An exceptionally clumsy, unpleasant action-melodrama. [1 Aug 1980, p.C12]

It's not as funny as "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie," but it is less pushy than "Meatballs." It is not as thickly stocked with outrageous moments as "Animal House," yet it is far easier to take than "Where the Buffalo Roam."

A witty, romantic, psychological horror film and it's almost as rewarding as a successful analysis...The fun is not in logic but watching how Mr. De Palma successfully tops himself as he goes along, and the fun lasts from the sexy, comic opening sequence right through to the film's several endings.

The Big Red One, for all its uncompromising brutality, is viscerally, angrily alive. Fuller was lucky to survive the war. It is our good fortune that this film, a tribute to his luck (and to those who did not share it), has come back to life.

The lines, like the movie itself, don't scan perfectly, but they are funny in the knowing, cheerfully bigoted way of Cheech and Chong's brand of comedy...Cheech and Chong's Next Movie is casual, slapdash and rude, and it's frequently hilarious in the way of some intense but harmless confrontation between eccentrics on a street corner.

Prom Night is a comparatively genteel hybrid, part shock melodrama, like Halloween, and part mystery, though it's less a whodunit than a who's-doing-it.

A foul-mouthed, bumpercrunching farce that is often funnier in theory than in fact but, even so, is a movie that has more laughs in it than any film of the summer except "Airplane!" It wipes out "The Blues Brothers," "Caddyshack," "Up the Academy," "Where the Buffalo Roam" and just about every other recent comedy aimed, I assume, at an otherwise television-hooked public.

Oh Heavenly Dog is diverting enough for its dog tricks - I like dog tricks, don't get me wrong - but it otherwise shows few signs of life, and many signs of depressing modernism.

How to Beat the High Cost of Living is a feeble house-fly of a comedy that unsuccessfully attempts to make fun of one of the more dismaying problems of our time: inflation.

At a time when throwaway gags seem like a luxury in any film, Airplane! has jokes—hilarious jokes—to spare. It's also clever and confident and furiously energetic, and it has the two most sadly neglected selling points any movie could want right now: it's brief (only eighty-eight minutes), and it looks inexpensive (it cost about three million dollars) without looking cheap. Airplane! is more than a pleasant surprise, in the midst of this dim movie season. As a remedy for the bloated self-importance of too many other current efforts, it's just what the doctor ordered.

Nestor Almendros's cinematography is soothingly gorgeous, and so are Miss Shields and Mr. Atkins. Both are quite adequate to the movie's requirements, and neither has much acting to do--Miss Shields's hardest job, for instance, is to pretend she is giving birth to a baby without ever having wondered why she's put on so much weight. Her second hardest job is to keep the wind from ruffling her hair.

The film's cleverness is aggressive and cool, and so its mysteries, though elaborate, remain largely uninviting.

A cheerful, four-cylinder children's movie, though its car jokes aren't good for much mileage. Herbie the Volkswagen, last seen in Monte Carlo, is now in South America, as the title may or may not indicate. This allows him to get into a bullfight, for the movie's most inspired episode, and to fall into the sea and get rusty, for its saddest. His adventures aren't much more far-flung than this, but fortunately they move fast. [12 Sept 1980, p.C8]

There are parts of The Blues Brothers that would have played infinitely better with a knock-about feeling, a sloppiness like that of "Animal House." As it is, the movie is airless. The stakes needn't have been so suffocatingly high.

Brubaker is an earnest, right-minded, consistently unsurprising movie about a penologist named Brubaker (Robert Redford), who sets out to reform a single corrupt prison and finds himself bucking an entire system, including the state administration that appointed him to his job. It says a lot about a movie that the only mildly interesting characters in it are those who are corrupt, such as the insurance-selling member of the prison board, played by Murray Hamilton, and a smarmy building contractor, played by M. Emmet Walsh, who attempts to buy Brubaker's neighborly good feelings with a homemade chocolate cake.

To watch it is to try to put together the pieces from three different jigsaw puzzles. Not everything fits. [19 June 1980, p.19]

The best and funniest Clint Eastwood movie in quite a while.

Up the Academy sets out to offend almost everybody, including women, blacks, homosexuals, Arabs, the military, and so on, but they've all been more efficiently offended by other, better movies.

Urban Cowboy is the most entertaining, most perceptive commercial American movie of the year to date. Here is a tough-talking, softhearted romantic melodrama that sees a world that is far more bleak than the movie, or the characters in it, ever have time to acknowledge.

The Outsider is vivid even if it isn't much of a character study, and energetic even though it's often clumsy.

The frontiersmen are wild and woolly, and most of the Indians remain scalp-collecting savages. [13 Sep 1980, p.C14]

Meticulously detailed and never less than fascinating, The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says "Tuesday."

The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly.

Mr. Hill weaves their gestures together with a portentous elegance that promises a great deal that it never delivers.

