It's noisy and brutal, with sentimental flourishes.

The picture, written and directed by James Bridges, tries to be thoughtful and provocative, but it has nothing to say.

Badlands is [Malick's] Breathless.

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the charac­ters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emo­tional range that is dizzyingly sensual.

Eustache's method resembles the static randomness of the Warhol-Morrissey pictures, but the randomness here is not a matter of indifference; it's a conscious goal.

This baseball weeper was very clumsily directed by John Hancock; everything stops dead for the dialogue scenes.

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lighting-fast choreography.

The casting, the acting, and the milieu seem effortlessly, inexplicably right. This movie transcends its genre; it isn't only about stock-car racing, any more than The Hustler was only about shooting pool.

The elements are all there, and Mitchum, looking appropriately square-headed, tries hard and has some good scenes. But you get the impression that the dialogue is moving faster than the action.

Emotions, identities, and even bodily functions are distorted by the mechanized uniformity, but Tati’s despair is modulated by a sense of wonder.

Probably nobody involved was very happy about the results; Dylan doesn't come off at all.

The facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his apparent intention -- to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old corn.

Altman gracefully kisses off the private-eye form in soft, mellow color and volatile images; the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality). Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance.

This rabble-rousing movie appeals to a deep-seated belief in simple, swift, Biblical justice; the visceral impact of the film makes one know how crowds must feel when they're being swayed by demagogues.

Ousmane Sembene's approach is thoughtful and almost reticent; the viewer contemplates a series of tragic dilemmas. Yet for all its intelligence, the movie isn't memorable--partly because the last section is unsatisfying.

[May] has a knack for defusing the pain without killing the joke.

Sam Peckinpah directed in imitation of Sam Peckinpah; it's a mechanical job, embellished with a vivacious, erotic subplot involving Al Lettieri and Sally Struthers.

Expensive pop disaster epic, manufactured for the market that made Airport a hit. Ronald Neame directed, with dull efficiency.

As a comic figure, Tati had a nice spare buoyancy in Jour de fete and Hulot's Holiday, but here his whimsical bumbling seems precious and fatuous.

The chemistry of pop vulgarization is all-powerful here; factually, this life of Billie Holiday is a fraud, but emotionally it delivers.

Extraordinarily simple, yet deeply, emotionally rich.

Gaudy black-exploitation film with explicit racism and some that's implicit. Partly slick, partly amateurish.

The film is beautifully acted and directed around the edges, but it also suffers from a tragic tone that has a blurring, antiquing effect. You watch all these losers losing, and you don't know why they're losing or why you're watching them.

Rigid formality leaves much unsaid in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film, but the director reveals the hidden depths of ordinary life with a quiet astonishment and observes his characters with an exacting subtlety of expression.

Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth and philosophical heft to this turbulent and grim family melodrama.

Frenzy, with its piles of peaches and lettuces, its constant drinking, is a masterpiece devoted to appetite in all its varieties—but it is most seriously devoted to the perversion of sexual happiness in murder and to the absence of sexual happiness in “normal” life.

Bogdanovich takes the plot and the externals of the characters but loses the logic. His picture goes every which way; he restages gags from Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy and W.C. Fields, plus a lot of cornball devices.

The dialogue is often painfully hip-cute, but the actors manage to be funny anyway.