It is a loud, churning and triumphantly empty exercise.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF, a Western period farce about a town-taming supersheriff, is something designed for sensibilities shaped by "Petticoat Junction" and "Green Acres."

Like an old electric automobile, the movie rolls forward, without surprises, steadily and almost soundlessly, except for the bomb explosion on the soundtrack. It's never as funny as it looks, but it's a pleasant enough ride if you like your companions.

Such a vulnerable movie that if it were a little less sappy, one might feel compelled to protect it, as if it were someone under 7 or over 65 -- that portion of the public for which it is intended.

Where Eagles Dare is the ultimate metaphor. It encapsulates human experience into an ordered, comprehensible melodrama that is both absurd and entertaining.

Sweet Charity, the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, has been so enlarged and so inflated that it has become another maximal movie: a long, noisy and, finally, dim imitation of its source material.

Dracula Has Risen From The Grave. Yes, again. And judging by this junky British film in color—asplatter with catchup or paint or whatever, to simulate the Count's favorite color—he can descend again.

[Mr. Sembène's] sadly pensive story of a young Dakar girl hired as a governess for a white couple's three children appears unevenly weighted in favor of Mr. Sembène's dolorous thesis.

It is possible that the way to a new kind of musical—using some of the talent and energy of what is still the most lively contemporary medium—may begin with just this kind of musical performance documentary.

Unlike "Funny Girl," the screenplay is rich, not in stereotypes (mothers, accents), but in anecdotes, and there is a wonderful confrontation between Jason Robards, as a slick, sleazy burlesque entertainer, and the owner of a restaurant, "a man from principle," over an order of bagels, which are thrown, one by one, to the floor, with rage and elegance.

Red Beard is well meant and well made, no question about it. But it unfolds familiarly and, at 185 minutes, practically forever.

A fast, dense, friendly children's musical, with something of the joys of singing together on a team bus on the way to a game.

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.

A really important movie about the American class, generation and marriage abyss.

Yellow Submarine is a family movie in the truest sense.

That first hour, although it is not too well or tightly written, is extremely well directed, by Gordon Flemyng, with fine chases on the order of "Bullitt" and meaningful uses of the split screen when the credits are on.

Ice Station Zebra is a fairly tight, exciting, Saturday night adventure story that suddenly goes all muddy in its crises, so that at two crucial points—when water comes rushing into a submarine under the polar ice cap, and when somebody is substituting something for the object everybody is searching for—it is very difficult to know what is going on, or who knows what about it. It doesn't make much difference, though.

A terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen—fast, well acted, written the way people talk.

THE BOSTON STRANGLER represents an incredible collapse of taste, judgment, decency, prose, insight, journalism and movie technique, and yet—through certain prurient options that it does not take—it is not quite the popular exploitation film that one might think. It is as though someone had gone out to do a serious piece of reporting and come up with 4,000 clippings from a sensationalist tabloid.

The movie, written by Terry Southern and seven other writers and based upon a comic strip, rapidly becomes a special kind of mess. All the gadgetry of science fiction—which is not really science fiction, since it has no poetry or logic—is turned to all kinds of jokes, which are not jokes, but hard-breathing, sadistic thrashings, mainly at the expense of Barbarella, and of women.

The cast is full of children who act as artificially and insincerely as the whole enterprise, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, would suggest.

A lovely, sensitive, friendly popularization of the play.

Lots of shooting, galloping, terse dialogue—it is the perfect movie to see in a two-theater town on a Saturday night.

Night of the Living Dead is a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farm house by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.

I'm told by someone whose opinion I respect that the novel was very moving and very sad. The movie is not. It's science-fiction without gadgets, a horror film without thrills.

The director, who also wrote the original story and screenplay, hasn't succeeded in making a drama that is really much more aware than the characters themselves. The result is a movie that is as precise—and as small—as a contact print.

Rachel, Rachel...is a real Movie movie, a little sappy at moments, but the best written, most seriously acted American movie in a long time.

A comedy so uninspired, so relentlessly awful that one occasionally laughs for it—more like a moo or a snort or a gagging noise—just to interrupt it a little or help it out of the room.

The film is a kind of gentle cross between Hiroshima Mon Amour and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—a little hard to imagine, it is true, but less pretentious than the first and less false than the second. If you like one of them I think you are obliged to like all three.

An ordinary, not wonderful, but highly enjoyable movie.

The Toho moviemakers are quite good in building miniature sets, but much of the process photography—matching the miniatures with the full-scale shots—is just bad.

Miss Farrow is quite marvelous, pale, suffering, almost constantly on-screen in a difficult role that requires her to be learning for almost two hours what the audience has guessed from the start...Everyone else is fine, but the movie—although it is pleasant—doesn't quite work on any of its dark or powerful terms.

