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.