The film starts in midbattle and scarcely slows up--a good thing, too, because the few slack spots are heavy-handed mystical interludes without a trace of humor.

Straight Time is a powerful film that shows a criminal as he is. The film has no tired explanations for Hoffman's behavior, no fingers are pointed, no apologies or excuses are offered.

A pleasant comedy, but any film starring Matthau and Jackson--and written by such funny men as Shulman and Epstein (among others)--should have been much funnier.

The film bogs down, however, because of De Palma's penchant for technically slick but overblown action scenes that call attention to themselves as virtuoso set pieces instead of advancing the narrative.

The kids will love all the visual gags in this pleasing if lightweight Disney film.

Set in the New York milieus Mazursky knows so well, AN UNMARRIED WOMAN has some great insights and is superbly acted by all involved. The director populates the film with his usual, very real and attractive modern characters, but you may think it cops out in the end.

Not only is this truly sick stuff, but the production is so low-budget, and the photography so muddy, that a sense of ultrasleaze prevails.

What does work in Coming Home are the small, human, unguarded moments. The performances, undeniably appealing, were deservedly praised, Dern and Voight coming off best.

The three leads--particularly Pryor, in an essentially non-comedic role--are remarkable.

It's a creepily sensuous film that suggests that the dark and troubling things we like to repress inhabit dresser drawers, live behind the radiator or lie under the bed. They are part of the environment.

Although it definitely falls short of The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now, the film is not without interest.

The film's outstanding beauty is not enough to compensate its slim story, which remains preoccupied with the duellists' insane obsession with military codes of conduct and personal honor.

COMA wastes a superb performance by Bujold on a simplistic, predictable series of cliched suspense scenes, seasoned with some last-minute moralizing about contemporary medicine.

Another of Cassavetes' puzzling, personal, neurotic, and often brilliant productions that would have benefited from editing with a scythe.

The film features a great cast and is adapted from a funny and moving book by Joseph Wambaugh, but the result is an abysmal, disjointed mess.

The violence is bloody, nonstop, and as pointless as the script.

The story here is really secondary to character and milieu, as director John Badham and his actors create a convincing portrait of frustrated 1970s working-class youth and the escape offered by the swirling lights and pulsing rhythms of the disco.

Fairly lackluster Disney effort is saved by Niven's great performance.

A rarity for Neil Simon's screen efforts, The Goodbye Girl perfectly blends humor, sentiment, and romance on a level so pleasant it's almost suspicious.

Semi-Tough is periodically funny and frequently on target in its satire, and it boasts a strong performance from Reynolds.

The Turning Point features a few laughs, lots of maudlin moments, superior dancing from a host of real ballerinas, and an occasionally perceptive script.

The screenplay relies heavily on movieland cliches about the mentally ill being saner than the rest of us, while Kagan's direction is unimaginative and made-for-TVish. Still, appealing performances by Winkler, Field, and Ford nearly compensate for the lack of inspiration behind the camera.

Steven Spielberg proves decisively that a special effects-dependent film need not be cold, mechanistic, or simpleminded.

Like a delicious pasta salad, ruined with intermittent slabs of Velveeta cheese.

The film lacks the emotional complexity and classic status of previous Disney films.

The film lacks any suspense or drama, and the special effects are not that special.

Brooks, hardly a great director, doesn't quite pull off this adaptation of the Rossner novel.

While Rolling Thunder suffers from Schrader's predictable obsessions with masculine ritual and gunplay, Devane and Jones enhance the material with their nuanced, sensitive portrayals of men who have lost their souls in another land.

Reiner does one of his best directing jobs and never resorts to some of the silliness he's demonstrated in other films. Denver is very affable and could have had a good movie career given the right material.

The script, the direction and finally, Fonda's acting choices capture nothing of what made Hellman a true piss-and-vinegar original.

This gorgeously shot film is a trifle long at just over two hours; much of the racing footage could have been dispensed with, along with the sudsiest of the emotions.

Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz are superb in Wim Wenders's The American Friend, a gripping Hitchockian thriller based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith.

The animation is no better than competent, but the film has a nice bluegrass-style musical score by Ed Bogas and should be fine for the kids and "Peanuts" fans.

The original ad campaign boasted that the only thing more terrifying than the last five minutes of SUSPIRIA were the first 90. Actually, it's the first 15 minutes that contain some of the most frightening footage ever committed to celluloid, but why quibble.

A disturbing, wonderfully acted, well-scripted, and suspenseful study of a murderous 13-year-old girl.

