My Bodyguared is a sweet little movie about characters who really seem to be people, and that sort of verisimilitude is rarer than it ought to be nowadays.

Low-budget horror films occasionally show the faintest glimmer of talent and are praised out of all proportion to their merits. Others are merely bad. Mother's Day goes beyond that. It is as though the persons responsible for it possess some fearsome power as yet unknown to science called antitalent.

A moving, intelligent and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them. Not since Robert Benton's "Kramer vs. Kramer" has there been a movie that so effectively catches the look, sound and temper of a particular kind of American existence.

There is a lot of stirring music on the soundtrack, and a fair amount of amusement in the audience. The special effects aren't bad, either.

He Knows You're Alone is the latest in a ghouls' parade of cheaply made horror movies by young and unknown film makers. It is the first theatrical film for the 30-year-old director, Armand Mastroianni, who is said to be a cousin of the film star, and it shows in uncertain pacing, halting performances and innumerable technical flaws. [26 Sep 1980, p.6]

If some of the plot seems familiar, the intelligence with which Mr. Clarke dissects the flaws of Britain’s “borstal” system is not. [15 Jun 2017]

The screenplay, by Jerry Belson and Brock Yates, is not so surreally funny as the one for the first film, but funny lines are not what the picture is about. Smokey and the Bandit II is about movement, action, frustration and destruction, and Mr. Needham, one of Hollywood's most successful stunt artists before he became a director, is very good at this sort of thing. Smokey and the Bandit is entertaining in a brainless way.

Like The Wiz...Xanadu is desperately stylish without having any real style.

The footage dealing with the mechanics of the Nimitz is, in fact, interesting, and there is one quite comic sequence in which several of the Nimitz's jet fighters take on two, totally baffled World War II-vintage Japanese Zeros. As an entertainment film, though, the movie is utter nonsense. [01 Aug 1980, p.C3]

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.