Apart from its virtues or defects as a general feature film, Fame - in its attitude toward the performing arts - strikes a new note. It is a streetwise film with streetwise characters. In its deflating moral for every protagonist, it sees these arts as meshed into a smog of urban existence. Its novelty is its anti-Romantic, ironic view toward these callings. [27 July 1980, p.8]

It's not a question of too little, too late, but of too much, too long.

The story it tells is so outsized, bizarre, funny, and eccentric, the movie compels attention. [11 Apr 1980, p.6]

The movie's distinguishing feature is not the number or variety of horrible murders, but the length of time it takes for the victims to die. This is a technique that may have been borrowed from Italian opera, but without the music, it loses some of its panache.

Nothing in Gilda Live is funnier than, or a substantial departure from, the material Gilda Radner does on "Saturday Night Live." But the film ought to satisfy her fans.

The latest Irwin Allen disaster movie is When Time Ran Out, which is waxen even by Mr. Allen's standards.

Like "Agatha" and the rock drama "Stardust," other movies of Mr. Apted's, Coal Miner's Daughter does a better job of setting its scenes than of telling a story. Its characterizations and its atmosphere work better than the action, which becomes shapeless and, in the manner of biographies of living subjects, slightly cramped by its good intentions.

It takes on the overtones not of an awful movie, but of an awful play.

One of John Huston's most original, most stunning movies. It is so eccentric, so funny, so surprising and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the 33d feature by a man who is now in his 70's and whose career has had more highs and lows than a decade of weather maps.

Mad Max is ugly and incoherent, and aimed, probably accurately, at the most uncritical of moviegoers. [14 June 1980, p.13]

The Fog is constructed of random diversions. There are too many story lines, which necessitate so much cross-cutting that no one sequence can ever build to a decent climax. The movie looks quite pretty but prettiness of this sort is beside the point in such a film.

Going in Style, a first commercial feature written and directed by Martin Brest, means to be both moving and comic, but though the cast is headed by three fine actors, two of whom, Mr. Burns and Mr. Carney, are also extremely funny men, it never elicits any emotional response more profound than curiosity.

Invigorating.

The Black Hole is attractively unpretentious and at times quite snappy.

A broad, low comedy full of speech defects and pratfalls.

Though a lot of the dialogue would seem absurd even on daytime soap opera, the movie keeps coming up with scenes so arresting or eccentric you are aware of the wicked intelligence behind them.

103 minutes is an awfully long time to watch people whiz along the boardwalk. The novelty wears off in a hurry.

An uproarious display of brilliance, nerve, dance, maudlin confessions, inside jokes and, especially, ego.

Kramer vs. Kramer is densely packed with such beautifully observed detail. It is also superbly acted by its supporting cast, including Jane Alexander, Howard Duff and George Coe.

Hal Ashby directs Being There at an unruffled, elegant pace, the better to let Mr. Sellers's double-edged mannerisms make their full impression upon the audience.

A fascinating, slightly chilly picture — as well as one of the best Preminger films in years.

1941 is less comic than cumbersome, as much fun as a 40-pound wrist-watch.

By turns funny, vulgar and backhandedly clever, never more so than when it aspires to absolute stupidity. And Mr. Martin, who began his career with an arrow stuck through his head, has since developed a real genius for playing dumb.

Watching Star Trek — the Motion Picture...is like attending your high-school class's 10th reunion at Caesar's Palace. Most of the faces are familiar, but the décor has little relationship to anything you've ever seen before.

BY the time you realize what's wrong with "The Rose," it will have you hooked anyhow...The Rose has an earnest, affecting character at its core. Even at its most preposterous, it never feels like a fraud.

It's cheerfully inoffensive entertainment designed for the crowd that liked "Car Wash," with which one of the present film's producers was also involved, and it offers a similarly shapeless brand of merriment.

The gimmick behind When a Stranger Galls is a scary one, but it's been played for more than it's worth.

Mr. Duvall, Miss Danner and Mr. O'Keefe are the main reasons you should see The Great Santini. They play together with the kind of ease and self-assurance that, in a movie, is as exhilarating as it is rare.

Parts of French Postcards have considerable charm, even if it is charm with the consistency of bunny-fluff.

With the exception of Mr. Strasberg and Mr. Levene, the actors are as hysterical as their material. The screenplay has one funny exchange. Other than that, the screenplay and the direction are a complete muddle.

As it is, the suspense is sludgy and the character development nil; even the inadvertent comedy is spotty.

VENGEANCE IS MINE, directed by Shohei Imamura, a Japanese director largely unknown in this country, is chilly without being austere, the sort of confounding movie that tells us too much and not enough.

For all its pretty glimpses of the desert island, the film never offers a clear, overall sense of what the place looks like; neither the camera nor the boy really goes exploring.

The Europeans isn't simply pretty, it's so relentlessly pretty it becomes almost boring to watch.

Blake Edwards's frequently hilarious new film, “10,” is the story of George's desperate efforts to come to terms with life in Southern California even though he knows he's inadequate.

Starting Over depicts an abandoned man in all his misery, and still manages to be fast and funny while it breaks new ground.

Herzog's film seems well worth the effort to me. It's funny without being silly, eerie without being foolish and uncommonly beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with mere prettiness.

