Woody Allen uses New York City as a backdrop for the familiar story of the successful but neurotic urban over-achievers whose relationships always seem to end prematurely. The film is just as much about how wonderful a place the city is to live in as it is about the elusive search for love.

Kathleen Quinlan is pretty convincing as the painter/photographer and a new, very handsome, young leading man is added to the Hollywood scene with Stephen Collins as the architect.

Norma Rae is that rare entity, an intelligent film with heart.

Theme of the pic, based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel, is a variation on countless westerns and war films. Update the setting to modern-day New York, and the avenues of escape to graffiti-emblazoned subway cars, and that’s The Warriors.

Murder by Decree is probably the best Sherlock Holmes film since the inimitable pairing of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the 1940s series at Universal.

Crichton’s films drag in dialog bouts, but triumph when action takes over.

Visually it probably is one of the most beautiful pix ever seen, with Aussie flora and fauna and wonderful blue skies. Everything has been carefully re-created with loving exactitude.

The easily shocked may want an expose, or more a condemnation. The more sophisticated may grow tired of Scott’s morality. But shocked, cynical or dissatisfied, nobody’s going to be bored.

Ice Castles combines a touching love story with the excitement and intense pressure of Olympic competition skating.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers validates the entire concept of remakes. This new version of Don Siegel’s 1956 cult classic not only matches the original in horrific tone and effect, but exceeds it in both conception and execution. Sutherland has his best role since Klute. He gets excellent support from Adams, who projects a touching vulnerability.

For Eastwood fans, the essential elements are there. Lots of people get beat up, Eastwood walks tall and looks nasty, cars are crashed. James Fargo directs limply.

Magnify James Bond's extraordinary physical powers while curbing his sex drive and you have the essence of Superman, a wonderful, chuckling, preposterously exciting fantasy.

Among the considerable achievements of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter is the fact that the film remains intense, powerful and fascinating for more than three hours.

Director Guy Hamilton manages over the course of almost two hours to keep his audience on edge. For a finale he has a double whammy destruction of a giant Yugoslav dam which sets loose forces of nature that crumble a seemingly indestructible bridge. Harrison Ford does a creditable job as the American Colonel; Fox is excellent as the British demolitions expert; Carl Weathers gives a powerful performance as the unwanted black GI who proves himself in more ways than one. Barbara Bach, lone femme, does fine in a tragic, patriotic role as a Partisan. Franco Nero as a Nazi double agent who fools the Partisans is slickly nefarious.

Unquestionably, Bakshi has perfected some outstanding pen-and-ink effects while translating faithfully a portion of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy. But in his concentration on craft and duty to the original story - both admirable in themselves - Bakshi overlooks the uninitiated completely.

In adapting his own best-seller, William Goldman has opted for an atmospheric thriller, a mood director Richard Attenborough fleshes out to its fullest.

After a promising opening, Halloween becomes just another maniac-on-the-loose suspenser. However, despite the prosaic plot, director John Carpenter has timed the film's gore so that the 93-minute item is packed with enough thrills.

Alan Pakula’s Comes a Horseman is so lethargic not even Jane Fonda, James Caan and Jason Robards can bring excitement to this artific- ially dramatic story of a stubborn rancher who won’t surrender to the local land baron.

Director Sidney Lumet has created what amounts to a love letter to the city of New York, which he equates with Oz.

Only saving grace is the satire pic’s opening titles, a clever lampoon of theatre trailers and advertising pitches, including a mid-credit title card that boasts, ‘This space for rent’. There’s also a tongue-in-cheek parody of disaster pic music, sung in a deep basso voice, but that’s over in about two minutes. Thereafter it’s all downhill, rapidly.

With two excellent antagonists in Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil presents a gripping, suspenseful drama for nearly all of its two hours - then lets go at the end and falls into a heap.

Picture starts off promisingly enough with Nicholson as a hapless outlaw who makes it across the border but the posse cheats and comes across after him causing his horse to faint. But it never jells, as Nicholson continues to sputter and chomp, acting more like her grandfather than a handsome roue out to overcome her virginity.

Midnight Express is a sordid and ostensibly true story about a young American busted [in 1970] for smuggling hash in Turkey and his subsequent harsh imprisonment and later escape. Cast, direction and production are all very good, but it’s difficult to sort out the proper empathies from the muddled and moralizing screenplay which, in true Anglo-American fashion, wrings hands over alien cultures as though our civilization is absolutely perfect.

