A smoothly efficient popcorn picture...Though Scodelario is spunky and game in what must have been an extremely uncomfortable shoot, the script (by the brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen) is airless and repetitive.

It’s one of those dumb movies that are so gleeful about their own idiocy that taking it seriously may seem pointless, which is always a good reason to take a movie seriously.

I liked the deluge of visual information and personalities. The pictures, footage, biography, news and gossip are the opposite of a Halston dress — unruly, busy, fussed over. But they come at you with an energy that feels substantial. Knowing what to do with all of that material is its own kind of intelligence. Why overthink it? Or: why show us what you’ve overthought?

Some promising ideas and characters are introduced, but the narrative is so superfluous, the connecting segments so fleeting, that little is fleshed out.

Aiming at a target as easy as suburban sterility, She's Having a Baby might be expected to hit its mark every now and then. But the film's mood is simply too sour, despite the best efforts of a cast filled with appealing actors, a number of whom have had walk-ons in other Hughes efforts.

The goings-on are grim, grueling and, eventually, grisly. Mensore shoots them with a sharp eye for maintaining coherent spatial relations, which enhances the suspense. It’s a sometimes bracing simulation.

Unfortunately, the authentic music is betrayed by the final guitar competition, a kind of Karate Kid cacophony between Eugene and the devil's favorite, a punk rocker, in which souls are saved, but Mr. Cooder may have jeopardized his own.

As long as the characters are doing stunts or whizzing impossibly through city traffic to a strong rock beat, there's something to watch. For the rest of the time, Quicksilver is as much fun as a slow leak.

A production in which the bludgeon is employed more often than the gimlet. The result is that this production is, for the most part, extremely noisy without being nearly as mirthful as their other films.

Much of the movie is occupied by people as they race one another down Mulholland Drive, but because most of the races are run at night, they aren't as exciting as they might be.

It's very easy to make it sound funnier than it ever is. Like ''Caddyshack'' and ''National Lampoon's Vacation,'' which Mr. Ramis also directed, and like ''Animal House'' and ''Ghostbusters,'' which he also wrote in part, Club Paradise is full of funny ideas that are never adequately developed. The best it can offer are successful one-liners....The movie is painless, and everybody associated with it is good company, but considering the obvious effort and the expense that went into it, the result should have been much, much better.

This Is Not Berlin so wants to evoke a time and a place that the backdrop engulfs the characters like a supernova.

You never quite buy Todd and Rory as flesh-and-blood people who could have conversations that don’t sound rehearsed.

The Fury was directed by Brian De Palma in what appears to have been an all-out effort to transform the small-scale, Grand Guignol comedy of his Carrie into an international horror/spy/occult mind-blower of a movie. He didn't concentrate hard enough, though.

Enormously good-natured - exactly the wrong tone for a comedy that needs all the rambunctious lunacy it can get. Instead, this story of an American mistakenly deported to Mexico as an illegal alien is amiable and plodding, the very last things you'd expect from Cheech, with or without Chong.

It’s perhaps unfair to call this a turkey. It’s got some sweet moments, and the cast, as it did in the previous picture, enjoys itself at least semi-infectiously. But the action sequences are lifeless; the lessons valid but arguably stale; and the trimmings, mere bloat.

As the full picture comes into focus, the narrative can tend toward the trite. The chief pleasure of the movie is the 35-millimeter cinematography of Jean Louis Vialard.

Funny Farm is good-natured even when it's not funny...As a comedy style, it has the impatience of a child who plants radish seeds and then pulls up the first tiny sprouts to see how they're doing.

Exhuasting without being much fun.

Nicolas Gessner's direction has a correspondingly comfortable feel, but this type of story is as old as the hills—no, older—and Mr. Gessner doesn't do much to make it plausible.

Mr. Caan is generally convincing, except in those classroom scenes, but all of the other actors, with the exception of James Sorvino who plays a sympathetic bookie, seem defeated by the quality of the material.

Tepid...A big Punchline problem is that it's impossible to tell the difference between Miss Field's routines that are supposed to be awful, and the awful ones that are supposed to be funny.

Despite her shaky handle on the movie’s ideas and the appealing if uneven performances, Waddington holds your attention with visual beauty and humor.

The spirit of Hustlers is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored.

Berman can’t quite juggle it all.

Despite the intriguing opening sequence, which involves shootings, a jet and a family escape, Black Widow, directed by Cate Shortland, lags, unsure of how to proceed with the story.

Freeman, never the most animated of performers, gives his specific brand of passive British miserabilism free rein. But it’s Melissa Rauch, as Charlie’s safely dull, place-holder girlfriend, who steals the show.

It almost works, but as persuasive as the performers can be, Tom and Joan seem less real the more time you spend with them.

Grant and Kurzel’s conceptions of the characters are so one-dimensional they seem to defeat the movie’s talented cast.