A movie that's as sweet as it is clever, and never so clever that it forgets to be entertaining.

Some intelligent, sophisticated people have knocked themselves out to transform bland into bland, and they have succeeded to the extent that anyone who fondly remembers the comic strip, or the old movie serial with Buster Crabbe, probably will not feel cheated.

This is a strong, affecting story but it's also a straggly one, populated by tangential figures and parallel plotlines; the criminals' histories are every bit as convoluted and fascinating as those of the policemen they abducted. Even the courtroom drama is unusually complicated, introducing a new legal team with each new trial.

Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.

A horror film that is not so much frightening as it is depressing. It is thin and dopey, which is perfectly O.K., but in place of invention it uses contrivance, and in place of imagination it uses shock.

Mr. Bronson grows ever more coolly dependable with each new film, but Love and Bullets is too clumsy to show him off to much advantage.

Every now and then a film comes along of such painstaking, overripe foolishness that it breaks through the garbage barrier to become one of those rare movies you rush to see for laughs. The clichés were everywhere, but always just slightly out of place and inappropriate.

Rock 'n' Roll High School purports to be little more than summer fun, and, in its zanily unpretentious way, it is certainly that.

Aeronautically and otherwise, it's a bumpy trip.

My Brilliant Career doesn't need to trumpet either its or its heroine's originality this loudly. The facts speak for themselves — and so does the radiance with which Miss Armstrong and Miss Davis invest so many memorable moments.

The principal thing that keeps "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" engrossing is the level of acting it sustains throughout.

Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom, terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Federico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point.

As for comedy, Mr. Grodin's deadpan manner supplies a fair amount of that until the adventure-mystery aspects become overpowering.

The central friendship in the movie, beautifully delineated, is the one between Mr. Nolte and Mac Davis, who expertly plays the team's quarterback, a man whose calculating nature and complacency make him all the more likable, somehow.

More American Graffiti is grotesquely misconceived, so much so that it nearly eradicates fond memories of the original.

So many horror-movie clichés have been assembled under the roof of a single haunted house that the effect is sometimes mind-bogglingly messy. There is apparently very little to which the director, Stuart Rosenberg, will not resort. Scary things do happen in the movie, but they're always telegraphed in advance and make too little sense to have a cumulative effect.

Mr. Douglas does a lot of stunts, some of them reasonably good; these seem to be the would-be comic backbone of a movie that's not after laughs but heehaws, which in any case it doesn't get.

The cast is unknown, the director has a spotty history, and the basic premise falls into this year's most hackneyed category (unknown boxer/ bowler/jogger hopes to become sports hero). Even so, the finished product is wonderful. Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn't even need a big budget or a pedigree.

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.

There's no shortage of talent in The Frisco Kid, but it's the wrong talent for the wrong material.

Makes mincemeat of an excellent novel.

Moonraker begins with one of the funniest and most dangerous (as well as most beautifully photographed and edited) sequences Bond has ever faced.

With far fewer high spirits than “Animal House,” and only two characters of any interest, Meatballs reveals itself to be a loud, offkey cry for conformism of a most disappointing sort. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing.

As cheerful and painless as not going to the dentist.

It's also very well written by Jerry Juhl and Jack Burns and directed by James Frawley ("Kid Blue," "The Big Bus") with a comic touch that never becomes facetious.

Escape From Alcatraz is not a great film or an especially memorable one, but there is more evident skill and knowledge of movie making in any one frame of it than there are in most other American films around at the moment. I should also add that it's terrifically exciting.

Rocky II has a waxy feeling, and it never comes to life the way its predecessor did. As the characters go through their stock routines — Talia Shire shyly whispering I love you, Mr. Stallone making self-deprecating jokes, Burgess Meredith telling the kid he's either a bum or a hero — you get the feeling that you've been here before. Well, you have.

Prophecy is full of lingering lap-dissolves and elegant camera movements that suggest history is being made. Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack music is so grand it could be played at a coronation, and it's so loud that it pierces the ears and threatens the head. None of this fits the movie.

Andrew Bergman has written one of those rare comedy scripts that escalates steadily and hilariously, without faltering or even having to strain for an ending.

It's thoroughly silly and endearing.

I was able to sit through only the first fifteen minutes of Dawn of the Dead.

A lot of Over the Edge is awkwardly acted and motivated, but it is staged with such vivid efficiency and concern that, as you watch it, you are frequently caught halfway between a giggle and a gasp.

Mr. Allen, who directed Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and produced it too, is so obviously ill-equipped to stage action scenes in cramped quarters that his audience winds up wishing as fervently as his characters for a chance to see the light of day.

La Cage aux Folles is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes.

Winter Kills isn't exactly a comedy, but it's funny. And it isn't exactly serious, but it takes on the serious business of the Kennedy assassination.

A Little Romance is a movie that seems to have melted the minds of everyone of any stature connected with it.

Mr. Hamilton's knack for comedy has been a well-kept secret until now, but he's certainly funny in Love at First Bite, a coarse, delightful little movie with a bang-up cast and no pretensions at all.