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.