The film is smart, literary, nuanced, slightly stagy — and pedigreed to within an inch of its life. It practically reeks of dusty, yellowed pages and engraved-leather bookbinding.

Flexploitation pure and simple -- nothing but savagery, sex and sinew.

A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment.

Director Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) settles for a movie of pat moralism, a pamphleteer's parable of how drugs destroy families.

Eagle flops around trying to sustain a premise that defies suspenseful elaboration from the outset. No one with his wits about him believes the conspirators will succeed in capturing or shooting Churchill. More to the point, who would want them to? We're asked to suspend disbelief for the sake of a gimmick that not only insults common sense and general knowledge but also betrays old loyalties and convictions. [26 Mar 1977, p.B5]

Easily the worst of the four movies drawn from S.E. Hinton novels to date, and that's saying a lot. [9 Nov 1985, p.G14]

A more modest, down-to-earth disappointment than Firefox, it benefits from a fair amount of incidental entertainment value, much of it supplied by a distinctive and often humorous supporting cast. [18 Dec 1982, p.C4]

The young actors are quite proficient and un-sappy too -- it's not their fault if they too often seem like chessmen being moved around on the director's board, composed into picturesque tableaux.

He's the anticop, one blood-soaked, quasi-psychotic symptom of Hollywood's desire to outgun, outkill and out-carchase itself.

Shamelessly catering to fans of the original film, while giving them nothing new, its story and humor are also inexplicably calibrated for a much younger demographic than those old enough to have seen the first film when it came out.

The movie is a capable and attractive enough biopic, if also less than riveting cinema.

Between the gang's patois and Seagal's soft speaking, Marked for Death almost begs for subtitles; the breaking of bones, however, comes through loud and clear.

While the details of Nureyev’s 1961 defection in Paris are thrilling, the film falls into the trap of many historical dramas, rendering the story as surprisingly clunky, especially considering the nimbleness of its subjects.

This story has explosive screen possibilities. What it seems to lack is an incendiary star. [22 Mar 1978, p.D9]

A funny thing happened while watching Luce. With only a half-hour or so of the movie left to go, it suddenly occurred to me: I wasn’t sure what the movie was actually about. Or, more accurately, it was about so much that, at the point where most films are starting to wrap things up, this one felt like it was still just setting the stage.

This may be the world’s first movie micro-targeted to several thousand of the people who live and/or work in Washington, and no one else.

Olivia Colman, Kaitlyn Dever and Jim Gaffigan round out a talented yet crowded ensemble cast, which has so many principal characters — all flawed in a different way — that the filmmakers are unable at times to devote the attention that each one deserves.

Black Sunday takes such a plodding literal-minded approach with an extravagant thriller premise that we have more than enough time to watch the gears working and all too often jamming. [01 Apr 1977, p.B1]

There are some amusing (and even poignant) moments between Franky and the two girls, who are the movie’s most interesting characters. But all the parents come across as stiff and hollow, and so does Ballas.

The Driver is a chase melodrama abstracted to the verge of pointlessness. [31 July 1978, p.B1]

The plot synopsis bears may a suspicious resemblance to "Alien." [6 Nov 1981, p.23]

Despite this sporadic funny stuff and the enthusiastic cast members, "Zorro" degenerates into a ponderous trifle. By turns, Peter Medak's direction seems stuffy and scattered and Hamilton's Spanish and English accents keep getting lost on the soundtrack. [25 July 1981, p.C9]

The director appears to be stuck with rather drab shots from inside the racers showing one car creeping ahead and then falling back. The effect is not exactly thrilling, but the audience is obviously eager to be thrilled and more than willing to do its imaginative share. Greased Lightning never generates enough momentum to meet the audience half-way. [16 July 1977, p.E5]

A talky European Grand Prix thriller/romantic potboiler. [14 Sep 2007, p.WE38]

The Tin Drum is likely to be remembered as another conspicuous example of why the urge to film certain books ought to be resisted. [25 Apr 1980, p.C1]

If this is corporate synergy fired up to a terrifying new level, there’s still enough heart at the movie’s center to keep it from becoming all business.

At times, the movie struggles to maintain the critical balance between detachment from and engagement with the thing it’s making fun of.

This is by no means the first film, nor the first film about the movie industry, in which the epitome of emotion is represented by a character talking on the telephone while oral sex is being performed on him. [3 July 1981, p.19]