The writing might be a tangle of limp clichés, but the actors — especially Woodley and the terrific Wendie Malick as Daphne’s mother — sweat to sell every line.

I Am Woman, a pleasant, yet disappointingly trite biopic of the singer Helen Reddy, has a flatness that’s difficult to ascribe to any one element.

The title Military Wives is plain to the point of blandness. This good-hearted comedy-drama, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, deserves a little better.

Existing outside of time and place, The Other Lamb is a gorgeous revenge fable with an excess of atmosphere and zero subtlety — a mallet wrapped in gauze and girlish laughter.

If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.

Mr. Donner has obvious difficulty coordinating the various elements of the overall vision.

Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.

Too theatrically phony and too predictably conventional, and the comedy — though in a few cases genuinely funny — is too mechanical for its function.

Gene Kelly, who directed two classic musicals with Stanley Donen, here acts like a caretaker of a big, valuable property. He and Michael Kidd, his choreographer, have protected everything Gower Champion gave the original, and added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.

A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.

Although it has been made with intelligence, is well directed and acted and is in touch with the ways of lower-middle-class American life, it has the sort of predictable outrage and shape of a made-for-television movie. It has suspense but little excitement.

Compared to its 1940 predecessor, One Million B.C., which the other film follows very closely, the new grunt-and-groaner isn't as effective with its trick photography, even with color added.

The scenery provided for this picture is clearly more profound than the script, and the sense of magnitude in the environment more engrossing than that in the plot.

Is Mr. Polanski endeavoring to tell us anything about life or crime or perversion in this complex and terminally morbid joke?If he is, I sure don't get it — except maybe that people are sick, that even good humor isn't funny and that social sterility is.

The focus of the movie is so wide, and the logistics of the production so heavy, that Oliver himself, dutifully played by 9-year-old Mark Lester, gets flattened out and almost lost, as if he had been run over by a studio bulldozer.

The forbidden romance has its will-they-or-won’t-they thrills, but this first feature by the directors Amp Wong and Ji Zhao, becomes a basket of tangled snakes when Blanca faces far too many obstacles.

Lewis Milestone's direction suits the movement of Harry Brown's and Charles Lederer's script, which is entirely centripetal, focusing exclusively on Mr. Sinatra and his gang. Young people are likely to find this more appropriate and bewitching than do their elders. The latter are likely to feel less gleeful in the presence of heroes who rob and steal.

The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering.

A weird, erratic and occasionally insightful experiment that, unlike its indefatigable star, never quite finds its zing.

For those who accept the absurd simulations as realistic, Sex and Zen will have soft-core pornographic appeal. For others, its appeal should be as a cheeky if predictable sendup of erotic obsession and its unhappy consequences.

Essentially the story of a young woman coming into her power, Gretel & Hansel is quietly sinister, yet too underdeveloped to truly scare. Together, Jeremy Reed’s production design and Galo Olivares’s photography weave a chilly spell that’s regrettably undermined by the opacity of the storytelling.

What Michôd never manages to make clear is what we are to make of this version’s nationalism, its glorification of war, its ambivalence toward corrupting power and its selective, finally misguided attempt to brush off Shakespeare.

For all its consideration, while Earthquake Bird adds up to a “real” movie, it’s too polite to add up to an entirely compelling one.

The movie abounds with imagination, but is unfortunately too unnerving — even nauseating — to enjoy.

Frogs, which is not to be confused with The Birds for an instant, is an end-of-the-world junk movie, photographed rather prettily in Florida and acted by Milland as if he were sight-reading random passages from the dictionary.

The Miracle of the Little Prince seems to have been made from the supposition that too many discussions of grammar or syntax might bore viewers. Even so, the platitudes are worse. A stronger movie might have dug more deeply into the languages it wishes to save.

An Officer and a Spy is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.

The Great White Hope is one of those liberal, well-meaning, fervently uncontroversial works that pretend to tackle contemporary problems by finding analogies at a safe remove in history.

As the camera circles swirling skirts and sweeps through elegant cafes, the director, Alexis Michalik, whisks up a whirlwind of soapy declarations and backstage chaos. For many viewers, that will be enough, with enjoyment in direct proportion to tolerance for theatrical farce and hyper-romantic dialogue — and a lead character who is less engaging than either.

The trouble with Fade to Black is that it's supposed to be a thriller. It's much more amusing than it is scary, although the killings are gory enough to be borderline vile. [17 Oct 1980, p.C5]

The backgrounds and characters, though ambitiously executed, aren't particularly compatible, because there's nothing in Mr. Frazetta's steep phallic landscapes that speaks to Mr. Bakshi's overly sleek cavemen.

Though Mr. Hanson ("Bad Influence," "The Bedroom Window") is a slick movie maker, he is not an especially persuasive one here.

The film’s deaf subjects feel creatively and philosophically shortchanged.

If evacuating cinema means engaging with the medium’s properties in only the silliest ways — mismatching subtitles with images and voices with speakers — Price certainly does that.

