Flash: There is intelligent life in outer space. More, anyway, than in this amiable footnote of a movie.

Murphy exudes the kind of cheeky, cocky charm that has been missing from the screen since Cagney was a pup, snarling his way out of the ghetto. But as befits a manchild of the soft-spoken '80s, there is an insinuating sweetness about the heart that is always visible on the sleeve of Murphy's habitual sweatshirt.

Plenty of tech-noir savvy to keep infidels and action fans satisfied.[26 Nov 1984, p. 105]

His point here seems to be that voyeurism can induce a trancelike emotional paralysis—a message feminists could appreciate if Body Double took less pleasure in the mechanics of mutilation, and that ordinary moviegoers could ponder if the characters' motivations were not so numbingly nitwit. Upscale sleaze—so what else is new?

The film's pleasures are simple and obvious: an original plot, lots of slapstick and a lead performance by the Bushman N!xau, who registers every absurdity with the aplomb of an aboriginal Buster Keaton.

It could as well be called Best Thing of Undetermined Species.

A grand, sprawling entertainment that incites enthrallment for much of its 2 hr. 38 min.

One of this summer's more pungent pleasures: a well-made sex farce of classical proportions. If there is a horse to fall off or an airplane forced to land at the wrong airport, you may be sure Teddy will be aboard.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it.

A lot of it's real pretty, the colors and creatures and all, but these days, you know, every movie is pretty pretty. I guess the only thing that kept me glued to my seat was the gum somebody'd stuck on the upholstery. [16 July 1984, p.71]

In short, The Karate Kid presents the smallest imaginable variations on three well-tested formulas for movie success. Robert Mark Kamen's script is developed with maddening predictability, and John G. Avildsen's direction is literal and ambling. Films like this are what the PG rating is supposed to be all about.

Whoever thought of having evil's final manifestation take the form of a 100-ft. marshmallow deserves the rational mind's eternal gratitude. But praise is due to everyone connected with Ghostbusters for thinking on a grandly comic scale and delivering the goofy goods, neatly timed and perfectly packaged.

Gremlins has enough style and savvy to stand on its own as the summer's most original Hollywood picture.

This time, though, the creative group has neglected to build to the kind of giddy, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink climax that made Airplane! such a memorable exercise in anarchy. Top Secret! plays more like a pillow fight in a summer-camp cabin, an agreeable way to pass the time after lights-out, but one that just peters out when everyone gets tired of breaking the rules.

It features as ghastly a group of interstellar pirates, the Klingons, as ever entered the star log, plus a spectacularly self-destructive planet and plenty of technically adroit and sometimes witty special effects. These are classic directorial occasions, and Nimoy rises to them with fervor, in effect beaming his film up onto a higher pictorial plane than either of its predecessors.

The new film is more an embellishment than an improvement on the snazzy Raiders.

As Hobbs, Robert Redford has never been better. A lefty who moves like the ballplayer he once wanted to be, he has, like all the truly great movie stars, the ability to appear as if he has transcended acting and can now simply behave a part like this.

Before Director Ron Howard and his gargle of writers (Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman) arrange a satisfactorily romantic ending for their odd couple, they also manage to satirize everything from presidential politics to daytime television. They are a jostling, busily observant, fundamentally good-natured crew, and audiences are well advised to take a plunge on Splash.

No wonder adolescents have taken Repo Man for their own. Lifting its hood is like peering into a teen-ager's mind: miswired and noisy, Repo Man is capable of fast starts and amazing cornering. [4 Feb 1985]

The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark.

For all its japes and jokes, the movie is really about exhaustion of the spirit: sitting in a bleak hotel suite at 4 a.m. with the bad taste of last night in the mouth and the feeling that tomorrow will not be a better day.

A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out "Staying Alive" for Worst Picture of the Year.

There is none of the affectionate respect for working-class life and values that marked the similar, and far superior, "Norma Rae," nor any of that film's sense of felt reality either.

It is a serious, often hilarious peek under the rock where nightmares strut in $800 suits and Armageddon lies around the next twist of treason.

No film since Preston Sturges was a pup has so shrewdly appreciated the way the eccentric plays hide-and-seek with the respectable in the ordinary American landscape; no comedy since Annie Hall or Manhattan has so intelligently observed not just the way people live now but what's going on in the back of their minds; and finally, and in full knowledge that one may be doing the marketing department's job for them, it is the best movie of the year.

