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.

The Onion Field is a serious and most uncompromising movie. It lacks, however, the sort of disciplined craft that might have made it a powerful and affecting one.

This is a modest, clear sighted film, and it profits considerably from a lack of the bravura landscape photography that most directors would have used to puff up a movie set in Australia.

The picture breaks down awkwardly when it tries to express directly what it has already said better by implication. This generally occurs in earnest scenes between Elliott and his all too dense girlfriend. Dayle Haddon's inexperienced playing adds nothing even faintly convincing to the badly written love interest, and the rest of the film has to struggle to recover from the resulting dead spots. Still, North Dallas Forty retains enough of the original novel's authenticity to deliver strong, if brutish, entertainment.

There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They will, if they have any sense, simply cherish it.

There is no point in retelling this tale if you are going to be stuffy about it.

By grafting stylistic affectations onto an otherwise naturalistic movie, Kaufman blunts the raw power that, is The Wanderers' greatest asset. Like his characters, he would have fared far better if he had stopped showing off and practiced a little self-control.

Broccoli serves the audience a space-shuttle hijacking, a jumbo-jet explosion and a protracted wrestling match between two men who are falling from the sky without parachutes. All this happens before the opening credits. From there, it's on to gondola chases in Venice, funicular crashes in Rio and laser-gun shootouts and lovemaking in deep space. Meanwhile, beautiful women come and go, talking (ever so discreetly) about fellatio. When Broccoli lays out a feast, he makes sure that there is at least one course for every conceivable taste...The result is a film that is irresistibly entertaining as only truly mindless spectacle can be.

The movie is a series of shopworn jokes, executed with no discernible flair. The writers have done little more than round up the usual array of stereotyped characters: a horny fat boy, a bespectacled nerd, a conceited stud, busty girls and so on.

Muppet magic remains a bewildering succession of wonderful bits.

Director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy, The Sting) and Screenwriter Allan Burns (cocreator of TV's original Mary Tyler Moore Show) have constructed a romantic comedy that, for all its contrivances, offers an indecent amount of emotional and comic satisfaction.

The production's genially tatty air enhances its anarchical mood and encourages one to go with its goofy yet often shrewd comic flow.

Hair succeeds at all levels—as lowdown fun, as affecting drama, as exhilarating spectacle and as provocative social observation.

What happens is not the substance of Manhattan as much as how it happens. The movie is full of moments that are uproariously funny and others that are sometimes shattering for the degree in which they evoke civilized desolation.

This horrific tale is told with marvelous shadowy indirection and delicate lyricism. It is full of enigmatic silences, which create a nice, ironic tension between the film's genteel manner and its really quite ferocious theme.

If there is a hero in the new film, it is Donald Sutherland, who gives an energetic, intelligent, emotionally rangy performance as the public health officer working on the case. There is nothing wrong, either, with Brooke Adams as his colleague and lover. But, sadly, they can not compensate for all the other mistakes in a film that lingers too long and too soberly over material that, as the original showed, must be quickly, even superficially handled, if it is to be accepted at all.

This excruciatingly violent, three-hour Viet Nam saga demolishes the moral and ideological cliches of an era: it shoves the audience into hell and leaves it stranded without a map.

Lacking a firm center in Frodo's story, the film plays itself out as a bewildering parade of elves, dwarves, ores, trolls and talking trees.

So much wit and talent and energy crowd the screen in this lavishly filmed variant of the Oz story that it is depressing to realize that the production never had a chance.

Yet in the end the self-conscious importance of the film produces a rather queasy feeling, for really this story is no more than a crude exploitation — decked out with our latest scientific finery — of what amounts to a penny dreadful fantasy. If you stop and think about it, even if there were a nest of Nazis hiding out in South America, most of them would be pushing 80 by now, and quite incapable of the exertions required by this farflung, not to mention farfetched plot.

At its best it perfectly expresses the fears and loathings of kids who came of age in the late '60's; at its worst Animal House revels in abject silliness. The hilarious highs easily compensate for the puerile lows.