]

As torpedoes shoot through the seas and depth charges pass by, carrying their whining cargo of destruction, Das Boot brings the presence of death to within a whisper of the eardrum.

What advance publicity has been powerless to suggest is that Personal Best is an exceptionally well-crafted, thoroughly accurate, emotionally galvanizing piece of filmmaking, easily one of the most intelligent explorations of competition on cinematic record. What's best about Personal Best is a lot more than just personal .[5 Feb 1982]

The reach of this sprawling, ambitious epic often exceeds its grasp. It has something in common with its hero. [5 Dec 1981]

Any chance the film might have had is trashed at the outset by Chase's disengaged style of non- acting and blas approach to pants-dropping. [28 Dec 1981]

Absence of Malice is lively, provocative and intelligent, three qualities in short supply this Christmas. It simplifies, but it rarely distorts, and it doggedly picks at sores journalists would just as soon banish by Band-aid. [19 Dec 1981]

A rancid, violent police picture starring and directed by Burt Reynolds who, like bad news, is everywhere this year. [19 Dec 1981]

In concert with composer Bill Conti and scriptwriter Larry Gelbart, Neighbors has become a hyper insult festival in which four people pointlessly humiliate each other in a variety of increasingly vicious ways. Sample dialogue: "Leave that warthead alone. C'mon, we've got cesspools to suck." It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Shavian wit of The Gong Show, for the genteel grace of Saturday afternoon wrestling. [19 Dec 1981]

Miss Fonda has thought to make a thriller out of that unthrilling process. [12 Dec 1981]

Fonda and Hepburn work gallantly against the mythic: Norman and Ethel are specific people, New Englanders, a middle-class pair without any special abilities or beliefs that might ease their slide into the oblivion at the end of life. They are Every Couple, delineated with a sharpness that only two consummate professionals working at the peak of their powers could provide. [18 Dec 1981]

Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]

Time Bandits is the best children's picture since The Black Stallion, but it is a satiric, inventive, fantastical vacation for the filmgoer of any age: imagine an intelligent Raiders of the Lost Ark with a deeply bitchy sense of humor. [06 Nov 1981]

When it's good, it's because it's imitating its predecessor (but it suffers from tired spilled blood) and when it's bad, it's because it's imitating its own imitators. [31 Oct 1981]

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

Two great beginnings disappoint in the end. If the novel is a dying form, film treatments are the poison. [21 Sep 1981]

The synthesis is a revealing and extremely funny portrait of urban schizophrenia in the waning years of the twentieth century. [21 May 1982]

One of the pleasures of "Old Acquaintance" was watching two fanged pros chew scenery. One of the pleasures of Rich and Famous is watching two toothless amateurs gum everything in sight, including each other (the penultimate confrontation, when the teddy bear, symbol of the friendship, is ripped into stuffing, is outrageously funny). [10 Oct 1981]

Any picture in which Burt Reynolds is a man unable to find a woman willing to have his child is quite clearly a limber farce and, sure enough, the most thoroughly stretched joke in Paternity, written by Charlie Peters and directed by Winnipeg comedian David Steinberg, is how utterly wrong Reynolds is for the role of Buddy Evans. [3 Oct 1981]

If Corman productions are lacking originality, ideas and expertise, they are at least devoted to the proposition that the attention span of the modern audience is shorter than the time it takes to soft boil an egg, and they are paced accordingly. Galaxy of Terror is one of the few films in existence that actually moves faster than its trailer. [26 Apr 1982]

The Face is her face, the mannerisms are her mannerisms and Miss Dunaway manages magnificently to depict a woman whose acting off- screen is no better than her acting on.This is theoretically a modern horror movie about mother love but it is actually one of the funniest movies about how not to make a movie ever made. [25 Sept 1981]

The specifics of Hill's movie - and despite its straining for universality, it is all specifics - come approximately a decade too late; in the wake of Who'll Stop the Rain and Apocalypse Now (and even that great B-movie anti-war movie, The Big Red One), it sinks like an insignificant stone. [24 Oct 1981]

A patchwork quilt of clashing colors, but it's cozy and warm. [10 Oct 1981]

Hurt is so good at capturing the charming and chilling Ned that he almost makes up for the film's two primary weaknesses: Kasdan's inexperience and a message of significant unpleasantness. [28 Aug 1981, p.P17]

Divided into five parts, the film is the most ambitious, realistic, thorough and scrupulous feature yet released by a major studio on the subject of cops and corruption...As portrayed electrifyingly - sometimes a little too electrifyingly - by Williams, Ciello's reasons for becoming a stoolie are as complex as his reasons for becoming a cop. [29 Aug 1981]

Heavy Metal is a first-class entertainment for the class of people whose eardrums are as strong as the pans of a steel band, whose nerves could be used to conduct electricity and whose fantasies tend to the leathery: it is, in other words, a movie for horny, hell-raising teen- agers. [7 Aug 1981]

