Even at its best, Robin Hood is only mildly diverting. There is not a single moment of the hilarity or deep, eerie fear that the Disney people used to be able to conjure up, or of the sort of visual invention that made the early features so memorable.

Disassembling and reassembling his blighted lovers in various moods and stances, Eustache achieves a fine perspective — detached but never dispassionate.

A funny, gentle and honestly sentimental movie that is easily one of the best of the year in any category, and very possibly the best movie about sport ever made in this country.

As a director, Eastwood is not as good as he seems to think he is. As an actor, he is probably better than he allows himself to be. Meanwhile, the best you can say for High Plains Drifter is that the title is a low pun. Rarely are humble westerns permitted to drift around on such a highfalutin plane. That, however, is small comfort as this cold, gory and overthought movie unfolds.

The movie can be flat-out fun, a sort of carnival of combat that can turn even a sophisticated audience into a group of gawking kids at a Saturday matinee.

This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period.

It is very fussy about period detail, and goes to some length to evoke the dim days of Depression America, while just about everything else is left to slide.

Though it’s the townspeople who slowly fall victim to the epidemic, the white-suited, gas-masked military men are just as imposing as any movie virus.

With a two-fisted script by John Milius (who later wrote Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn), Huston and Newman created a raucous, Rabelaisian, revisionist western of the sort popular at the time.

The life and the lady have been slicked up and toned down, in the best tradition of such tears and tinsel sagas as The Helen Morgan Story and I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which lovers are long-suffering and steadfast, agents loyal, temptation rife and facts irrelevant. Billie Holiday, an artist, deserves a far better memorial.

Anthology inspired by Dr. David Reuben’s book of the same title. Allen’s version is far less educational than Reuben’s; it takes the form of several unrelated sketches, each of which purports to answer a question posed in Reuben’s book. The funniest bits are the first and last.

Each of the four lead performances is exceptional, none more so than Burt Reynolds' beefy, supercilious Lewis.

Neither the authentic political atmosphere nor canny performances by Redford, Boyle and Porter go far to cut through the basic glibness of the film. Ritchie incorporates numerous television political commercials and makes a point of their smooth dishonesty and wily distortion. None, however have less substance than The Candidate.

Directed by and co-starring Sidney Poitier, it is at least competently made and has a few, fleeting moments of genuine fun.

Bakshi's animation is good, and the visuals—which marvelously capture the grainy, lowering look of the Manhattan streetscape—are raucous, ingenious and convincing. But Fritz the Cat is, for a cartoon, exasperatingly slow: Bakshi's sense of pace and editing is snail-like, and the dialogue mostly naive and muffled.

The result is a comedy made by a man who has seen a lot of movies, knows all the mechanics, and has absolutely no sense of humor.

By the time Scenarist Allen and Director Fosse have wrung them out, what's left - with one exception - is mostly slack and sour.

The confounding thing, and perhaps the ultimate irony of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, is that Alex is surprisingly but undeniably engaging.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks could use some magic itself. The fantasy is earthbound, the score by Richard and Robert Sherman (who also wrote music and lyrics for Mary Poppins) is forgettable, the special effects lackadaisical.

On an informal Richter scale of movie terror, Play Misty for Me registers a few gasps, some frissons and at least one spleen-shaking shudder. A good little scare show, in other words, despite various gaps in logic and probability.

The qualities that have kept the Broadway Fiddler running these seven years are in scant supply onscreen. Gone with barely a trace are warmth, joy, insight and even the most elementary kind of entertainment.

Director Bogdanovich has achieved a tactile sense of time and place. More, he has performed that most difficult of all cinematic feats: he has made ennui fascinating. Together, that is enough to herald him as possibly the most exciting new director in America today.

The French Connection is a knockout police thriller with so much jarring excitement that it almost calls for comic-book expletives. POW!, ZOWIE! The film has all the depth of a mud puddle, but Director William Friedkin (The Night They Raided Minsky's) sets such a frantic pace that there is hardly a chance to notice, much less care.

With the exception of Zohra Lampert's subtle and knowledgeable performance, no one in the cast has enough substance even to be considered humanoid. And after the first reel, the vampires seem to have lost their bite.

It is like a lunatic opera, an attempt to make a furious poem out of frenzy. Russell's flamboyant theatricality and his interest in the perverse have been too much imposed on his other films; but here, style and subject are perfectly matched. The film does not work as drama. But as a glimpse of hell it is superbly, frighteningly effective.

Roeg and his scenarist Edward Bond (BlowUp) aim for the mind and miss wildly. Their preachy, anti-intellectual Natural Mannerisms are neither convincing nor new.

Klute is a sharp, slick thriller about murder, perversion, paranoia, prostitution and a lot of other wonderful things about life in New York City.

Unfortunately, failed comedy and vigorous suspense are handcuffed together for the entire trip.