This naive little movie hopes to prove itself the Flashdance of football.

If the movie does not have that almighty precious thing, at least it had the wit to look for it in the right place. Moviegoers seeking a grand yet edifying entertainment, right-stuffed with what Kaufman calls "seriousness of subject matter and a wild humor that comes out of left field," now know where to look too.

Rumble Fish is the messiest, most provocative inkblot of the year.

It is good to see Connery's grave stylishness in this role again. It makes Bond's cynicism and opportunism seem the product of genuine worldliness (and world weariness) as opposed to Roger Moore's mere twirpishness.

Indeed, the entire film is a kind of sock-hop benefit for Approaching Middle Age. This maturing generation never played Taps with such glamour or good humor. Play the music and let the big chill—the knowledge that "we're all alone out there, and we're going out there tomorrow"—melt away in the warmth of the feel-good movie of '83.

"Wanna see something really scary?" asks Guest Star Dan Aykroyd at film's end. The Miller and Dante episodes are. So is the epic waste that informs much of this movie. [20 June 1983, p.73]

When he had started playing this game of Save the Planet—when he was roguish Sean Connery and the world was so much younger—Bond had been a kind of role model for people of a certain class and ambition. Savoir-faire meant the aristocracy of style: which wine to decant, which brand of cigarette to smoke, which automatic weapon to carry under the armpit. Now that he was Roger Moore, 20 years later, Bond had degenerated into a male model, and something of a genial anachronism.

[Murphy] makes Trading Places something more than a good-hearted comedy. He turns it into an event.

This is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations.

It is not as exciting as Star Wars itself, which had the advantage of novelty. But it is better and more satisfying than The Empire Strikes Back, which suffered from a hectic, muddled pace, together with the classic problems of being the second act in a three-act play.

Like Saturday Night Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz.

Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

The director's stylistic self-denial serves to keep one's attention fastened where it belongs: on a persuasive, if perhaps debatable vision of Gandhi's spirit, and on the remarkable actor who has caught its light in all its seasons.

The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels. What saves this meditation on the vestiges of colonialism is, ironically, its celebration of American star power.

This year's miracle is called Tootsie. It is not just the best comedy of the year; it is popular art on the way to becoming cultural artifact.

The invention is impressive, but there is little indication of the Henson-Oz trademark: a sense of giddy fun.

It is a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people in Depression America, but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys.

Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy.

A sloppy mess that stumbles toward oblivion like a drunk on a losing streak

The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul.

What is missing from the movie is any attempt to discover a cinematic language that compares with the language of the novel. Where the book jumped, the movie plods; where the novelist came upon his themes in the course of rich exploration, the movie marches up and confronts them with all the subtlety of a morning-talk-show host. It is hard to recall any recent movie, of whatever literary lineage, that is as dully literal and unadventurous as this one.

There are a few longueurs, and moments when the plot trips, like Jeremy, over its own complications. But The Secret of NIMH is more important as Bon Bluth's declaration of dependence on a form of popular art that can infuse every corner of the imagination with its rainbow light.

Director John Huston offers production numbers full of empty extravagance, a host of familiar characters (like Punjab and the Asp) with little to do - and a chorus of baby Mormans knowingly strutting their stuff, breaking the sound and charm barriers.

One leaves the film neither hugely thrilled nor greatly awed, but with a pleasant sense of having caught up with old friends and found them to be just fine, pretty much the way one hoped they would turn out in later life.

At first and final glance, Poltergeist is simply a riveting demonstration of the movies' power to scare the sophistication out of any viewer. It creates honest thrills within the confines of a P.G. rating and reaches for standard shock effects and the forced suspension of disbelief only at the climax, when we realize that the characters are behaving with such obtuseness precisely because they are trapped inside a horror movie.

Miller suggests violence; he does not exploit it. He throws the viewer off-balance by mixing the ricochet rhythms of his chase scenes with tableaux of Walpurgisnacht grandeur.

Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.

Hudson painstakingly makes an obscure corner of history reverberate in a nearly mythic way. It is lovely work. And like old snapshots of forgotten people from another time, strangely evocative and moving.