Depending on one's mood, or level of sobriety, it can be a hysterical picture that pokes good natured fun at American movies, TV and commercials.

As the Bond series moves deeper into the 1970s, the emphasis moves away from the inventive scripts that made the best Sean Connery films fine examples of the spy genre and toward the kind of feats of daring and visual spectacle that abound in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Though not particularly bloody, The Hills Have Eyes is an extremely intense and disturbing film. As is the case with Sam Peckinpah's classic, Straw Dogs, it becomes oddly and distressingly exhilarating to watch the nice family become increasingly savage in their efforts to survive.

Dino De Laurentiis' attempt to cash in on the popularity of JAWS is a total failure.

The original The Bad News Bears was a home run, but the sequels are little more than weak trips back to the mound.

The special effects are sub-Bert I. Gordon, but in color, turning THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT into the movie that people will forget.

Directed by the prolific but uneven African-American filmmaker Michael Schultz, this well-intentioned biography of the first black auto racing champion, Wendell Scott, features Richard Pryor in an early dramatic role.

Laughable exploitation film results in a complete waste of time and talent.

Friedkin's Sorcerer is just as gripping and spine-tingling an adventure film as The Wages of Fear and, at times, surpasses the original film with breathtaking photography and a superb use of sound (the scene on the bridge is truly amazing). The musical score by German electronic experimental band Tangerine Dream is brilliant and haunting. The eerie electronic music adds immeasurably to the overall effect of the film, complementing the exotic imagery perfectly.

McEveety can't match Stevenson's sense of comic timing and handling of slapstick humor, but he still manages to make HERBIE GOES TO MONTE CARLO an entertaining children's film.

The voices are all well suited to the characters, and the film is a delight for children as well as adults who appreciate good animation and brisk storytelling.

A visually fascinating rumination on the genre.

Most of the film consists of meetings between different factions and groups, all conducted according to ancient tribal customs.

The film will mostly be remembered for Bisset's wet T-shirt sequences.

Not as awful as its notorious reputation would indicate, but certainly not the neglected masterpiece its small cult of supporters has claimed, Boorman's gorgeously shot sequel to The Exorcist has isolated moments of breathtaking imagery, but its parts do not add up to a satisfying whole.

A thoroughly disappointing and overproduced picture, A Bridge Too Far is nevertheless technically impressive and its sheer scope may interest hardcore warmongers.

Outside of Fonda's minor role as an executive and Huston's equally small part as a newspaper reporter married to Winters, there isn't much to the ultraboring TENTACLES.

A great one for the kids.

As in LATE SPRING (1949), Ozu eschews formula standards of dramatic convention by omitting the actual scene of the wedding ceremony, choosing instead to focus on its planning and consequences. The result is poignant and moving, and if EQUINOX FLOWER is not one of Ozu's greatest films, it's still a gentle and touching late work from this master.

The stunts in Smokey are excellent but the comedy is numbing, and the acting is on a par with a junior high school production of Our Town. Even Gleason comes across badly, and that's a major feat. Adolph Coors and Sons must have been very happy to have a 97-minute commercial for their brew.

Star Wars brought back for a new generation many of the most attractive elements of studio-era moviemaking, and it did so in breathless anthology form. For some young filmgoers this film acted as a doorway to the glory of the movies.

CROSS OF IRON is anything but a standard WWII movie, especially compared to its mythicizing contemporaries. Shot superbly by cinematographer Coquillon, the film shows war as hideously brutal, inglorious, and insane.

An early and sometimes funny effort by director Demme but the hilarity of the subplots (especially the bigamous Napier) swallows the main storyline.

Although Eaten Alive is not so unusual or terrifying as Texas Chainsaw, Hooper does a fine job of building up the Southern-gothic atmosphere and continues his brilliant use of sound to enhance the sense of unease and suspense.

Good score, OK crash sequences, and lots of unintentional laughs are the only reasons to sit through this movie.

Generally regarded as Bronson's worst picture to date.

The simplicity of the seemingly impromptu story, set largely in Allen's beloved New York City, is part of Annie Hall's undeniable charm, along with Allen's flashbacks to childhood (with side-splitting Jonathan Munk as a young Woody) and constant asides to the camera, a device that sometimes has to carry the laughs.

Underrated science-fiction thriller about a superintelligent thinking machine, Proteus IV, designed by obsessive computer wizard Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver).

Although Rabid is full of interesting ideas, they are not particularly well developed or presented by Cronenberg's unfocused script.

Anyone with even a modicum of history awareness knows that Churchill was never kidnaped--which destroys much of the film's suspense. Director Sturges, however, is an excellent craftsman and, with the help of a very good cast, manages to make the proceedings entertaining.

