An impressive first feature from Melvin Van Peebles has a black American soldier, Baird, stationed in France and visiting Paris on a three-day pass.

A very expensive caper picture that drowns in its own artiness, using multi-images, cinematic tricks, and other pretentious film gimmicks--all of which detract from the story.

It's all as campy as can be and a great time waster.

Truly frightening because so much of it is so plausible, ROSEMARY'S BABY is one of the finest examples of modern horror, a milestone in the evolution of the genre. Although the subject matter is ultimately supernatural, the treatment is very realistic.

Elvis Presley again plays a successful racer in this, his 27th film.

The dialogue flows a little too thickly in an awkward attempt to find a parallel with the then-raging Vietnam War; Hale, a TV veteran, directs loosely, but the few action scenes he does permit are snappy and scary.

The good news is that, as sitcom-style theater goes, The Odd Couple is often highly amusing, with Lemmon and Matthau ideally cast as prissy neatnik and unmitigated slob.

The script quickly runs out of gas thanks to the one-joke story line and Blake's uninspired direction.

PLANET OF THE APES is a success on many levels, with a witty, intelligent script by Rod Serling and a suitably hot-tempered, athletic performance from Charlton Heston. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter are highly effective as a sympathetic ape scientist and doctor, respectively, with John Chambers's superb latex makeup allowing them a full range of expressive facial gestures.

A beautiful, confounding picture that had half the audience cheering and the other half snoring. Kubrick clearly means to say something about the dehumanizing effects of technology, but exactly what is hard to say.

Mel Brooks's first and funniest, a spoof of Broadway theater that has earned a deservedly devoted cult following.

It's all good fun, and Ustinov is very amusing as Blackbeard.

There are only short bursts of action in between nearly endless talk in the Clements script. Despite a huge cast of very competent actors the film misses the mark.

A massive, many-faceted film that continues to hold up, viewing after viewing.

A genuine oddity, the film is exceedingly well shot by cinematographer Alfred Taylor and has a creepy PSYCHO-like feel about it as well as some nightmarish surrealism.

The Graduate is a flawlessly acted and produced film. [Review of re-release]

Will put the kids to sleep, but may kill you.

Pure trash, based on a trashy book, filled to the brim with trashy performances, now becoming a trashy cult film.

Cook and Moore brilliantly shift from character to character with just a change of voice (not unlike Peter Sellers), and the movie never flags.

Ippoliti's sharp cinematography helps salvage this below-par production.

The film's story line is a clever and perceptive story, superbly told.

Shot in the Italian Alps, the cinematography is striking.

Too cool for words, then switches past midstream into a work of poignancy and power.

An interesting, often absorbing offbeat western with excellent production values.

Expertly directed by veteran British helmsman Young, Wait Until Dark is an exciting, original chiller.

The film loses steam, sabotaged by Joshua Logan's too-obvious direction and receiving little help from a score by Lerner and Loewe that remains one of their minor efforts.

The last animated film to be directly overseen by Walt Disney himself, Jungle Book contains some great visual laughs and is low on sticky sentiment, but the sketchy animation style strains to be modern and looks careless instead.

A weird picture based on a slim novel by Carson McCullers, this movie fails to engender any sympathy or interest due to several miscalculations.

The ultimate arty 60s thriller, and we mean that as a compliment.

Landmark gangster film that made a huge commercial and cultural splash.

Superb thriller...IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT was carefully directed by Norman Jewison, who avoids sentimentality and all the racial cliches that could have crept into almost every scene.

Aldrich was a master at presenting his distinctly cynical outlook in the context of crowd-pleasing entertainment, and The Dirty Dozen is one of his most effective and lasting efforts.

What makes To Sir, With Love such an enjoyable film is the mythic nature of Poitier's character. He manages to come across as a real person, while simultaneously embodying everything there is to know about morality, respect, and integrity.

Nancy Sinatra sings the wistful title song, and the action scenes are enhanced by some of composer John Barry's best work for the Bond series.

Sly, leisurely-paced western from Howard Hawks, with a script by Leigh Brackett ensuring a few laughs.

Even Nicholson's presence can't lift this trash to a one-star listing.

A thoroughly enjoyable way to spend 101 minutes.

Redford and the Oscar-nominated Natwick, fresh from their Broadway triumph in the play, perform with the ease familiarity brings, and Fonda and Boyer also display the appropriate lightness of touch.

An extraordinarily predictable and uninviting western directed by McLaglen in the John Ford vein but with none of the Ford atmosphere, complexity, characterization, or inventiveness.

