The only memorable facet of The Blue Lagoon (at the York) is the visual prowess of the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros - but here the photography, unlike his work in Days of Heaven or Kramer Vs. Kramer, is too great. It's all there is, and its monumental beauty overwhelms the fragile orchids-and-jockstraps pastoral of the narrative, with its faux naif philosophy. [12 July 1980]

The Stunt Man, which is scary and sorrowful and stirring and sexy - in other words, everything a big Hollywood popcorn-cruncher of a movie should be - is the best movie about making a movie ever made. [11 Oct 1980]

David Keith, a native of Tennessee, had a tiny role in The Rose (as Bette Midler's soldier friend) and he is one of the few in the Brubaker cast whose accent is authentic and who appears to have the wherewithal to survive in a penitentiary. His scenes are the only respite from the movie's shrill, simplistic self-congratulation. [21 June 1980]

Under Don Siegel's flag, no new territory is surveyed and the destination is familiar, but the journey proves to be a comfortable one and the victory waiting at the end is far from Pyrrhic. [19 June 1980]

Casting Eastwood in a friendly, bumbling, light romantic lead is like asking Ethel Merman to sing a lullaby: in the end, nothing is forthcoming but overkill. Clint Eastwood was already famous for that. [16 June 1980]

Up the Academy, directed by Robert Downey, combines Little Darlings, Meatballs and Animal House into a crude concoction that holds out the promise of approximating Mad Magazine's cheerful, sophomoric vulgarity. [09 June 1980]

At no time is Urban Cowboy especially well-directed - Bridges, director of The China Syndrome and The Paper Chase, has yet to learn where to put a camera and when to move it. But the performances are so fresh, the dialogue so prickly and arid, and the milieu observed with such accuracy, that one's reservations regarding the cinematography, editing and a raft of other technical matters are held in check. [07 June 1980]

Kubrick certainly doesn't fail small. One could fast forget The Shining as an overreaching, multi-levelled botch were it not for Jack Nicholson. Nicholson, one of the few actors capable of getting the audience to love him no matter what he does, is an ideal vehicle for Kubrick. [14 Jun 1980, p.E1]

Adds more cosmic cliff-hangers than it resolves, and it's not as satisfying as the original. A star war can be an exhausting bit of business, especially when, in the end, it turns out to be something of a cheat.

The first half hour of the film, showing the school auditions, is superb. But it's hard to care when every tear-stained monologue is no more moving than an audition piece. Michael Seresin's photography is so beautiful that everybody in the film looks as if they could be famous, and the surface glossiness serves only to falsify the emotions further. [23 May 1980]

Judging by Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham is not a great, not a good, not even a barely competent director. He has said that "a filmmaker must be part magician, part gypsy and part huckster." On the basis of this effort, Cunningham has conveniently overlooked the first two components and settled for a complete mastery of the third. [14 May 1980]

The Schlondorff version of The Tin Drum is never more than an intelligent reduction and simplification of an enormous and complex work of art. [26 Apr 1980]

The Changeling is a breathless, enjoyably scary amusement-park ride through an aged genre that comes back more often than Frank Sinatra; and that appears to be as pleased with itself, and as well-preserved. [28 Mar 1980]

The movie degenerates from the merely farcical to the appallingly tasteless...As the end draws mercifully near, one character proclaims: "This ship needs blood to survive." A film needs more than that. [22 May 1980]

Everything about the remake is inferior to the Hitchcock classic. [01 Dec 1980]

One does not expect to find references to Bertolucci in a action movie distributed by American International, but Mad Max is no ordinary action movie: it's a B-movie classic on the order of Truck Stop Women, and when its director, George Miller, steals from established filmmakers, he steals from the best. [15 April 1980]

As should be obvious by now, Harvey Keitel is a lucky man indeed: how many actors, stuck in an atrocious film, have so many immortal lines? [20 Feb 1980]

What Cruising does have, then, is a claim to narrow truth and limited verisimilitude. What it does not have is a mind. [15 Feb 1980]

An inspired variation on his familiar theme: the whore with a heart of gold is a man. [2 Feb 1980]

The plot gives Brest a structure on which to build a minor, gentle, subtle miracle; he uses the hackneyed plot as the foundation for a restrained monument to the dreams of the elderly. Going in Style has many of the simple but considerable virtues of Best Boy - the epiphanies may be diminutive, but they linger. [27 Dec 1979]

The Black Hole isn't mediocre or even bad - it's dreadful...[It] looks, sounds and feels like a careless, cynically manufactured B-movie. Uncle Walt must be spinning in his cyrogenic vault. [24 Dec 1979]

Mostly, Cuba is boring. [24 Dec 1979]

Kramer vs. Kramer is one of the most sensitive and least judgmental film about relationships ever made in the United States.... One of the important films. [15 Dec 1979]

Jerzy Kosinski's witty but slim novel was based on a witty but thin conceit, and Hal Ashby's film of that novel is equally witty, equally thin. [09 Feb 1980]

Not only is it mindless, it is also racist. Not only is it racist, it is also incompetent. Not only is it incompetent, it is also unfunny. [17 Dec 1979]

Director Carl Reiner has put it together so that the character (hardly) ever becomes boring, and the Martin-Carl Gottlieb-Michael Elias screenplay has just enough genuinely witty moments to keep the story rolling past its flat parts. What more can anyone say? If you like Steve Martin, you'll love this movie. If you don't, you'll laugh sometimes but wish you'd gone elsewhere. [17 Dec 1979]

Fans will probably spend little time debating Star Trek's intellectual depths; there are none. But the human element triumphs over the technological in a resolution that is sentimental and highly satisfying. Star Trek is a visually boggling 23rd-Century fantasy. But peel away the budget and it's as comforting as an old-fashioned fable. [8 Dec. 1979]

If you have missed Janis Joplin, and if you have looked forward to Bette Midler's debut in a role she seemed born to play, you should leave the theatre at that precise moment. Almost everything else in and about The Rose, except a few concert sequences and the occasional occasions when Miss Midler falls out of character and into her stage persona of The Divine Miss M, is infuriatingly tedious, depressing, pretentious, obvious and downright pushy. [10 Nov 1979]