An honest failure. This United Artists big-budget musical film, directed by Martin Scorsese, suffers from too many conflicting intentions.

The film is too cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (and when it opened, there were accounts of people in theaters who threw things at the screen). But it's winged camp--a horror fairy tale gone wild, another in the long history of moviemakers' king-size follies. There's enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what it lacks is judgement.

There is something dazzling about a sci-fi film that manages to call upon the energies of both futurism and long-held faith. The movie is not to be compared in ferocity of imagination with Kubrick’s “2001”—significant that the music here is merely illustrative, never caustic or memorable, and that there is nothing of Kubrick’s vision of a blanched form of existence—but it is exuberantly entertaining.

A high-spirited, elegantly deadpan comedy, with a mellow, light touch.

Allen joins the Catskills tummler’s anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession with baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions. It’s a mark of Allen’s artistic intuition and confessional probity that he lets Diane Keaton’s epoch-defining performance run away with the movie and allows her character to run away from him.

Christie’s passionate, vulnerable performance keeps pulling the entire movie into her point of view.

Hill lacks the conviction or the temperament for all this brutal buffoonishness, and he can't hold the picture together; what does is the warmth supplied by Paul Newman.

It holds the viewer's interest, but it does so by setting up the bodybuilding champions for you to react to in a certain way, and then congratulating you for seeing them in that psychologically facile way.

Directed by James Fargo, this third in the series doesn't have the savvy to be as sadistic as its predecessors; it's just limp.

As the lines drone on -- paced with a sledgehammer -- you may feel you could die for a little overlapping dialogue. But with this material you can't even have the frivolous pleasure of derision.

It sounds promising, but Bogdanovich attempts an exercise in style, and the result is sustained clutter.

May’s judgment on manhood is harsh: it entails renunciation, submission, humiliation, and the willingness to betray and to break the relationships forged in the heat of male bonding. Or, to be a man, one must stop being one of the guys.

Sentimental, without being convincing for an instant.

The movie is a romantic adventure fantasy--colossal, silly, touching, a marvelous Classics Comics movie (and for the whole family).

The director, Blake Edwards, sets up promising slapstick situations, and then the payoffs are out of step (and worse, repeated); after the first half hour or so, the film loses momentum.

An absorbing and impressive piece of work.

A low-budget winner--a romantic fable about a Philadelphia palooka who gains his manhood, written by and starring muscle-bound Sylvester Stallone, who is repulsive one moment, noble the next. He's amazing to watch.

So inept you can't even get angry; it's like the imitations of sophisticated entertainment that high-school kids put on.

Probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter; the film needed a writer who would fill in what's missing--Pinter's art is the art of taking away.

The best scary-funny movie since "Jaws" - a teasing, terrifying, lyrical shocker, directed by Brian De Palma, who has the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies. Pale, gravel-voiced Sissy Spacek gives a classic chameleon performance as a repressed high-school senior.

He hardly bothers with the characters; the movie is a ventriloquial harrangue. He thrashes around in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.

The picture teeters on the edge of parody without giving itself the relief of falling over.

A junk-food mixture of poetry, black anger, bathroom humor, and routines that have come through the sit-com mill.

The director, John Schlesinger, opts for so much frazzled corss-cutting that there isn't the clarity needed for suspense. The only emotion one is likely to fell is revulsion at the brutality and general unpleasantness.

It operates on darlingness and the kitsch of innocence. The almost pornographic dislocation, which is the source of the film's possible appeal as a novelty, is never acknowledged, but the camera lingers on a gangster's pudgy, infantile fingers or a femme fatale's soft little belly pushing out of her tight stain dress, and it roves over the pubescent figures in the chorus line.

The script, by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale, is a mechanical demonstration of how greedy and unfeeling the townspeople are, and Don Siegel's directing lacks rhythm--each scene dies a separate death.

Well thought out and with a feeling for ordinary American talk, but too mechanical, too blandly sensitive, too cool to be popular; it's the sort of small-scale picture that's a drag in a theatre but shines on Home Box Office.

Deep Red evinces the full extent of Argento’s seductive artistry. The film’s glamorous collection of psychics, dandies, and artists suggestively discuss murder as if they’re speaking of sex. And aren’t they, really?