Conversation Piece is a disaster, the kind that prompts giggles from victims in the audience who, willingly, sit through it all feeling as if they were drowning in three inches of water.

Efficiently short, charming, mildly scary in unimportant ways, and occasionally very funny. It's a perfect show for the very, very young who take their cartoons seriously.

It's not that the movie runs out of steam long before it has gone on for two hours and 33 minutes, but that we have figured it out and become increasingly dumbfounded.

Ceddo is a folk tale presented as the kind of pageant you might see enacted at some geographic location made famous by history and now surrounded by souvenir stands. It's not cheap or gaudy, but it's an intensely solemn, slightly awkward procession of handsomely costumed scenes designed to pass on a lot of information as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The story, as well as Peter Yates's direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innarcent, but the underwater sequences are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling. The shore‐based melodrama is as badly staged as any I've seen since Don Schain's “The Abductors” (1972), which is to remember incompetence of stunning degree.

Exorcist II begins by looking foolish and slowly becomes a straightfaced film of the absurd.

The movie is massive, shapeless, often unexpectedly moving, confusing, sad, vivid and very, very long.

People who are immune to atrocious acting in minor roles; to occasionally poor dubbing; to a totally unoriginal story; to the sort of sloppiness that allows at least one reference to the octopus as a squid; and to a climactic sequence that looks like feeding time at the aquarium when it is at all intelligible, will cull the exceedingly minor rewards of "Tentacles" from some realistic underwater photography, a nicely manipulative opening sequence in which the baby vanishes; and the bobbing corpse gimmick that was more shocking than anything else in "Jaws."

The card announcing the film's G rating was roundly booed by the youngsters though at almost every sight of the dog they screamed with mouth-filled delight.

Equinox Flower—a particularly inscrutable title even for this great Japanese director—is one of Ozu's least dark comedies, which is not to say that it's carefree, but, rather, that it's gentle and amused in the way that it acknowledges time's passage, the changing of values and the adjustments that must be made between generations.

With Mr. Reynolds playing it cool and Mr. Gleason doing his burns and investing the film with a certain raunchy humor, the rest is up to the vehicles. And they don't do anything that hasn't been seen before.

Everyone treats his material with the proper combination of solemnity and good humor that avoids condescension. One of Mr. Lucas's particular achievements is the manner in which he is able to recall the tackiness of the old comic strips and serials he loves without making a movie that is, itself, tacky.

Cross of Iron is Mr. Peckinpah's least interesting, least personal film in years, a hysterically elaborate, made-in-Yugoslavia war spectacle, the work of international financiers and a multinational cast, most of whom are supposed to be Germans although they sound like delegates to an international PEN convention.

Citizen's Band, is so clever that its seams show. Mr. Demme's tidiest parallels and most purposeful compositions are such attention-getters that the film has a hard time turning serious for its finale, in which characters who couldn't communicate directly come to understand one another at long last.

The performances are terrible—thin and overwrought in the manner of actors trying to improvise without an idea in their heads.

There will be discussion about what points in the film coincide with the lives of its two stars, but this, I think, is to detract from and trivialize the achievement of the film, which, at last, puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have.

Gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly.

It took (Cronenberg) several films to come into his own as a filmmaker, but even his earliest work reflects his obsessive interest in the human body as raw material that can be transformed -- for better or for worse -- by strong emotions. [08 Jun 2004, p.E3]

A good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.

The characters don't motivate the drama in any real way. They are cut and shaped to fit it, and if the cast of Black Sunday were not so good, and if Mr. Frankenheimer were a less able director, the movie would be unendurably boring.

Airport '77 looks less like the work of a director and writers than like a corporate decision.

The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.

Nagging thoughts are not supposed to arise in horror pictures—last summer Mr. Winner predicted that this picture would be extremely horrifying — but The Sentinel has long stretches where there is nothing to do but notice things.

The plague germs rapidly mutate into something harmless, like a cold. The film never mutates: It just goes on, becoming more and more lethal.

Toward the end there are some amusing car-chase scenes. Elsewhere the humor is clotted by the feeling that the jokes are chasing the reactions, instead of the other way around.

An interesting, rather slick and excessively long documentary about the small but intensely competitive world of body-building.

A couple of professional actors, Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine, head the cast, but the film looks nonprofessional in every other respect.

The action is reasonably fast and competently photographed. The picture doesn't exactly drag. But it is maggoty with non‐ideas.

Movies as clumsy, tasteless and self-righteous as this are worse than merely boring. By exploiting the tragedies of real people, some wildly fictionalized, The Voyage of the Damned attempts to turn them to profit without giving them any measure of the respect that is due.

Nickelodeon is two hours and two minutes of impersonations.Some of them are very good impersonations—deft and funny—but they lack a life to string them together.

Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.

Streisand never plays to or with the other actors. She does A Star Is Born as a solo turn. Everybody else is a back‐up musician, which is okay when she's belting out a lyric, but distinctly odd when other actors come into the same frame.