Death on the Nile is a clever, witty, well-plotted, beautifully-produced and splendidly acted screen version of Agatha Christie's mystery. It's old-fashioned stylized entertainment with a big cast and lush locations.

Bloodbrothers is an ambitious, if uneven probe into the disintegration of an Italian-American family [from the novel by Richard Price]. Under Robert Mulligan's forceful direction, sharply-drawn characters clash, scream and argue, but fail to resolve any of their or the film's conflicts.

It’s an upbeat, funny, nostalgic film populated by colorful characters, memorable more for their individual moments than for their parts in the larger story.

What’s lacking in Up in Smoke is a cohesiveness in both humor and characterization. Once the more obvious drug jokes are exhausted, director Lou Adler lets the film degenerate into a mixture of fitful slapstick and toilet humor.

A dramatically moving and technically breathtaking American art film, one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1970s.

This is one film where the fish win.

Watching this picture a question keeps recurring: what would Woody Allen think of all this? Then you remember he wrote and directed it. The film is populated by characters reacting to situation Allen has satirized so brilliantly in other pictures.

Eyes of Laura Mars is a very stylish thriller [from a story by John Carpenter] in search of a better ending.

Film has a hardnose progression and solidity in its characterizations. Nolte earns his star stripes here, displaying presence and perceptiveness in socking home his character, while Weld and Moriarty are also effective.

Steady readers of the National Lampoon may find National Lampoon's Animal House a somewhat soft-pedalled, punches-pulled parody of college campus life circa 1962. However, there's enough bite and bawdiness to provide lots of smiles and several broad guffaws.

Individually, the performances in this story of three generations of Hollywood stuntmen are a delight. And Hal Needham’s direction and stunt staging are wonderfully crafted.

Director Walter Hill and stunt coordinator Everett Creach have engineered a number of car chases and they are fabulous, if you like car chases.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band will attract some grown-up flower children of the 1960s who will soon find the Michael Schultz film to be a totally bubblegum and cotton candy melange of garish fantasy and narcissism.

Revenge of the Pink Panther isn't the best of the continuing film series, but Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers on a slow day are still well ahead of most other comedic filmmakers.

Foul Play revives a relatively dormant film genre - the crime-suspense-romantic comedy in which low-key leading players get involved with themselves while also caught up in monumental intrigue. The name missing from the credits is Alfred Hitchcock. Writer Colin Higgins makes a good directorial bow.

Killer bees periodically interrupt the arch writing, stilted direction and ludicrous acting in Irwin Allen's disappointing and tired non-thriller.

Producer Michael Ritchie (who directed the first installment) and writer-creator Bill Lancaster encore with Japan resulting in a more vigorous film than the sodden Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Heaven Can Wait is an outstanding film. Harry Segall's fantasy comedy-drama play, made in 1941 by Columbia as Here Comes Mr Jordan, returns in an updated, slightly more macabre treatment.

Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy starts out as Smokey and the Bandit, segues into either Moby Dick or Les Miserables, and ends in the usual script confusion and disarray, the whole stew peppered with the vulgar excess of random truck crashes and miscellaneous destruction.

Grease has got it, from the outstanding animated titles of John Wilson all the way through the rousing finale as John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John ride off into teenage happiness.

Despite a notable but effective change in story emphasis, Jaws 2 is a worthy successor in horror, suspense and terror to its 1975 smash progenitor.

Alas, Little Orphan Damien, lucky enough to be taken in by a rich uncle after bumping off his first pair of foster parents, can’t resist killing the second set, too, along with assorted friends of the family. Damien is obviously wearing out his welcome.

The fun, as usual with Disney pix, comes in the believable sight gags provided along the way. Also as usual, it’s a good cast of veterans and nothing to tax them beyond their abilities, all ably kept in pace by director Norman Tokar.

Capricorn One begins with a workable, if cynical cinematic premise: the first manned space flight to Mars was a hoax and the American public was fooled through Hollywood gimmickry into believing that the phony landing happened. But after establishing the concept, Peter Hyams' script asks another audience - the one in the theatre - to accept something far more illogical, the uncovering of the hoax by reporter Elliott Gould...In general, it is a script of conveniences.