A satire of overamped gamer culture that is itself too overamped to be much fun, Guns Akimbo takes a while before it stops showing off its virtuosity — shots that turn cartwheels, frantic cutting, an onslaught of graphics — and finds a groove.

A curiously flat and fragmentary visualization of the original.

As directed by Harry Hook, the new Lord of the Flies offers much spectacle for the eye and almost nothing to keep the mind from wandering.

The various excuses made for The Enquirer’s ethics undermine Landsman’s efforts to portray the paper as splashy, all-American fun.

Donald Siegel, a talented director, is too handicapped by his limited means to do much with the fragments of plot about a fall guy involved with a mail robbery, a devious redhead and double-crosses following in predictable sequence. His actors seem dispirited by the script.

This talking-head footage is a promising start that ultimately leads to a less than illuminating documentary.

A respectably packaged drama of a young card sharp, played by Steve McQueen, with a capable enough cast, that pungently projects the machinations and back-room temperatures of the side-street professional gambling world and little else.

What it doesn't have, unfortunately, is enough true conviction to rise above novelty status. Nor does it really have a plot.

Serie Noire,' adapted by Mr. Corneau and Georges Perec from ''A Hell of a Woman'' by the late Jim Thompson, takes itself much too seriously, as is the way with humorless French adapters of American fiction of this sort.

The drama, for all its invention, is creaky and a bit passé. (Apparently there has still been no contact with other planets in 800,000 A. D.) And the mood, while delicately wistful, is not so flippant or droll as it might be in a fiction as fanciful and flighty as this one naturally is.

It's too bad Mr. Castle, in serving up his ghosts, didn't simply have some cartoonists draw, 'em on in full view.

When it comes to turning up action to 11, Bay is incorrigible. Not just with sound and fury; there are genuinely eccentric innovations here. There’s certainly not a whole lot of recognizable humanity, but hey, that’s why there’s “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

Under the low-budget circumstances, Vincent Price and Myrna Fahey should not be blamed for portraying the decadent Ushers with arch affectation, nor Mark Damon held to account for the traces of Brooklynese that creep into his stiffly costumed impersonation of the mystified interloper.

The point is cleverness and looking cool, though, mostly the movie is about Ritchie’s own conspicuous pleasure directing famous actors having a lark, trading insults, making mischief. There’s not much else, which depending on your mood and the laxity of your ethical qualms, might be enough.

As cheerful and painless as not going to the dentist.

As the sequel to "The Shaggy Dog," Walt Disney's 1959 moneymaker, The Shaggy D.A. is a farce with all the witless energy of an unrestrained Great Dane puppy and, thankfully, a cast and director who generally avoid taking themselves or the free-wheeling plot seriously.

In this genial but strained and arch frolic, the one real joke is not only "in" but it wears thin and even frantic.

Escape to Witch Mountain is a Walt Disney production for children who will watch absolutely anything that moves...It's not very scary, but neither is it very exciting.

Time hasn’t made it more than a cryptic curiosity. Dialogue is sparse, and it takes some time for the threesome’s dynamic to come into focus, to the extent that it ever does.

Nothing about his modest coming-of-age comedy demands anything like this awestruck approach.

This "Computer" isn't I.B.M.'s kind but it's homey, lovable, as exciting as porridge and as antiseptic and predictable as any homey, half-hour TV family show.

Heavyweights is really two movies in one, and they don't mesh.

Intriguing, but ultimately slight.

Despite this lively history, the material seldom rises above the level of upbeat platitudes.

Rookie of the Year, which was directed by Daniel Stern from a script by Sam Harper, has an appealing central performance by Mr. Nicholas, who manages to be cocky without seeming obnoxious. As a summer diversion, the film has about as much substance as cotton candy.

Wendy has her moments, certainly, but she remains frustratingly undeveloped and uninvolving, despite the clamor and the score’s triumphalism.

This is a puff piece of a documentary, eager to spread a message and go down easy.

For a film about the struggles of a black man in America, The Banker spends an awful lot of time on a false white front.

By no means lacking in stylishness; if anything, it's got style to spare. But so many of its sequences are at fever pitch, and the mood varies so drastically from episode to episode, that the pace becomes pointless, even taxing, after a while.

The dialogue is mostly composed of rude variations on ''eek,'' ''ugh'' and ''I'd like to sleep with you this evening.''

Idiosyncratic to the point of alienation.

What’s left is a baroque pantomime, a heavy-handed satire of intolerance whose fun fades faster than the livid bruises on Judy’s face.

Pat Garrett and Billy the kid suggest either that he (Peckinpah) has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.

It is easier to like Feast of the Epiphany as an idea for an uncompromising film than it is to reconcile its pretensions.

A muddled mélange of black comedy, revenge thriller and feminist lecture, Promising Young Woman too often backs away from its potentially searing setup.