Anyone grownup enough to gain legal admission to the movie (it is rated R) will probably find himself either reduced to guffaws or wishing he had stayed home looking at his poster of Nastassia Kinski wearing a snake.

It has some of ["American] Graffiti's" sweetness of spirit, but none of its style or depth of feeling; it has some of "Animal [House"]'s raunchiness, but none of its loony anarchy.

One can still appreciate the professionalism with which Levin crafted them and the larky spirits with which the performers force the suspension of incredulity.

The film is wonderfully cast and played, right down to the bit player (Ralph Tabakin) who shops suspiciously for a TV set: "I saw Bananzo and it was not for me."

Neither slick nor glib, they all suit a film that may finally disarm everyone with its full-frontal naturalness, its unsmirking bawdiness, its obvious liking for athletes as people, and its refusal (most of the time) to poeticize sport. Personal Best is likable precisely because it is so unembarrassed.

It is also extremely well acted at every level (one especially wants to single out Bob Balaban as the Government's chief aggressor and Wilford Brimley as its belated voice of conscience), and directed by Sidney Pollack with a sort of crisp but unassuming professionalism that is rarer than it ought to be. Perhaps best of all, the script, by sometime Journalist Kurt Luedtke, who was once part of a Pulitzer-winning investigative team on the Detroit Free Press, has a marvelously entertaining intricacy, briskly and believably building, half-inch by half-inch, Michael's outrage over and Megan's entrapment in the plot to get him.

Emotionally On Golden Pond is no less valid for being something of a cliche. Anyway, the characters are so strong that the piece does not play as a cliché. Hepburn, for example may have a less chewy part than has Fonda, but the briskness of her manner, her well-justified image as a no-nonsense individualist who is nevertheless a good sport, serve her wonderfully. There is a vivifying touch of tension between an actress who was a liberated woman before the movement was born and her role as traditional wife and mother.

Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.

So why does the movie version, with Robert Duvall as Tom and Robert De Niro as Des, proceed at the sluggish pace of a Sodality novena? Perhaps because Dunne's collaborator on the screenplay was his wife, the Empress of Angst, Novelist Joan Didion. Onscreen, characters who should percolate with rage simply simmer. Two exciting, dangerous actors have little to do: Duvall spends too much time pacing and waiting; De Niro's big scene has him hanging up his vestments.

Well acted and, within its limited terms, well made, Gallipoli represents a failure of nerve as well as design.

Body Heat is full of meaty characters and pungent performances...a film to be seen at a drive-in, on a heavy summer night, with someone you trust.

As a bestseller, this was a good read, but on film, the crimes the Needle commits on his escape route are so psychopathically gory that he is rendered loathsome. Sutherland's sometimes effective stillness, and some routine direction, are also offputting. On the other hand, Nelligan's anguish is quite touching; she grants the film's final passages a certain suspenseful, almost redeeming, grace.

A rich man, perpetually tiddly from drink, gets incompetent self into various muddles; unflappable gentleman's gentleman gets him out. It has always been an excellent joke, and Writer-Director Gordon has added a dash of sentiment to their relationship, trusting Sir John's expertise to keep things taut and tart, which he does admirably.

Hith her flat little voice and her skinny emotional range, one has to wonder: Is Brooke Shields truly obsession worthy? And can she carry, commercially, another movie about another kind of obsession? The answer is no.

To evaluate For Your Eyes Only and the other Bond movies, it helps to think of them not as, say, different vintages of a fine Bordeaux but as successive models off the Pontiac assembly line. In one vehicle there may be an annoying ping in the engine of narrative; in another the dialogue may be as sleek as Genuine Corinthian Leather. But all meet the same standards of speed, styling and emotion control. If there is no Rolls-Royce in the Bond series, there is also no Pinto.

Private Benjamin, meet Meatballs. Bill Murray of Saturday Night Live, meet Harold Ramis, John Candy, Joe Flaherty and Dave Thomas of SCTV. Psycho from Taxi Driver, meet martial music from 1941. Tired moviegoer, meet tired moviemakers.

This movie has two big things going for it—the dragon and the man who masterminds its slaying.

A stylish, well-paced film with a good variety of moods and moves.

Raiders of the Lost Ark has it all—or, anyway, more than enough to transport moviegoers back to the dazzling, thrill-sated matinee idyls of old. It is surely the best two hours of pure entertainment anyone is going to find in the summer of '81.

