The picture is just a flimsy, thrown-together service comedy about smart misfits trying to do things their own way in the Army. But it has a lot of snappy lines (the script is by Len Blum, Dan Goldberg, and Ramis), the director, Ivan Reitman, keeps things hopping (it's untidy but it doesn't lag), and the performers are a wily bunch of professional flakes.

It's like reading a fairy tale that has the mixture of happiness and trauma to set your imagination whirling; the fire-breathing dragon--scaly, winged, huge--is more mysterious, probably, than any we could have imagined for ourselves.

It has charm and a lot of entertaining kinkiness, too.

Seeing “Raiders” is like being put through a Cuisinart—something has been done to us, but not to our benefit.

Peter Hyams, who directed, knows how to stage chases and fights. But he also wrote this script, which deadens everything and doesn’t even make sense.

A funky, buoyant farce. The picture doesn't have the dirt or meanness or malice to make you explode with laughter, but it's consistently enjoyable.

You're entertained continuously, though you don't feel the queasy, childish dread that is part of the dirty kick of the horror genre.

The film is hair-raising because of what Elvis turns into.

It takes Malle a little while to set up the crisscrossing of the 10 or 12 major characters, but once he does, the film operates by its own laws in its own world, and it has a lovely fizziness.

The impulsiveness and raw flamboyance that make the book exciting are missing, and the cool, elegant visuals outclass the characters right from the start.

The film is packed with symbolic gestures, though they're not quite as effective as the ghostly fiesta scene behind the opening titles, with senoritas dancing to music that's different from the music we hear, and castanets silently clicking.

A crisp, tough-minded action film about an international group of mercenaries who stage a coup in a small, decaying West African country run by an Idi Amin-Papa Doc-style despot. The casting of Christopher Walken as Shannon, the leader of the group, gives the film the fuse it needs.

The director Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich try to make a new, more meaningful version of a 40s melodrama, but their Manhattan-set thriller bogs down in a tangle of plot.

The film has many of the ingredients of a shocking, memorable movie, but it's shallow and earnest...It's a mess, with glimmerings of talent and with Newman's near-great performance.

An aggressively silly head-horror movie, the result of the misalliance of two wildly different hyperbolic talents-the director Ken Russell and the writer Paddy Chayefsky.

Tomlin confirms herself as a star whenever she gets the material, and Dolly Parton's dolliness is very winning, but it's easy to forget that Jane Fonda is around - she seems to get lost in the woodwork. The director, Colin Higgins, is a young fossil who sets up flaccid, hand-me-down gags as if they were hilarious, and damned if the audience doesn't laugh.

The picture doesn't come together and much of it is cluttered, squawky, and eerily unfunny. But there are lovely moments --especially when Olive is loping along or singing, and when she and Popeye are gazing adoringly at the foundling Swee'Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt).

Roman Polanski’s version, from 1980, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is textured and smooth and even, with lateral compositions subtly flowing into each other; the sequences are beautifully structured, and the craftsmanship is hypnotic. But the picture is tame.

It's about Scorcese and DeNiro's trying to top what they've done and what everybody else has done. Scorcese puts his unmediated obsessions on the screen, trying to turn raw, pulp power into art by removing it from the particulars of observation and narrative.

A likable first feature by the director Taylor Hackford; it has verve and snap, despite a rickety script and a sloshy finish.

The script goes from one formula to the next, and it reworks the pranks of generations of male service comedies, but the director, Howard Zieff, refurbishes the stale material with smart small touches, and Goldie Hawn has such infectious frothy charm that she manages to get laughs out of ancient routines about a tenderfoot going through the rigors of basic training.

Lynch’s powerful depiction of Merrick (played by John Hurt) moves a viewer from revulsion and fear to empathy and tenderness.

Kurosawa seems to be saying that wisdom dictates caution, security, stasis, but that to be alive is to be subject to impulse, to chaos.

Cassavetes films Rowlands, his wife, with self-deprecating adoration; the demanding man likens himself to the defenseless boy, and both are saved by this gloriously burdened woman who would kill for them.

One of the most sheerly enjoyable films of recent years, this sophisticated horror comedy, written and directed by Brian De Palma, is permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts.

Its kitschy grabs at the surreal--the scene in a lunatic asylum, where German troops are billeted, manages to be at once implausible and offensive--that blocks any close engagement with the drama. That said, you must see this film for one unstoppable reason, and that is Lee Marvin.

A classic screwball fantasy - a neglected modern comedy that's like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures...Set in the world of competing used-car dealers in the booming Southwest, this picture has a wonderful, energetic heartlessness; it's an American tall-tale movie in a Pop Art form. The premise is that honesty doesn't exist; if you develop a liking for some of the characters, it's not because they're free of avarice but because of their style of avarice.

All we have to look forward to is: When are these two going to discover fornication? The director, Randal Kleiser, and his scenarist, Douglas Day Stewart, have made the two clean and innocent by emptying them of any dramatic interest. Watching them is about as exciting as looking into a fishbowl waiting for guppies to mate. It's Disney nature porn.