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.