Black Sunday benefits from its technical skill, drawn-out suspense and developed characterizations, though the film could have been even more effectively tight with a shorter running time.

Here we go again--it's time for a 747 to meet disaster once more with a host of colorful characters to worry about as they go down--and this time they go down 50 feet into the ocean.

The on-ice violence is hyperreal, the emotions believable, and the laughs plentiful in this slightly off-the-wall comedy.

Whereas Tod Browning showed the warm humanity of such people in FREAKS (1932), Winner cruelly exploits their handicaps for the purpose of repulsing his audience. This alone makes the film detestable.

The best thing about this forced film is the special effects at the finale.

The film is filled with sight gags and features a wonderful performance by Harris.

It remains notable primarily as a record of pre-Hollywood Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Despite the intriguing premise, Pierce is a stupifyingly unimaginative director, and the film is incredibly dull.

Improbable as are all the Dirty Harry films, The Enforcer is crammed with action and spilling over with violence. The photography is fine, but the gore is as repugnant as Daly's overacting.

The huge cast seems to share in the sense of confusion, and what might have been an excellent treatment of an important story merely falls flat.

An attempt by director Bogdanovich to capture his great love of early movies in a full-length motion picture.

There is much to enjoy in this movie, but just as much to yawn over. One has the feeling that this was a play that was never produced on stage but went directly to the screen from the typewriter. Since so much of it is dialogue with very little cinematic action, it just feels stagebound.

The fourth remake of this story, this is a fairly good, though overlong, film.

Without a doubt, De Laurentiis' remake of Cooper and Schoedsack's classic is the biggest con job ever pulled on the unsuspecting American public.

Though at times the film relies a bit too much on slapstick humor, skilled director Robert Stevenson (working on his 19th Disney film) keeps the action from getting too out of hand

There are some marvelous sight gags, but the film goes over the top into mindless farce at times, destroying much of the Chaplinesque believability that Sellers had earlier engendered.

A moving, brilliantly photographed picture that portrays the legendary eccentric folksinger Woody Guthrie in a trip across Depression-era America.

As drenched in sentiment as it is in sweat, as much love story as fight film, this classic tale of a tireless "bum" who makes good is one of the most uplifting films ever made.

Silver Streak is a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930s but with none of the verve or the motivation needed to get an audience to swallow the shenanigans.

Fitzgerald's unfinished novel transfers awkwardly to the screen but is saved from oblivion by that always-fascinating actor De Niro, who essays the role of the movie mogul (based on MGM's Irving Thalberg).

The film has a strikingly unsettling mood that enhances its power and gives it an impact that the story would otherwise lack. Much of the credit, though, must go to Spacek, who so convincingly portrays Carrie's pain and her longing for acceptance.

There's an amazing display of acting talent, even though director Lumet doesn't quite tie all the strands together.

An excellent low-budget horror film from director Sole, whose impressive grasp of filmmaking technique and eye for the grotesque keeps the viewer on edge throughout the movie.

This mess is no fun until the sniper starts shooting--at least that livens things up a bit.

Performances from the two principals are as developed as the frequently convoluted script allows them to be.

The shadowy photography, great editing, snappy dialogue, and a moody synthesizer score by Carpenter himself make this one of the most successful homages to the Hawks brand of filmmaking--and a very impressive film in its own right.

Low-key comedy detailing a day in the life of an L.A. car wash, featuring an ensemble cast of superb performers.

Iconoclastic New York-based filmmaker Larry Cohen has always stood apart from the Hollywood crowd, inventing new subgenres of exploitation that are invariably bizarre, unpredictable, and clever, even when they don't quite work. The hugely entertaining God Told Me To, a supernatural psychological thriller that's almost horror, sort of science fiction, is among his very strongest works.

Die-hard fans will appreciate this rare glimpse of the great band at work, while mavens of unique musical instruments will delight in seeing Page "play" the seldom-used theramin (previously restricted to the Beach Boys's "Good Vibrations" and schlock horror movie soundtracks). Also, it's kind of fun watching the backstage hysterics of band manager Peter Grant, the man of legendary bad temper who was the basis for Spinal Tap's manager, Ian Faith, in THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984).

Overlong, talky, predictable, and dull, dull, dull.

A truly harrowing film, Marathon Man is a clever series of accidents that produce a nightmare thriller with an unrelenting attack on the viewer's nerves.

Slow, but ravishingly beautiful and charged with a real poignancy.

Incredibly inept and silly adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' adventure yarn.