There are individual sequences alternately amusing and touching. [08 May 1984]

The picture is slightly too long, there are some special effects (especially during a storm at sea) that don't come off, and Vangelis's electronic moans on the soundtrack are sporadically anachronistic, but The Bounty is otherwise a spectacularly sustained piece of epic filmmaking. [04 May 1984]

A cheap pickup from the Playboy Channel that was too soft for Playboy but appropriately raunchy for the college movie crowd. [27 Apr 1984]

The appeal of the Friday the 13th cycle is difficult for any one who has not seen the movies on a Saturday night in a packed theatre to understand: they are an exercise in collective adolescent camp. As each victim falls to Jason's wrath, the kids cheer and laugh, and the gorier the death, the better. By the standards of that audience, part four is perfection: there are more gruesome homicides than Pauline had perils. [17 Apr 1984]

Despite the quick succession of sight gags director Hugh Wilson engineers in the film, Police Academy has it weak moments, particularly with Steve Guttenberg and Kim Cattrall in the leads. [23 Mar 1984]

There is no psychology in L'Argent, no acting to speak of; every scene is a minimal sketch which drives the didactic story forward. This use of narrative may sound ordinary, but, in Robert Bresson's pure filmmaking, it becomes extraordinarily relentless. [20 July 1984]

A non-stop, shoestring trip with more adventures and a helluva lot more smarts than you'll find in most American movies...All in all, there's more plain fun to be had here in 10 minutes than in a whole hour on the road with that jerk Indiana Jones.

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

This fictional "rockumentary" about a mediocre, aging heavy-metal band's last tour of America is surprisingly modest, subtle and funny. Not only is this the kind of satiric treatment rock music has been crying out for, it may be one of the most original film comedies in years. [20 Apr 1984]

Certainly, this is meant to be a bittersweet tale of the ties that bind the generations, of the love-hate relationship between a demanding Daddy and his amiable offspring. But nothing really develops, nothing ever connects. [02 Mar 1984]

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

Though it leaves no sex and danger cliche unturned, Lassiter is a lightweight, but briskly entertaining and stylish genre film. [20 Feb 1984]

Splendidly viewed through Gordon Willis' gleaming black and white cinematography, the story of Danny Rose, narrated by a group of aged comics reminiscing at the Carnegie Deli, becomes a bittersweet examination of dreams that don't come true. [27 Jan 1984]

Mostly I laughed at the idea that Steve Martin could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy, and that Arthur Hiller, who directed this, or Neil Simon, who adapted it, or Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels, who wrote it, could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy. [28 Jan 1984]

The Keep has opened just in time - if it had waited another couple of weeks, it would have been the worst horror movie of 1984 and there wouldn't have been anything to look forward to all year. [17 Dec 1983]

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

D.C. Cab is a high-energy comedy in desperate search for the big laugh. So desperate that the film has the manic pace of a sitcom gone bonkers. The score pounds, the cars careen, but the laugh is never found. And a few chuckles are a minor reward for a major assault. [19 Dec 1983]

Silkwood is a friendly, kooky and caring film. [09 Dec 1983]

Scarface is a B- movie with singularly silly psychological pretensions: its neo-primitivism is to the complex moral cosmos of Francis Coppola's "Godfather" saga as Disney is to Dickens. [09 Dec 1983]

When Christine's on the warpath, she foams at the grille. But her movie doesn't do right by her snottiness. Her movie, never scary but campily entertaining for about an hour, loses compression toward the end and the grumpy old thing finally sputters to a stall - gets flattened, poops out. [09 Dec 1983]

Wonderfully directed - the interiors are lit like Caravaggio, the action sequences are smooth as a well-oiled .38) - but is less than wonderful, unless you're the kind of moviegoer who loves to cheer when human "vermin" gets its guts blown out. [10 Dec 1983]

Terms of Endearment is the rare commercial picture that sets audiences to laughing hysterically and crying unashamedly, sometimes within consecutive seconds, and then shoos them out of the theatre in contented emotional exhaustion. [23 Nov 1983]

Needless to say, what's refreshing about A Christmas Story is subversive to the sepia-toned and loving references to the forties which director Bob Clark has provided for the film. The fictional Parker family that Shepherd has written about for 20 years is not as gentle or gauzy as they first appear. It's possible to imagine them so preoccupied with their own problems, whether dealing with the neighbor's dogs or winning a mail- order contest, that they could forget Christmas altogether. [25 Nov 1983, p.E5]

There is not really anything that could be called suspense in Amityville 3-D, at least, any more than the suspense involved in waiting for a pop tart to pop. [22 Nov 1983]

Fosse carries the movie to its conclusion steadily and superlatively, with a directness that is devastating and with a depth of insight that ameliorates, if only slightly, the ghastliness of the carefully choreographed images. [10 Nov 1983]

The Dead Zone, from the book by Stephen King, a horror novelist whose prolific output is the scariest thing about him, is academic filmmaking all the way, a crafty Establishment tour de force. [21 Oct 1983]

A surprisingly large portion of the picture is given over to a gritty and unexpectedly moving examination of a senseless but understandable feud between two wrongheaded, sincere people making all the wrong moves. [21 Oct 1983]

THE THREE hours and 10 minutes of The Right Stuff fly by faster than a plane snapping the sound barrier - there's never a moment that's not entertaining, and there are very few that are not wonderfully photographed and choreographed - but for the non-American, the excitement is confined to the filmmaking. [22 Oct 1983]