Love Excalibur or hate it, but give Boorman credit for the loopy grandeur of his imagery and imaginings, for the sweet smell of excess, for his heroic gamble that a movie can dare to trip over its pretensions— and still fly.

The film's steamy sex scenes—especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures...Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.

Cronenberg delivers.

Orchestrating the efforts of a superb production team — and of the reluctant Mr. Chayefsky — Russell has devised a film experience that will astound some viewers, outrage others and bore nobody. Laugh with it, scream at it, think about it.

The first hour of the film sets up the situation with a naturalistic vigor and cinematic resourcefulness unique to Scorsese. He knows precisely how to move the camera, dress a set, direct his splendid actors, underlay the music, edit to keep the viewer off guard and consistently impressed. But Raging Bull has nowhere to go but down and out. As Jake follows the trajectory of his predictable degradation, the film threatens to become as bloated and repetitious as the fat ex-champ in his cups.

This is a tale of redemption and transcendence, of the hunchback of London Hospital, of the noble phantom who want to go to the opera, of Beauty and the Beast. In Treves' account, though, the Beast was a Beauty. In Lynch's hands, so is this film.

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face.

Airplane! is a splendidly tacky, totally tasteless, completely insignificant flight, a gooney bird of a movie that looks as if it could never get off the ground and then surprises and delights with its free-spirited aerobatics.

A carnival of bang-up stunt scenes. which Richard Rush presents with marvelous subtlety.

Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie's tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog's-or a god's-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.

It is a daring thing the director has done, this bleaching out of all the cheap thrills, this dashing of all the hopes one brings to what is, after all, advertised as "a masterpiece of modern horror." Certainly he has asked much of Nicholson, who must sustain attention in a hugely unsympathetic role, and who responds with a brilliantly crazed performance.

In many ways the new film is a better film than Star Wars, visually more exciting, more artful and meticulous in detail. As a special effects wizard, Lucas fairly dazzles the eye with his optical magic.

Hill wants the viewer to read his frames, not his dialogue; lighting, angles and cut ting carry the weight of meaning. Perhaps he sends too many people to meet their maker in balletic slow-motion. But that is only a small reservation. Hill is very much in the American grain, the inheritor of the Ford-Hawks-Walsh tradition of artful, understated action film making.

The film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life.

Both girls deserve a better vehicle than Little Darlings. The film has an amusing premise: the two heroines race to see who can lose her virginity first. But Director Ronald F. Maxwell, who has done superior TV work (PBS's Verna: U.S.O. Girl), settles for slogging his way through a threadbare script.

Those moviegoers who have a taste for Wise Blood are not going to cavil about flaws. It is enough to ride the wild imaginative waves of this singular artistic adventure

With his instinct and craft, Miller has provided more autosuggestive violence on a $1 million budget than The Blues Brothers did with half the Chicago police force and $30 million.

As a simple detective story, the film is defeated by narrative loopholes, unconvincing plot twists and the last-minute injection of a demon who seems to have drifted in, half-baked, from The Exorcist. The psychological drama is forfeited by the handling of the central character.

Schrader's development of the frame-up story is mechanically melodramatic, and Gere, essentially a boring actor, doesn't help much either. He just cannot carry a picture, even when his passivity and gentleness well serve some aspects of his character, as they do here.

It is good to see the Disney craftsmen doing what they do best on such a grand and risky scale. If one has time for only one space opera this season, this is the one to choose.

Though Scheider is a wry, sensitive actor, he soon gets lost in the vulgar theatrics. So does the subject of death. When Fosse attempts to put his heart on the table, he does so too literally.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a rare movie that finds its tone, its focus and its poetry in its very first image.

Here is a comedy that valiantly defies both gravity and the latest Hollywood fashion.

The Jerk will not drive away any Steve Martin fans, but neither is it likely to convert many unbelievers. Its humor is successful and unsuccessful by turns, and although Comedian Carl Reiner is the director, the instinct here is to give most of both credit and blame to Martin.

Star Trek is, finally, nothing but a long day's journey into ennui.

Though the freckle-faced Reno and Mickey Rooney (as the horse's crafty old trainer) are well cast, their scenes together are perfunctory and impersonal. Emotions are provided in stead by a busy and overbearing musical score. The film's story begins to move in fits and starts.