It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.

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.

Both Mr. Sellers and Mr. Edwards delight in old gags, and part of the joy of The Pink Panther Strikes Again is watching the way they spin out what is essentially a single routine, such as one fellow's trying, unsuccessfully, to help another fellow out of a lake.

The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.

The sort of comedy that leaves you exhausted, though not from laughing.

The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.

Mr. de Palma has ordered universal overacting. Piper Laurie does it with considerable grace—the wicked witch in a children's pantomime. The marvel, though, is Sissy Spacek. She makes us perfectly aware that she is overacting, and yet she is very effective. Her hysteria is far too hysterical. Her delight in being taken to the prom is far too radiant. But it moves us.

Network can be faulted both for going too far and not far enough, but it's also something that very few commercial films are these days. It's alive. This, I suspect, is the Lumet drive. It's also the wit of performers like Mr. Finch, Mr. Holden, and Miss Dunaway.

Mr. Sole, whose first feature this is, knows how to direct actors, how to manipulate suspense and when to shift gears: the identity of the killer is revealed at just that point when the audience is about to make the identification, after which the film becomes less of a horror film than an exercise in suspense.

The movie is a blank, in other words, until the end. And then, suddenly, a lot of people are killed very gorily; and there is a mass stampede, and the football crowd becomes a panicked, murderous mob. And even the panic lacks emotion. It has momentum—lots of feet stepping on faces—and viciousness. Nothing more.

A suspense melodrama made by people whose talent for filmmaking and knowledge of international affairs would both fit comfortably into the left nostril of a small bee.

Assault on Precinct 13 is a much more complex film than Mr. Carpenter's Halloween, though it's not really about anything more complicated than a scare down the spine. A lot of its eerie power comes from the kind of unexplained, almost supernatural events one expects to find in a horror movie but not in a melodrama of this sort.

It's a dazzling testament to the civilizing effects of several different arts, witty, joyous and so beautiful to look at that it must seem initially suspect to those of us who have begun to respond to spray-painted subway graffiti as the fine art of our time.

A cheerful, somewhat vulgar, very cleverly executed comedy about what goes on in a single 10-hour period in a Los Angeles car wash.

The Song Remains the Same is a movie to listen to Led Zeppelin by. If you want to listen to Led Zeppelin. If you don't, there's no point going. If you do, it's still a dubious proposition...The scenes showing the group performing are more informative though not much more powerful.They are dominated by the singer, Robert Plant. A great mass of yellow curls tumbling around his shoulders, Mr. Plant sashays around the stage, posturing, pouting and conducting a meaningful relationship with the microphone. It looks like a sheep trying to seduce a telephone pole.

Director Curtis times his audience immersions into the ice bath of terror with such skill that moviegoers will scarcely have the leisure to ask why some of the renters aren't a bit more observant and curious about their dwelling.

J.D.'s Revenge crosses the line from a stupid movie to a potentially harmful one.

Messy little melodrama of Southern corruption. [25 Aug 1976, p.46]

Mr. Siegel's lack of form and fidelity to his own story means that as the movie proceeds, even those things that are charming turn to lead.

A film about robots and, evidently, for robots. It is as much fun as running barefoot through Astroturf.

Whatever shred of credibility the movie retains is dispersed by the final, dead serious directorial hocus‐pocus.

After they all start off, and once you get used to the rather handsome speeding-car effects, which is soon, the movie seems to be nothing but one long exhaust pipe. There is only so much that can be done with scenes of cars passing each other.

As a film, Lifeguard is romantic twaddle, but as sociology it's a spontaneous assault on a very American way of life.

This is a decently average Disney film, with a few funny parts and other parts where you would agree to smile if you could.

It's apparent that someone connected with They Came From Within has an impertinent sense of humor even though the film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it's difficult to stay with it.

The movie tends to muffle and sell short whatever points it may be trying to make. There seems to be a ghost of an attempt to assert the romantic individualism of the South against the cold expansionism of the North. Every Unionist is vicious and incompetent, whereas Wales, despite his spitting, is really a perfect gentleman. There is something cynical about this primitive one-sidedness in what is not only a historical context, but happens also to be our own historical context. To the degree a movie asserts history, it should at least attempt to do it fairly.

The film is superbly acted by Mr. Polanski, Mr. Douglas and Miss Winters, who might not be entirely convincing as a Parisian concierge in a realistic film, but who fits into this nightmare perfectly.

It is a dreadfully silly film, which is not to say that it is totally bad. Its horrors are not horrible, its terrors are not terrifying, its violence is ludicrous—which may be an advantage—but it does move along. There is not a great deal of excitement, but we manage to sustain some curiosity as to how things will work out. The Omen is the kind of movie to take along on a long airplane trip.

In place of narrative drive it relies, on the momentum created by ‐ its visual spectacle, its prodigal way with ideas, its wit and its enthusiasm for the lunatic business of making movies.