A rubber stamp wouldn’t do for John Milius. So he took a sledgehammer and pounded Important all over Big Wednesday. This film about three Malibu surfers in the 1960s has been branded major statement and it’s got Big Ideas about adolescence, friendship and the 1960s.

The Buddy Holly Story smacks of realism in almost every respect, from the dramaturgy involving Holly and his back-up band, The Crickets, to the verisimilitude of the musical numbers.

Pittsburg-based auteur George A. Romero is still limited by apparently low budgets. But he has inserted some sepia-toned flashback scenes of Martin in Romania that are extraordinarily evocative, and his direction of the victimization scenes shows a definite flair for suspense.

Production is a tasteless and overripe comedy that disintegrates very early into hysterical, undisciplined hamming.

In its superb telling of how a humble but idealistic young man escalates to the corrupt heights of unbridled power, F.I.S.T. is to the labor movement in the United States what All the King's Men was to an era in American politics.

This bout between good and Satan includes some scares, camp and better than average credits.

An outstanding rock documentary.

Director Jack Gold controls all the angles of this improbable story. Burton has some very effective moments too as does Remick.

The film is handsome, the players nearly all effective, but the story highlights are confined within a narrow range of ho-hum dramatization.

David Carradine is the quiet good guy and the best thing that can be said about his acting and his part is that he doesn’t say much. Claudia Jennings is his partner good guy, the one who gets to amuse the bad guy in the dark room. The best thing that can be said about her performance is that she gets to take off her clothes, twice.

Straight Time is a most unlikeable film because Dustin Hoffman, starring as a paroled and longtime criminal, cannot overcome the essentially distasteful and increasingly unsympathetic elements in the character. Ulu Grosbard's sluggish direction doesn't help.

Despite some horsepower casting, House Calls is overall a silly and uneven comedy about doctors which wants to be as macabre as, say, Hospital, and at the same time as innocuous as a TV sitcom. It manages to be neither.

The Fury features Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes as adversaries in an elaborate game of mind control. Director Brian De Palma is on home ground in moving the plot pieces around effectively.

Pic is loaded with the kind of visual hijinks juve audiences love, and appeal should hold for adults, as well. Playoff looks bright in most situations.

Paul Mazursky's excellent screenplay presents Jill Clayburgh in a most demanding role where she is torn between conflicting forces following the surprise confession of weak-willed husband Michael Murphy that he has fallen in love with another woman.

In general an excellent Hal Ashby film which illuminates the conflicting attitudes on the Vietnam debacle from the standpoint of three participants.

Paul Schrader's directorial debut is an artistic triumph. Schrader has transformed a carefully researched original screenplay penned by him and his brother Leonard into a powerful, gritty, seamless profile of three automobile assembly line workers banging their heads against the monotony and corruption that is the factory system.

Eraserhead is a sickening bad-taste exercise made by David Lynch under the auspices of the American Film Institute. Like a lot of AFI efforts, the pic has good tech values (particularly the inventive sound mixing), but little substance or subtlety.

The Boys in Company C is a spotty but okay popcorn trade drama about five young Marines and how their lives were changed by duty in the Vietnam war. Laden with barracks dialog and played at the enlisted man's level, the Raymond Chow production, directed well by Sidney J. Furie, features strong performances by some very fine actors.

It does not quite achieve a more lusty visual feel for the times and the strange relations of these two men to themselves and to the women in and out of their lives.

Coma is an extremely entertaining suspense drama in the Hitchcock tradition. Robin Cook's novel is adapted by Crichton into a smartly paced tale which combines traditional Hitchcock elements with contemporary personal relationships.

Gena Rowlands turns in another virtuoso performance as the troubled actress. Cassavetes’ highly personal work will please his coterie of enthusiasts, but for general audiences it will be viewed as shrill, puzzling, depressing and overlong.

When Robert Aldrich's filmmaking is good, it's very, very good; and when it's bad it's awful. This cheap-looking ultra-raunchy alleged comedy about policemen leaves no stone unturned in its exploitation of vulgarity.

In a major role reversal, Clint Eastwood stars in The Gauntlet as a person who might be on the receiving end of the violence epitomized in his famed Dirty Harry film series.

The clumsy story lurches forward through predictable travail and treacle, separated by phonograph records (or vice versa).

