Gripping to watch but ultimately misses the target. [29 Apr 1978]

Apart from the ideology of the film, Pretty Baby is exquisitely executed. Shields, Sarandon and Carradine all give substantial but generally low key performances. [11 Apr 1978]

Straight Time is an exquistitely crafted film, loaded with good performances, propelled by excellent direction and brimming with heart-wrenching suspense. Unfortunately, it is also overwhelmingly depressing. [24 Mar 1978]

Clayburgh is in every frame of the film and you never tire of her even when you occasionally weary of writer-producer-director Paul Mazursky's cuteness. [21 Mar 1978]

A ghoul's dinner of undigested indelicacies pilfered from other horror feasts; the undeniable ability of the chef, director David K. Lynch, has been utilized to create a cream sauce in which the victuals cook without ever cooking together. [18 Sep 1979]

Cassavetes' latest film, Opening Night, tries to deal with aging, a problem of genuine importance to an increasing proportion of the population but the movie ends up floundering and finally sinking beneath its own weight. [23 Dec 1977]

As slow as Eastwood appears onscreen, he's learned a thing or two about fast pacing as a director. The action is frequent, occasionally inventive, and, aided by some searing trumpet playing on the soundtrack by Art Pepper, fairly tense. Unfortunately, he overdoes it. [23 Dec 1977]

If you enjoyed previous Simon comedies like Plaza Suite, it is virtually guaranteed that you will enjoy Goodbye Girl. If you have not previously enjoyed Simon's work, Goodbye Girl will not convert you. [21 Dec 1977]

Although Ritchie has blown Semi-Tough as a film, many individual moments are very funny and worthy of praise. [18 Nov 1977]

The dancing is lovely, the story is secondary. [17 Nov 1977]

A series of implausable adventures, everything from killer cockroaches to world-tilting flash floods, punctuate this otherwise stupid action picture about Third World War survivors. [16 Nov 1977]

Producer Joseph Levine has spared no expense but achieved very little in this $25- million all-star extravaganza. [16 Nov 1977]

Star Wars is the most entertaining sci-fi movie of the decade.

If anything, this film is a cautionary tale for those who clamour for the driverless car.

John Frankenheimer does an excellent job of maintaining tension in an implausible situation in Black Sunday. Good performance by Bruce Dern as the loony. [31 Dec 1977]

At times a bit plodding, Voyage of the Damned certainly succeeds in making its point, as did the conniving Hitler: It's harder to condemn the perpetrators of racism when you turn away their victims at your door. [17 Sep 2005, p.12]

A drawing-room murder mystery that had some extremely funny moments. [24 June 1978]

Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick are perfectly caste as two naive waifs who stumble upon the castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter after car trouble on a rainy night. The supporting cast is appropriately, well, let's say idiosyncratic, but for my money it's Tim Curry as the mad doctor who steals the show. Surely he stands as the most charismatic transsexual Transylvanian ever. [1 Dec 1990]

Working "lobbed" and "scimitar" into that same sentence hovers near the empyrean of genius.

This excellent British film is an eerie, thoroughly engrossing thriller about the disappearance of a youngster and the events that follow when a policeman goes to a small, privately owned island to investigate. [23 Jan 1988]

One of Robert Altman's lesser known gems, Thieves Like Us, brings Depression-era rural Mississippi to life with the story of three convicted killers on the lam from prison.

Not Hitchcock's best, but far from his worst. [01 Mar 1997, p.11]

Clunky and preachy, but Freeman's three robots - named Huey, Dewey and Louie - are adorable. [21 Jul 2011]

You can practically taste the grit and grime of the mean streets of this North of England setting. [17 Aug 1996, p.11]

Director Martin Ritt (Hud) keeps the movie powerful and tense until the ending, which is crudely manipulative. [22 Aug 1998, p.11]

Persona still conveys a power to lift the scalp and scramble the brain, and the fact that it's out-of-time says less about it being dated than it does about it remaining a radically visionary work.

John Frankenheimer created this eccentrically brilliant thriller, an exercise in mid-sixties paranoia. [12 Jan 2002, p.R25]

Lumet uses every claustrophobic camera angle in the book to make the viewer feel as trapped as the characters. [04 Nov 2000, p.12]