This is after all, just another Presley movie — which makes no great use at all of one of the most talented, important and durable performers of our time.

It’s the tension between Sellers’s inane tact and the general tastelessness of his surroundings that gives the movie its zing.

It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch.

The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that its is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.

The whole thing, by the way, shines in nifty color. But the real appeal of such wholesomeness is the brisk, unsugary serving, under Robert Stevenson's trim direction, and the consistently adroit humor, which sidesteps slapstick.

Firecreek is a good, sturdy and occasionally powerful little Western.

Funny, outrageous, and touching, The Graduate is a sophisticated film that puts Mr. Nichols and his associates on a level with any of the best satirists working abroad today.

Richard Fleischer's direction, is slow and without surprise. Indeed, toward the end it is perfunctory. Things happen mechanically. The actors appear self-conscious and the fantasy is dull.

It's an unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish mish-mash of backstage plots and Peyton Place adumbrations in which five women are involved with their assorted egotistical aspirations, love affairs and Seconal pills.

Maybe the brand of British banter and buffoonery that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore bombard us with in Stanley Donen's Bedazzled would be very funny if it came in small bursts at not too frequent intervals in an expansive musical comedy or revue. But fired at you exclusively and endlessly for more than an hour and a half in this pretentiously metaphorical picture...it becomes awfully precious and monotonous.

The latest of a succession of super-bloody Westerns made by Italians and Spaniards in Spain with Italian, Spanish and American actors, this time led by Burt Reynolds, as the American titular superhero who dispatches troops of villains singlehanded. Shot in color but decidedly colorless.

Amazing: stirring, subversive and, beneath their dauntingly severe surfaces, sneakily lyrical.

This beautifully produced, superbly scenic and excitingly photographed spoof of old-fashioned horror movies is as dismal and dead as a blood-drained corpse.

Mr. Newman is excellent, at the top of his sometime erratic form, in the role of this warped and alienated loner whose destiny it is to lose. George Kennedy is powerfully obsessive as the top-dog who handles things his way as effectively and finally as destructively as does the warden or the guards.

The wonder is that John Sturges, a top director, has made such an obvious, slow film with this cast, and that Mr. Garner should be such a nobody as the legendary Mr. Earp.

Once this build-up is accomplished—once the sinister plot is launched and the young woman suddenly realizes that she has been duped and is in grave peril—the shock and suspense of the situation hit the audience with almost the same force, I'd imagine, as they evidently hit her. And from here on, the tension is terrific and the melodramatic action is wild as the blind woman uses all her courage and ingenuity to foil her assailants and save her life.

What it basically needed in its transfer to the screen was a drenching in cinema magic to remove all the dull and pretentious patches of realism and romantic cliché that kept it from sparkling in the theater. And that's what we all hoped it would have. Well, it hasn't, alas.

Based loosely on Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories, this glowing little picture should be grand fun for all ages.

The environment is more impressive than the slow, mawkish drama it contains, and the peasants are more assertive and colorful than the main characters. Scenes of sheepherding, farm gatherings, harvest suppers and assemblies at markets and fairs are more energetic and entertaining than the bloodless confrontations of the principals.

The shame of it is that this conclusion is so anticlimactic and banal, because there is so much in the picture that seems to be leading to -- certainly prepares us to expect -- much more.

It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in "Thoroughly Modern Millie."

But here Norman Jewison has taken a hard, outspoken script, prepared by Stirling Silliphant from an undistinguished novel by John Ball, and, with stinging performances contributed by Rod Steiger as the chief of police and Sidney Poitier as the detective, he has turned it into a film that has the look and sound of actuality and the pounding pulse of truth.

Sadistic, anti-Nazi slaughter mission. Entertaining as a blowtorch.

A cozy, good-humored and unbelievable little tale.

Although there's a lot more science-fiction than there is first-vintage James Bond in You Only Live Twice, the fifth in a series of veritable Bond films with Sean Connery, there's enough of the bright and bland bravado of the popular British super-sleuth mixed into this melee of rocket-launching to make it a bag of good Bond fun.

The taut guidance of Mr. Hawks, an old frontier hand, the barbed, pungent and frequently funny dialogue, plus some murderous gun forays, add up to crisp entertainment

The Wayne-Douglas Western looks like something that the two saddle-sore stars cooked up to kill time and make a little money... It's not a bad picture, just obvious.

Gene Saks, directing his first movie, has paced it so unevenly and allowed such glaring mismatches of scenic backgrounds and even of gag sequences that it looks as though his costly picture was made by people who didn't know their way around.

What they have to go through to reach Oregon is nothing to compare to what an old Western fan has to go through to keep from getting up in the middle and walking out.

It is an absorbing film. Whether one is a member of the under-30 set that regards Mr. Dylan as a spokesman, or one of the vanishing Americans over that age, this look into the life of a folk hero is likely to be both entertaining and occasionally disturbing.

