It's a frenetic farce that takes the form of a folksy study of Smalltown, U.S.A., where there is no problem that can't eventually be solved on top of a bed, in a bath.

James Bridges's smashingly effective, very stylish suspense melodrama.

A dense, quirky, uncommonly interesting movie, this time with a high quotient of suspense.

A rollicking musical memoir, as much a recollection of the show as of the period, a film that has the charm of a fable and the slickness of Broadway show biz at its breathless best.

The performances are very, very bad, and the mountains boring.

The members of the cast are undercut by both material and direction.

The ending of Real Life is the most uproarious of a good many inspired moments.

Norma Rae is a seriously concerned contemporary drama, illuminated by some very good performances and one, Miss Field's, that is spectacular.

The movie’s intellectual provocations — mostly pertaining to the elasticity of cinematic form — remain as lively as they were many decades ago.

The film is as handsome to watch as it is preposterous to listen to, full of gorgeous nocturnal city images that splash blaring neon colors against filthy, rain-slicked gray. Mr. Hill uses subways, jukeboxes, spectacularly eerie costumes and deserted streets to create a stark yet extravagant visual style, and a grimy little world in which everything looks curiously brand-new. Thanks to a lot of wipes and slow-motion shots, you are never in danger of forgetting that somebody clever is at the helm.

Mr. Hopkins's screenplay is funny without being condescending, more aware of history, perhaps, than Conan Doyle's mysteries ever were, but always appreciative of the strengths of the original characters and of the etiquette observed in the course of every hunt.

Mr. Crichton's previous films as a director — "Westworld" and "Coma" — are skillful and, each in its own way, entertaining, but they give no hint of the amplitude he displays in this visually dazzling period piece. With Sean Connery as the gang's elegant leader, the sort of mastermind who denies his body nothing, Lesley-Anne Down as his magnificent moll, and Donald Sutherland as his locksmith —"the best screwsman in England" — The Great Train Robbery is classy entertainment of the sort I associate exclusively with movies.

The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy.

Hardcore never gives in to the rhythm of its nighttime world, never swoons; Mr. Schrader doesn't seem capable of the perversely rhapsodic style his subject demands. But he does work with speed and intelligence, paying sharp attention to detail and making the movie as funny as it is quick and frightening.

It's too bad that Mr. Wrye's bungling renders the story sob-proof, because injured-athlete sagas are usually so hard to resist.

The screenplay, by W. D. Richter, remains bright and lively throughout, but the plot just isn't full enough to carry a feature film. The characters are vivid, and uniformly well-played, and their pre-pod lives are fairly well established. But an hour into the film, once the menace is identified, the few remaining humans begin fleeing for their lives, and after that it's just run, run, run.

The slackest and most harebrained of Mr. Eastwood's recent movies. It is overlong and virtually uneventful, even though there are half a dozen cute characters and woolly subplots competing for the viewer's attentions.

Frank Pierson has written and directed a melodrama about three generations of gypsies that is all color and no substance.

Superman is good, clean, simple-minded fun, though it's a movie whose limited appeal is built in.

A big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since "The Godfather."

The plot of Force 10 is banally improbable. Guy Hamilton's direction is sluggish and the camera work, by Chris Challis, makes the least of the picturesque locations in the mountains of Montenegro. There is, moreover, an unmistakable air of haste and cost-cutting that suggests that most of the production budget went to pay the high-priced stars.

As in his last film, "Sorcerer," Mr. Friedkin seems bent on supplying us with more sociological information than is entirely necessary, whereas more information about the heist itself would have been welcome.

When the film's focus is on labor history, remembered or recreated, it is extremely moving. Fortunately this is most of the time.

The Lord of the Rings, is both numbing and impressive. Yet it would be difficult to recommend this movie to anyone not wholly absorbed by the uses of motion-picture animation or to anyone not familiar with Tolkien's home-made mythology, which borrows liberally from various Norse myths, the Eddas, the Nibelungs and maybe even Beatrix Potter.

A no-frills, no-imagination reworking of the story about the ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy.

From the first shot to the last, this movie is confidently guided by a specific and committed vision.