The film's greatest incidental pleasures are images of a time when outlaw musicians wore suit jackets and the craggy Dylan was a delicate, unconventionally handsome young man.

The second film in Leone's Dollar trilogy finds the Italian director in better form than in A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More has better writing, superior production values, and more characters who aptly complement Eastwood's stoic Man with No Name.

Overly sentimental, but with its heart in the right place, THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE tells the story of Prothon, a Parisian who returns to Algiers (he was raised there) during the war of independence to be with his dying father.

A mess. Casino Royale is two hours and eleven minutes of non sequitur.

Donen's direction here is a trifle trendy and frantic, with sometimes jarring results.

Hope isn't funny, Winters misses the mark completely, and watching Diller is like scratching your fingernails down a blackboard. To be avoided.

It's an extremely violent and brutal film, featuring a fine performance by Newman. He's a blunt, practical man who favors action over words. Cilento is appealing as the worldly landlady, and Boone is chilling as the sadistic bad man who is ready to murder anyone standing in his way.

Although the film downplays the comic aspects of the Falstaff-Hal relationship, the two lead performances are splendid, with Baxter alternately playful, cunning, icy, and commanding and Welles giving the performance of his career in a part he deeply understands.

An interesting variation of the Frankenstein theme presented with fine production values.

This is Ingmar Bergman's chaste exploration of psychosis. It's not a horror story but a poem, and remarkable for that. This is one of the director's masterworks.

While far from being one of Harryhausen's best films (the quality of which had little to do with his abilities), the movie has superb effects that are worth a look for his fans.

The plot is simple and the Italian performances verge on the operatic, but Leone revitalizes the Western through a unique and complex visual style. The film is full of brilliant spatial relationships (extreme close-ups in the foreground, with detailed compositions visible in the background) combined with Ennio Morricone's vastly creative musical score full of grunts, wails, groans, and bizarre-sounding instruments. Aural and visual elements together give a wholly original perspective on the West and its myths.

GAMBIT was a slightly-veiled copy of TOPKAPI and RIFIFI, down to the elaborate planning sequence in both films. The major difference is that this picture had some very funny dialog. A delight to the eye and ear.

Frankenheimer pulls out all the stops to lend excitement to the racing footage--splitting the screen into ever smaller increments, mounting cameras to the cars to get shots taken inches above the track, and using slow motion--but ultimately his obsession with technique becomes wearying, and the plot is simply not interesting enough to stand on its own.

An engrossing study of imagery and one's perception of the image.

Director Zinnemann never allows his primarily stage-trained actors to indulge in theatrical over-emoting. This absorbing film features inventive camerawork and superior production values.

Unlike the work of either Jean-Luc Godard or Richard Lester (both obvious influences on Coppola at this point in his career), YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW fails to have much impact beyond its lightheartedness. It is as if Coppola were too concerned with creating a style to put much effort into the implications of his material.

Violent tale of a man who comes into a town run by rival gangs--this time it's the Ku Klux Klan and Mexican bandits.

Neat little chiller with Polanski honing his abilities as a director and standout performances from Pleasence, Stander, and Dorleac.

What's Up Tiger Lily? is cleverly devised, hinging on a well-developed sense of the absurd. Allen and his cohorts make good use of the source movie's situations, turning its obvious cliches into some wonderful parodic gems.

A truly adventuresome, action-filled film that is played more for thrills than for conveying a story, The Professionals offers a field day for Lancaster, Ryan, Marvin, and Strode.

Despite some minor flaws, The Fortune Cookie is a very satisfying film.

The film features a surprisingly good performance by Rock Hudson, an impeccable supporting cast and stunning cinematography by screen veteran James Wong Howe.

Jean-Luc Godard visited the world of young folk to create his most humane film. (Review of Original Release)

This great film, made with uncompromising honesty and devastating reality, is, according to Jean-Luc Godard, "the world in an hour and a half."

Director Furie's stylistic method of dwelling on certain scenes, a penchant for close-ups so large and exasperating as to blot out the screen and confuse the vision, worked effectively in his Ipcress File, but here his shots of teeth, guns, horses' eyes, Brando's jowls, and Comer's brow are merely specious, distracting, and as amateurish as a TV director shooting into the sun for reflection or allowing water on the camera lens to remind the viewer that technicians are present.

The film was directed and scripted by Douglas Heyes, who was smart enough to know he couldn't improve on William Wellman's 1939 version, so he made some changes in plot and emphasis, and put a great deal of care into the casting of secondary roles.