Condorman, the new Disney Studios film, has the odd exploding car or boat in it, but it is sheer amiability. [18 Aug 1981]

Victory, the new film by 74-year-old John Huston, is a civilized, professional, old-fashioned entertainment about men in groups. The picture is being hyped as a story of human spirit, prevailing against impossible odds, but it's a lot more low-key and a great deal more enjoyable than that. It's the story of the wake left by a great director sailing smoothly at half-mast. [31 July 1981]

This denouement, even without its obviously reprehensible politics, is weak; it's also extremely confusing and confused. It does, however, manage to catch that nebulous ideological zone where white man's guilt, which decries the technological greed of our dog-eat-dog world, can go overboard in justifying the natural appetite of dog-eat-man. [27 July 1981]

TARZAN The Ape Man, in which Bo Derek (the 10 of 10) is Jane to newcomer Miles O'Keeffe's mute Tarzan (his chests are bigger than hers), takes 45 minutes to get to the reasons the film may have attracted an audience. As nearly as I can figure, based on the soft-core porn of the advertisements, the reasons are three: two belong to Miss Derek, one to O'Keeffe. But although Miss Derek's reasons do receive screen time (O'Keeffe's reason remains unviewed, to the vocal scorn of women in the audience), this topless Tarzan is not soft-core porn, which might justify, on a utilitarian basis, its existence. It's not that good. [25 July 1981]

A well-crafted, well-acted anomaly: a film good enough to raise its aim and our expectations but not to score a direct hit. So one leaves simultaneously pleased and disappointed, asking the right question - "What if?" - but for all the wrong reasons. [25 July 1981]

Arthur constantly flirts with the trite and dallies with the excessive. But it goes steady with neither, and so makes for a very pleasant companion on a warm summer eve. [17 July 1981]

The real lesson of Zorro the Gay Blade is that Melvin Simon Production had a huge budget to play with - and a lonely little pun to spend it on. [18 July 1981]

The premise, nearly miraculous in its banality, is not failed by the execution, which unblushingly operates at the level of somnambulism. [13 July 1981]

A movie so pungent and filled with sweaty intensity that you can practically smell the rank body odour of the film's subjects as they hurl their bodies against each other in a frenzy of aggression or perform as if in a trance, soaked with perspiration.

It's a satire inferior to the thing it satirizes. [3 July 1981]

IN THE BEGINNING, Ivan Reitman begat Animal House and Animal House begat Meatballs and Meatballs begat Stripes. In the end, the box-office deity surveyed this handiwork and pronounced it good. Good and stale. For you can tamper with the setting, you can fiddle with the cast but, by all that's holy in the land of the cash flow, don't ever mess with a lucrative premise. [27 June 1981]

Director Robbins is a natural - he has managed to make a movie that is entertaining despite the handicap of having a main character who is at best a black hole. [30 June 1981]

Farrah Fawcett offers to this corrupt "entertainment" a small measure of the fresh innocence Marilyn Monroe used to bring to her movies; watching her work under these circumstances is like watching a maiden being thrown to Moloch. [22 June 1981]

Raiders of the Lost Ark (at the Eglinton) is a cinematic roller-coaster, thrilling and frightening in equal measure, a heart-pounding slide down greased lightning. [12 June 1981]

Never as spectacular as it promises, often funnier than it intends, Clash of the Titans is a harmless diversion - neither bad enough to annoy nor good enough to admire. [15 June 1981]

Mel Brooks, the writer, director and producer of History of the World, is an ecologically sound filmmaker, a staunch adherent of recycling. If you laugh the second or third time, you defend the repetition as a variation on a theme; if you don't laugh, the charges are self-plagiarism and lack of imagination. [13 June 1981]

Waters uses the tawdry in satirical celebration of itself - he's the red satin tassled plush pillow of filmmaking. [17 Sep 1981]

Partly because of Alda's comedy training on television, he has succeeded in making, for two thirds of its length, an amusing and very commercial film. But the last part shows him failing at what he really wanted to do. [23 May 1981]

Even without a chronological point of reference, Outland has an intriguingly realistic look. Unfortunately, both the realism and the intrigue begin and end with the sets. [25 May 1981]

What Death Hunt is a piece of is neither entertaining nor educational. [18 Apr 1981]

The same covey of kids assemble at a summer camp to meet their predictable fate. Once again, their thespian talents defy assessment, since most hang around just long enough to take off the limited clothes of the American teen-ager and take on the limited role of the bloody victim - both acts performed just once, always in that order. [04 May 1981]

There are some genuinely witty lines, but The Hand is no comedy. In the end, it must rank as one of the more original efforts to find danger in mundane places. [18 May 1981]