The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day.

The shimmering, sensitively scored restoration brings out the production’s opulence and hence the regal stage von Stroheim sets for his characters’ attractions and abjection.

What has emerged is not a towering film, nor a definitive war drama, but an extremely good one with real people, French and Algerian, dark and light.

If it were stopped at the end of an hour and 40 minutes instead of at the end of 2 hours and 10 minutes, it might be a terminally satisfying entertainment instead of the wearying one it is.

There are some precious moments of romantic charm in this bitter account of domestic discord amid surroundings that should inspire nothing but delight. And so one must seize upon them for the entertainment that is to be had, and endure the tedium of much of the picture.

The latest Hope vehicle, Eight on the Lam, gallops frenetically all the way back to Mack Sennett, shedding goodwill and about every tired family television cliché you can think of.

Hombre seems constantly meaning to have something vital to say, maybe about racial antagonisms, that it can't quite sputter out because it has so much to do. But in the doing of it, all the people are fine in their roles and the whole is tremendously engrossing without being important. Hombre is tough.

A confusing patchwork of scenes and characters.

Persona is at once tactile and elusive, splintered and seamless, systematic and free-associative. Essentially a movie of fragments and vignettes, it is held together by the power of the artist’s craft and the centripetal force of his unconscious.

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.

Clearly, the magnet of this picture, which has been a phenomenal success in Italy and other parts of Europe, is this cool-cat bandit who is played by Clint Eastwood, an American cowboy actor who used to do the role of rowdy in the Rawhide series on TV. Wearing a Mexican poncho, gnawing a stub of cheroot and peering intently from under a slouch hat pulled low over his eyes, he is simply another fabrication of a personality, half cowboy and half gangster, going through the ritualistic postures and exercises of each.

It's razzle-dazzle of a random sort, but it works.The big trouble with this picture is that the characters and their romantic problems are stereotypes and clichés.

This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed.

A Man for All Seasons is a picture that inspires admiration, courage and thought.

The charm of his picture lies in the casual kookiness of his characters, plus the random and childlike unreality of the lovely, fragile, dead-panned Miss Deneuve.

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 idea for this satirical adventure is so bright, it's a real pity that the picture doesn't hold up, even with some truly hilarious moments, specifically wisecracks, courtesy of Woody Allen and a battery of six comedy writers.

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.

The Fortune Cookie is no more sunny--and, if possible, even less romantic--than Kiss Me, Stupid, Mr. Wilder's last film and a comedy of unrelieved vulgarity, but it has style and taste.

Its so called science is still fiction, and its lesson is all to apparent to the mature. Its tensions and terrors, however, are genuinely fascinating.

This document of youthful confusion has not aged one minute. If anything, its detached, discursive and sympathetic observation of the earnest foolishness of post-baccalaureate, pre-1968 Parisians is more acute, and more prophetic, than ever.

This is neither an easy film, nor, in the show biz sense, an entertaining one. It makes large demands upon its audience, and in return confers exceptional rewards.

Essentially a film of mordant feeling in which violence is always just below the surface of pokerfaced bluffing and fake Old-World Spanish courtesy.

The only thing really wrong with this tame little film, based on a prize-winning children's novel by Joseph Krumgold, is that nothing happens.

All I can tell you is it is quite a trip. Fortunately, all of the voyaging is done in the northern hemisphere.

The whole thing is played expertly by everyone in the large cast, and a lively jazz score and bright color make it seem much more casual than it is.

In these times, with James Bonds cutting capers and pallid spies coming in out of the cold, Mr. Hitchcock will have to give us something a good bit brighter to keep us amused.

Like its careening, footloose hero, A Fine Madness needs discipline. But you'll never guess what lurks around the bend, from gold to brass.

In its forthright dealing with the play, this becomes one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made.

Happily, the viewer is not asked to ponder profundities very often—just to have fun.

Mr. Arkin and Mr. Reiner meet and the comedy takes off in wild flight.

Unfortunately, neither Mr. Randall's Poirot nor the gags, chases and red herrings offered are inventive, comical or charming enough to make this more than a routine run through of clichés and clues.

Feeble in concept and conventionally (if smoothly) executed.

Producer-director, Stanley Donen, apparently goes on the theory that in a chase movie the plot should only be used as a framework, for visual entertainments. Arabesque provides those, all right—Op photography, lush décor, gimmicky locations and hairraising pursuits. And, of course, Sophia Loren, a stunning bit of animated scenery who is not called upon to act but to Dior.

The action is swift and the mystery fetching in this handsomely made color film. But eventually it seems a bit too obvious, imitative, old-fashioned and, worst of all, stale.

It takes a soft heart and a strong stomach to absorb the amount of saccharine that is studiedly and shamelessly dished up in Henry Koster's The Singing Nun.