Their voyage through the body's bloodstream past assorted organs was created by inventive special effects that make this one of the more visually interesting science fiction films of its era.

ALFIE is a surprisingly successful exercise in dramatic irony: the title character, a charming mediocrity who fancies himself a ladykiller, delivers a running commentary on his tawdry sexual conquests and penny-ante criminal ambitions, cheerfully oblivious to an audience that knows more about him than he will ever know himself.

Shot in the same campy style that characterized the TV show, all the cast members look like they are having a great time chewing up the scenery. Meredith as the Penguin and Gorshin as the Riddler are the villainous standouts.

Putting Julie Andrews in a Hitchcock film at all, meanwhile, proves that a spoonful of sugar doesn't help the medicine go down...in the most de-light-ful way. Dull and way too long.

Director Kershner demonstrates fine visual talents in his use of New York locations.

Strong stuff, intensely watchable, but definitely not for children.

Only those who find the subject matter utterly disinteresting will be turned off by Brown's devoted, almost fanatical, approach. Otherwise, the film has a low-budget charm that won it many admirers in and out of the surfing community.

This hysterically funny parody of Cold War tensions sees a Russian submarine get stuck in a sandbar off the coast of New England after its commander, Bikel, ventures too close to shore in order to get a good look at America.

Ridiculous detective Randall stops a sadistic killer from working his way through an alphabetical victim list. Agatha Christie and her legendary detective, Poirot, get a not-at-all serious treatment in this unbelievably unfunny comic mystery.

It's all mindless, absurdly complex and hopelessly hip in that 1960s sort of way, but an agreeable way to pass the time with gorgeous Sophia.

MacDonald's novel--his first solo screenwriting credit--is full of rapid-fire dialogue but some of the characterizations are thin. Despite all the big names involved, Harper doesn't begin to approach the big leagues of hard-boiled detective films. Nonetheless, Newman gives a convincing performance.

The Singing Nun was created in the style of MGM's popular family musicals of the 1940s, loaded with gloss and sugary sentimentality. The direction shamelessly panders to these elements, resulting in sluggish development.

An early cinema staple, the chase film, is resurrected, pure and simple, by star-producer-director Cornel Wilde.

If this film is less engaged with social and political realities than most of Godard's other work from this period and seems like nothing more than a playful attempt to re-create an old Hollywood genre, one must remember that even a lesser Godard is likely to be much more stimulating than another director's better films.

As always, Lean's handling of the purely physical aspects of the material is spectacular, with the scenes of revolution, the harsh Russian winters, and Zhivago's trek across the steppes simply unforgettable.

The action is reasonably well-staged, but the film is overlong and occasionally draggy.

This moving story neatly avoids melodrama.

Silly, fun stuff, with a good supporting cast.

KING AND COUNTRY is a grim indictment of the arrogant, simple-minded mentality of the men who send their fellow citizens off to war.

An attempt to do for poker what The Hustler did for pool, The Cincinnati Kid succeeds on its own, but it might have been a classic with some more attention paid to the script and, perhaps, a little humor sandwiched in to relieve the suspense.

A truly compelling psychological suspense story from Otto Preminger.

An intense, if slightly overlong, drama. The film is well assembled, and the performances are all quite good, especially Connery and Hendry.

Shot on location in the Bahamas, Austria, and on Salisbury Plain, HELP!, the second Beatles film, is nonsensical fun.

Probably the most lighthearted and enjoyable of Meyer's films, Faster, Pussycat was embraced by a new generation during its art-house re-release in 1994; many viewers detected a feminist subtext beneath its extravagantly campy surface.

One of the best British science-fiction films and one of the most controversial.

While many of the jokes don't pay off, it's still funny enough to merit your attention. Mancini's score adds pace and flow. This spectacle is almost totally uncontrolled, and therein lies much of its charm.

Funny--but not that funny--western spoof.

Following surgery Wayne wanted to prove he was still physically fit, and his role here certainly goes to great lengths to show it. Wayne rides, shoots, and fights as though the worst that had happened to him was a touch of the flu.

Even in this early effort the whimsical, odd world of Fellini comes dancing forth.

Also unforgettable is Steiger's towering performance as the volatile survivor, a powder keg of hateful remembrances.

A superior WWII film that provides plenty of edge-of-the-seat thrills, THE TRAIN also poses a rather serious philosophical question: is the preservation of art worth a human life?

It's so perfectly contrived and mechanical and fresh as a daisy, it's infuriating.