This compelling and horrifying study of random violence seldom lives up to its promise, but it still packs a powerful wallop.

Sentimental, formulaic, predictable and shamelessly manipulative, Marcos Carnevale’s tale of late-life love is also genuinely heartbreaking and heartening.

Exceedingly stagy and theatrical, even by 1930's standards, but is nevertheless very funny and highly enjoyable.

One of the more graphically violent movies ever made, Magnum Force is shatteringly effective.

It's handled well by veteran director J. Lee Thompson, with strong cast support and excellent production values that make it all lavish, rich, and often breathtaking.

First-time writer-director Rian Johnson's gimmick is that his SoCal teens talk like film-noir yeggs and dames, slinging hard-boiled shade and spitting out terse, rat-a-tat dialogue peppered with slang that was yesterday's news 40 years before they were born. But the result is, against all odds, marvelously entertaining.

This is one of the best political thrillers of the 1970s.

The result is a film that's comfortable and familiar, but at the same time feels fresh, fun, and original.

The film's heart is Magdiel and the modest dreams that get him through the day but may also be the death of him.

Although the film contains a subtle antiwar message, it's not necessary to look for any rhyme or reason in the script; just enjoy all the derring-do.

The result is slick, mainstream entertainment with just enough surprises that you don't have to feel like a fool for enjoying it.

Like Night and Day and Words and Music--film biographies about Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart, respectively--Rhapsody In Blue has little to do with the real life of its subject, but, as is the case with those films, its subject's wonderful songs are the main attraction.

An observant and sensitively played drama about adolescent sexuality, unrequited love and heartbreak.

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.

Many of the script's observations sound as though they were lifted directly from the pages of Baxter's book, and they're too platitudinous to impart much wisdom to anyone who's been in and out of love at least once in his or her life. But it's nice to see these ideas played out by a fine cast.

Williams gives a fine performance, the rest of the cast is also excellent, and director Sidney Lumet's eye for detail is sure throughout this authentic look at the dirtier side of police work.

The script is spiked with cheeky, occasionally hilarious encounters, like the trio's stroll through a lazy Outback town in flamboyant space-age drag, or Bernadette's deliciously unprintable riposte to a hostile woman in a bar.

The dialogue is minimal but sharp, the pace swift and the action sequences suitably loud and brutal.

As lightheartedly as the film plays, Morrison manages to say quite a few serious things about immigration and otherness.

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.

Not quite as heart-wrenching as the original version, this remake is still pretty good and does benefit from being filmed in color.

Anyone looking for the comfort in a tense thriller ending in a satisfying restoration of order and psychological security will be bitterly disappointed, but Haneke isn't in the business of encouraging comforting illusions.

Though screenwriter Dianne Houston spent time observing the real-life Dulaine, her screenplay is a showcase for triumph-of-the-underdog sports-movie cliches and coming-of-age-through-adversity moral lessons.

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

Lavish, interesting, evocative but strained and self-conscious, The Cotton Club is all watchable curiosity.

Filmmaker Barry Hershey's impressionistic documentary about the casting process is the antidote to years of comic "audition montages," those guaranteed laugh-getting freak-show parades of no-talents mangling monologues and pulling nutty stunts in hopes of standing out from the crowd.

Director Peter Yates takes Tesich's basically wobbly story and makes much more out of it, driving the tale and the characters at a hectic pace and providing some truly unnerving moments.

The acting is consistently good, with Liotta, in particular, creating a masterful portrait of implacable, blue-eyed terror--a man equally at ease explaining his vocation to a class of schoolkids ("I'm here to be your friend") as staging a cold-blooded murder. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.