Jeanne Dielman... has been described as minimalist, though I don't see how any film this long and so packed with information could be equated with minimalism as defined in painting. The manner of the film is spare, but the terrible, obsessive monotony of the life it observes is ultimately as melodramatic as, say, Roman Polanski's ''Repulsion.''

A big expensive, star‐studded bore in which a lot of famous talent is permitted — no, encouraged — to do a series of campy turns on their own worst mannerisms.

A phony, attitudinizing, self-indulgent mess, a multimillion-dollar B (for boring) picture with the ear of a cauliflower, the heart of a hustler and the soul of a used-car salesman.

It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film.

Though the movie looks beautiful, the elegant style occasionally works against it, showing it up. This happens in a striking close-up of Miss Keaton, sitting alone on a photogenically windswept ocean beach as she is supposed to be thinking sensitive poet-type thoughts. Yet the image is empty. It's not the actress. It's not the director, whose close-ups of Miss Keaton in Annie Hall burst with love, pride and affection.The movie that contains the image fails to invest it with any associations whatsoever.

It's the cleverness of Eyes of Laura Mars that counts, cleverness that manifests itself in superlative casting, drily controlled direction from Irvin Kershner, and spectacular settings that turn New York into the kind of eerie, lavish dreamland that could exist only in the idle noodlings of the very, very hip.

National Lampoon's Animal House is by no means one long howl, but it's often very funny, with gags that are effective in a dependable, all-purpose way.

This time, Mr. Reynolds has made a movie to please fans of all persuasions, and to please them a great deal.

Written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, Hard Times, with Charles Bronson. This one is not good. It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this.

The movie may have been conceived in a spirit of merriment, but watching it feels like playing shuffleboard at the absolute insistence of a bossy shipboard social director. When whimsy gets to be this overbearing, it simply isn't whimsy any more.

If you have the Clouzot habit, as I have, there's very little that Mr. Edwards and Mr. Sellers could do that would make you find the movie disappointing.

Foul Play is a slick, attractive, enjoyable movie with all the earmarks of a hit. But as “House Calls” did a.few months ago, it starts out promising • genuine wit and originality only to fall back on more familiar tactics after a half‐hour or so. If either film had a less winning opening, perhaps it wouldn't leave a vague aftertaste of disappointment.

Mr. Allen might just as well have devoted his talents to man-eating goldfish, poodles on the rampage or carniverous canaries.

The Bad News Bears Go to Japan isn't the sort of bad movie that angers you. It's sad in the way of something that's been abandoned. It deserved better from the people involved.

There is something eerily disconnected about Heaven Can Wait. It may be because in a time of comparative peace, immortality — at least in its life-after-death form — doesn't hold the fascination for us that it does when there's a war going on, as there was in 1941 when Here Comes Mr. Jordan was released and became such a hit. Or perhaps we are somewhat more sophisticated today (though I doubt it) and comedies about heavenly messengers and what is, in effect, a very casual kind of transubstantiation seem essentially silly.

The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.

GREASE is not really the 1950's teen-age movie musical it thinks it is, but a contemporary fantasy about a 1950's teen-age musical—a larger, funnier, wittier and more imaginative-than-Hollywood movie with a life that is all its own. It uses the Eisenhower era — the characters, costumes, gestures and particularly, the music—to create a time and place that have less to do with any real 50's than with a kind of show business that is both timeless and old-fashioned, both sentimental and wise. The movie is also terrific fun.

Some of the action sequences have been well staged, but they've been dropped into the film so indiscriminately that Jaws 2 never builds to a particular climax. It simply drones on and on and on, like a television movie.

Though it's as foolish as the first film, is rather more fun to watch and sometimes very stylish-looking.

The Cat From Outer Space, is likely to keep the under-14's amused, at least if supplemented by plenty of popcorn.

The central portion of Corvette Summmer, set in Las Vegas with an Alice in Wonderland air, has a visual zaniness that meshes effectively with the script. But for the most part, the movie takes a slender, boyish conceit — of the sort that is suddenly so popular among Hollywood's current batch of boy wonders — and invests it with silliness rather than whimsy.

