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.