Logan's Run is less interested in logic than in gadgets and spectacle, but these are sometimes jazzily effective and even poetic. Had more attention been paid to the screenplay, the movie might have been a stunner.

Murder by Death is as light and insubstantial as one could wish.

Midway solemnly cross-cuts between the war councils, chart rooms and communications offices on the American side and those on the Japanese side, with characters, who often have to be identified by subtitles, laboriously trying to give us all of the exposition necessary to make the battle coherent. There's no way to act such roles.

There's very little excitement, but quite a few laughs, all provided by the dialogue contributed by Bert I. Gordon, who wrote the screenplay and then produced and directed it.

A virtually uninterrupted series of smiles.

The Last Hard Men is not just a horse opera; it's practically Tristan and Isolde. Only the love-death relation isn't between a man and a woman but between a retired lawman and a halfbreed Navajo who is obsessed with the notion of killing him.

The film conveys a fine sense of place and period, of weather and mood and the precariousness of life, which are things that Mr. Nicholson responds to as an actor. Yet the plot, along with Mr. Brando, keeps intruding and throwing things out of balance.

Grizzly is not only clumsily plotted, photographed and edited, it is also downright rude when it insists on showing us the bear lopping off an arm or decapitating a horse. Because it's not good enough to earn the right to scare us, I would hope intelligent adults would avoid it and that parents would give it a personal X.

Hawmps is a long march on light provisions. Based on a tiny historical curiosity—an experimental use of camels by the United States cavalry in Texas in the mid-19th century—it should have been a nice small movie. Instead it stretches into an underpopulated two hours and five minutes.

Part 2 has been compiled with the kind of intelligence and affection that allow us to get some purchase on the Hollywood history made by M-G-M without spending our whole lives at the job.

Stay Hungry, the new film directed by Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens), isn't all bad. It just seems that way when it pretends to be more eccentric than it is and to have more on its mind than it actually does.

The manners and methods of big-city newspapering, beautifully detailed, contribute as much to the momentum of the film as the mystery that's being uncovered. Maybe even more, since the real excitement of All The President's Men is in watching two comparatively inexperienced reporters stumble onto the story of their lives and develop it triumphantly, against all odds.

A witty, relaxed lark. It's a movie to raise your spirits even as it dabbles in phony ones.

Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.

Bergman creates a stunning picture not only of personal anxiety but also of the fury that may exist just below the surface of any perfect state.

The revelation of Lipstick is another Hemingway, first name Mariel, Margaux's 14-year-old sister, who plays her sister in the film. As the chief witness to the events within the movie, and its ultimate victim, she gives an immensely moving, utterly unaffected performance that shows up everything else as a calculated swindle.

Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.

Robin and Marian is a hybrid movie, one that seems embarrassed by feelings; yet it works best when it admits those feelings, when it plays them straight.

Watching the film is like listening to someone use a lot of impressive words, the meanings of which are just wrong enough to keep you in a state of total confusion, but occasionally right enough to hold your attention. What is he trying to say? It takes a little while to realize that maybe the speaker not only doesn't know but doesn't even care to think things out.

Acting of this sort is rare in films. It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer. Were Mr. De Niro less an actor, the character would be a sideshow freak.

Dog Day Afternoon is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously illplanned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.

Mr. Peckinpah is mannered and inventive, and these qualities both give the film its strengths and undermine it horrendously. Cleverness, for one thing, gets in the way of comprehensibility.

Barry Lyndon is another fascinating challenge from one of our most remarkable, independent-minded directors.

The movie, which was shot in Morocco, looks lovely and remote (how did we ever once settle for those black-and-white Hollywood hills?) and has just enough romantic nonsense in it to enchant the child in each of us.

A comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors.

It is part fable and part satire, but it is much more: with the greatest fineness and delicacy, Mr. Sembene, the Senegalese writer and director who made this picture, has set out a portrait of the complex and conflicting mesh of traditions, aspirations and frustrations of a culture knocked askew by colonialism and distorting itself anew while climbing out.

There is no doubt about the artistr and devotion that the Maysles have used in recording the life in Grey Gardens." There is no reason to doubt them when they say they love and admire the Beales. But the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter. To watch Grey Gardens is to take part in a kind of carnival of attention with two willing but vulnerable people who had established themselves, for better or worse, in the habit of not being looked at. And what happens when the carnival moves on?

A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.

Fast, vivd espionage-betrayal thriller, dandy plot. [24 Sep 1975]

Swept Away is less a film about ideas than about previous commitments, for which neither character can be held completely accountable. The enormous appeal of the comedy has to do with the way, briefly, each character, is able to overcome those commitments.

Besides being one of Woody's most consistently witty films, Love and Death marks a couple of other advances for Mr. Allen as a film maker and for Miss Keaton as a wickedly funny comedienne.

Just as the much grander Jaws became less scary the moment its mechanical shark appeared, the early virtues of Land collapse once the island is reached and the traffic jam in artificial monsters develops.