An expensive stylistically bankrupt suspense melodrama.

The movie often seems even more uneventful than material like this need make it, and Mr. Milius's attention to his actors focuses more closely on their pectorals than on their performances.

It's Gary Busey's galvanizing solo performance that gives meaning to an otherwise shapeless and bland feature-length film about the American rock-and-roll star who was killed in a plane crash in 1959.

In this splattery George A. Romero movie from 1977, the title character is not your typical vampire. In fact, he may not be a vampire at all. I mean, did Count Dracula ever need hypodermic needles (for sedation) or razor blades? Mr. Romero, the director who gave the world the ravenous 20th-century zombies of Night of the Living Dead, plays around with the possibility that Martin is just certifiably psychotic.

This is half-heartedly satiric material that's been directed by Mr. Reynolds as if it were broad, knock-about comedy sometimes and, at other times, as if it were meant to evoke pathos, which it never does.

F.I.S.T. is a big movie that benefits more from the accumulation of small, ordinary detail than from any particular wit or inspiration of vision. It's also played with great conviction by its huge cast.

There is a dazzling array of talent on display here, and the film surely has its memorable moments. But it articulates so little of the end-of-an-era feeling it hints at—and some of Mr. Scorsese's accomplishments have been so stunning—that it's impossible to view The Last Waltz as anything but an also-ran.

Some routines work a lot better than others, but the whole film sparkles with a boisterous lunacy that's perfectly in keeping with the frenzy of the fans.

The movie was directed by Jack Gold from a screenplay by John Briley and it's fuzzy on a number of key issues that possibly could have made it fun, had they been sharper.

Miss Rivers's jokes mostly have to do with racial stereotypes and the essential revoltingness of pregnancy, but a few of them are funny just the same. However, as a director, Miss Rivers is forever sandbagging her own scenes, throwing away a good chuckle in a sequence that desperately needs a punch line, or wasting something fairly subtle right after a broad, dopey joke about a urine sample.

Straight Time is not a movie to raise the spirits. It is so cool it would leave a chill were it not done with such precision and control that we remain fascinated by a rat, in spite of ourselves.

Mr. Zieff seems never to have determined what sort of romance he wanted to show, and as a result the movie is constantly contradicting itself.

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.

The two young principals are serviceable, but not nearly as lively as some of their co-stars — Christian Juttner, as the tallest Earthquake, steals virtually every scene he doesn't share with Miss Davis or Mr. Lee.

It is high comedy of a sharp, bitter kind, and Michael Murphy is fine as the weasel husband named Martin, but Miss Clayburgh is nothing less than extraordinary in what is the performance of the year to date.

Strong, stinging triangle of two Vietnam vets and one wife.

Is Blue Collar an action film or a meditation upon the American Dream? I suspect it wants to be both though it's not very serious at being either.

A murkily pretentious shocker.

As a film about heroism, it is chiefly remarkable for its gutlessness.

Renaldo and Clara is so personal it borders on being obscure, yet it remains surprisingly deficient in personality.

A film that satisfies not because it sweeps us off our feet, knocks us into the aisles, provides us with visions of infinity or definitions of God, but because it is precise, intelligent, civilized, and because it never for a moment mistakes its narrative purpose.

Plausibility is not always important, but in a film as bereft of distinctive style and wit as Coma, it helps to believe in something. It can even help if one is offended. The aftereffect of Coma is a catlike yawn, benign and bored.

As witty and as disciplined as "Young Frankenstein," though it has one built-in problem: Hitchcock himself is a very funny man. His films, even at their most terrifying and most suspenseful, are full of jokes shared with the audience. Being so self-aware, Hitchcock's films deny an easy purchase to the parodist, especially one who admires his subject the way Mr. Brooks does.

Opening Night is a reminder of what has made Mr. Cassavetes's films so appealing, and of what can make them so maddening, too. For all its length -- nearly two and three-quarter hours -- it's a relatively thin example of the director's work, but a mischievous and inviting one, too.