The Neil Simon script evolves a series of increasingly intimate and sensitive character encounters as the adults progress from mutual hostility to an enduring love. Performances by Dreyfuss, Mason and Cummings are all great, and the many supporting bits are filled admirably.

Semi-Tough begins as a bawdy and lively romantic comedy about slap happy pro football players, then slows down to a too-inside putdown of contemporary self-help programs.

The Turning Point is one of the best films of its era. It's that rare example of synergy in which every key element is excellent and the ensemble is an absolute triumph.

A poorly-written melodrama.

Steven Spielberg's film climaxes in final 35 minutes with an almost ethereal confrontation with life forms from another world; the first 100 minutes, however, are somewhat redundant in exposition and irritating in tone.

Bertolucci’s ambitious generational canvas is elaborately constructed.

Pete’s Dragon is an enchanting and humane fable which introduces a most lovable animal star (albeit an animated one).

Damnation Alley is dull, stirred only occasionally by prods of special effects that only seem exciting compared to the dreariness that proceeded it. What's worse, it's dumb, depending on its stereotyped characters to do the most stupid things under the circumstances in order to keep the story moving.

In Looking for Mr Goodbar, writer-director Richard Brooks manifests his ability to catch accurately both the tone and subtlety of characters in the most repellant environments - in this case the desperate search for personal identity in the dreary and self-defeating world of compulsive sex and dope. Diane Keaton's performance as the good/bad girl is excellent.

Excellent cast performs well, but not well enough and Paul Schrader's story is strong, but not strong enough. In sum, it neither rolls nor thunders.

Oh, God! is a hilarious film which benefits from the brilliant teaming of George Burns, as the Almighty in human form, and John Denver, sensational in his screen debut as a supermarket assistant manager who finds himself a suburban Moses.

Fred Zinnemann’s superbly sensitive film explores the anti-Nazi awakening in the 1930s of writer Lillian Hellman via persecution of a childhood friend, portrayed in excellent characterization by Vanessa Redgrave in title role. Richard Roth’s production is handsome and tasteful.

Bobby Deerfield is a brilliantly unusual love story, told in a European fashion which makes the Sydney Pollack film at first irritating, then intriguing, finally most rewarding and emotionally satisfying.

This film, about a homicidal orphan girl, is farfetched nonsense with precious little to appease shriek freaks. Laird Koenig's screenplay from his novel is riddled with unsuspended disbelief - coincidences, gimmicks.

The Kentucky Fried Movie boasts excellent production values and some genuine wit, though a few of the sketches are tasteless.

Triple X posed an ideal opportunity for the series to rectify its dismissive treatment of women until this point, putting a lady on equal footing with Bond. To its credit, the film does feature a bit of screwball badinage between the two (a clunky bit about female drivers, unfortunately), but it has yet to introduce a single female character who doesn’t want to sleep with our hero.

Wes Craven’s blood-and-bone frightener about an all-American family at the mercy of cannibal mutants is a satisfying piece of pulp.

Orca is man-vs-beast nonsense. Some fine special effects and underwater camera work are plowed under in dumb story-telling.

Special effects add to the suspense as the group encounter all manner of hair-raising beasties and erupting fire in braving the dangers of the cavemen in an attempt to find their quarry.

Greased Lightning is a pleasant, loose and relaxed comedy starring Richard Pryor in an excellent characterization based on real-life racing driver Wendell Scott.

Periodic moments of good special effects are separated by reels of dramatic banality as players flounder in flimsy dialog and under sluggish direction.

William Friedkin's Sorcerer is a painstaking, admirable, but mostly distant and uninvolving suspenser based on the French classic The Wages of Fear [from the novel by Georges Arnaud]. Friedkin vividly renders the experience of several men driving trucks loaded with nitro through the South American jungle, yet the characters are basically functional. 'Sorcerer' is merely the name of one of the trucks.

Together again, Jones finds once more he is at the mercy of Herbie, who time and again takes matters into his own hands for often slapstick and mirthful effect as they roar toward their destination.

There’s real terror in the story, and the Gothic setting of the swamp where the girl is held captive; the maudlin pitfalls of the plot are avoided through deft use of humor, and the plucky character of the young captive.

In a final burst from Old Hollywood, Minnelli tears into the title song and it’s a wowser.

Efficient but rather colorless...It’s possible that inside this slick piece of engineering there is a genuinely mordant satire of human greed struggling to get out, but it never quite gets to the surface.