The movie, which Mr. Aldrich directed from a screenplay by Christopher Knopf, is cheap and nasty without having any redeeming vulgarity and absolutely no conviction of truth.

It is a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it's impossible not to pay attention most of the time.

Fever beings to flag when, after an initial hour filled with high spirits and jubilant music, it settles down to tell its story; the effect is so deflating that it's almost as though another Monday has rolled around and it's time to get back to work.

Candleshoe, with its beguiling English countryside settings, languid pace, defanged Dickensian villains, compassionate butler, down-at-the-heels nobility, hidden treasure and orphaned children engaged in a plot to outwit swindlers, keep up appearances and save the old manor from foreclosure, is the fiction of a bygone era.

Exhuasting without being much fun.

A funny film that is as much satire as parody, as much about our time as it is about some of our more bizarre culture heroes.

The Turning Point is entertaining, not for discovering new material, but for treating old material with style and romantic feeling that, in this day and age, seem remarkably unafraid.

Heroes, co-starring Henry (The Fonz) Winkler and Sally (The Flying Nun) Field, brings to the motion-picture theater all of the magic of commercial television except canned laughter. Well, no truly rotten movie is perfect. Harrison Ford, who may be one of the most-seen movie actors of the day because of his role in Star Wars, is effective in a supporting role too small to make the picture worth seeing.

Steven Spielberg's giant, spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind...is the best—the most elaborate—1950's science fiction movie ever made, a work that borrows its narrative shape and its concerns from those earlier films, but enhances them with what looks like the latest developments in movie and space technology.

It's a shapeless mass of film stock containing some brilliant moments and a lot more that are singularly uninspired.

At two hours and 14 minutes, the movie is a lot longer than it needs to be. On the other hand, Elliott (whose beeps and bomps and chomping sounds are supplied by Charlie Callas) is very sweet and emotive, and you don't often see children's musicals as ambitious as this one any more.

The only real value of Damnation Alley is educational: This is the movie to see if you don't understand what was so wonderful about the special effects in, say, Star Wars.

Miss Keaton, who continues to grow as an actress and film presence, is worth paying attention to in bits and pieces of the movie. She's too good to waste on the sort of material the movie provides, which is artificial without in anyway qualifying as a miracle fabric.

The movie has some good things, but in the way it has been directed by John Flynn it moves so easily and sort of foolishly toward its violent climax that all the tension within Charlie has long since escaped the film.

An uneasy amalgam of inconsistent attitudes, without enough humor or zaniness to divert attention from its questionable premise.

Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.

Big, expensive, ultimately ridiculous movie that appears to have been constructed to be a Love Story on wheels.

Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia.

A midnight movie in lysergic spirit and vibe, this was a film made for late-night screening and screaming.

The net effect is that of having read the comic strip for an unusually long spell, which can amount to either a delightful experience or a pleasant but slightly wearing one, depending upon the intensity of one's fascination with the basic “Peanuts” mystique.

Mr. Argento's methods make potentially stomach-turning material more interesting than it ought to be. Shooting on bold, very fake-looking sets, he uses bright primary colors and stark lines to create a campy, surreal atmosphere, and his distorted camera angles and crazy lighting turn out to be much more memorable than the carnage.

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.

Lots of people will probably like The Kentucky Fried Movie, just as they like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's hamburgers. But popularity is still no reason for deifying mediocrity.

The film moves along at a serviceable clip, but it seems half an hour too long, thanks to the obligatory shoot-'em-up conclusion, filmed on the largest sound-stage in the world, but nevertheless the dullest sequence here.

If it were medically possible to overdose on claptrap, Orca would be compelled to carry a warning from the Surgeon General.

Manufactured comedy of a slick order, depending aImost entirely for its effects on the sight and sound of a bunch of kids behaving as if they were small adults. It's a formula that worked for Our Gang Comedy for many years, and works again here with a bright screenplay by Paul Brickman, based on Bill Lancaster's original characters, and direction of intelligent lightness by Michael Presman.

Mr. Pryor is especially successful in presenting Mr. Scott as a man who guards his energy and intelligence carefully, betraying very little to his enemies and saving a great deal for the moments that matter.