If a movie can be said to snore before your eyes, Damien sustains an ungodly, unstimulating buzz. [13 June 1978, p.B1]

The premise breaks down just at the point when it needs to be cleverly elaborated into a story. [05 Aug 1978, p.H1]

Steve Rash directs the firm in a clean, observant and confidently transparent style - making an impressive debut after several years of TV pop-music specials - and demonstrates a flair for expressing Holly's appeal. [18 Aug 1978, p.B1]

Martin is pretentious in a way that pornography is when it is dressed up for people who don't want to admit to their taste. We're not really coming for that , it seems to say; that is just there because it is an integral part of the story.

The End never really lives up to its beginning. It's much too long and, after a while, the one-track theme - how a man reacts when he's suddenly told he has less than three months to live - begins to get old. [26 May 1978, p.20]

F.I.S.T. may be given patronizing credit for reflecting some vague desire to do an important picture about the perils of corruption within the American political system. Unfortunately, it can't be given credit for realizing that desire with much skill or credibility. [26 Apr 1978, p.B1]

Is "The Last Waltz" the greatest rock movie of all time? It makes its case persuasively in a restoration overseen by director Martin Scorsese and producer Robbie Robertson that's been released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the concert it made famous.

Director Robert Zemeckis has created a hodgepodge of amateurish, pie-in-the-face humor. The six young stars are untalented, unattractive and about as believable as characters from a Laverne and Shirley episode, and for a solid hour and a half they run around bumping into things. [28 Apr 1978, p.19]

What makes it so bad is the jokes, a collective of offensive jokes - imagine uncomic Polish jokes applied to every race, religion, form of life and nationality, even including Polish - which are so poorly acted out by a cast including Imogene Coca, Alice Ghostley, George Gobel, Fannie Flagg and Roddy McDowall that they actually sound funnier in the recounting that they are on film.

Malle's most forcefull dramatic element is the feeling of rivalry and resentment that exists between mother and child without the characters being conscious of it. The script is eloquently supplied with scenes illustration this fundamental conflict and bond. [26 Apr 1978, p.B1]

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

Far from insipid, it's one of the funniest, and most affecting, movies to come around in a long time. The acting is polished, the writing superb. The jokes make you laugh. That's no small feat. [10 Mar 1978, p.15]

It's a frequent theme of bad children's pictures that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is the opposite of unspoiled childhood goodness,and here it is again, only weakly contradicted by the one pleasant actor in the film, Jack Soo, as an idealistic truant officer. It's as if kiddies' mindless escape films, unlike adults', needed to carry their own internal justification. [31 March 1978, p.15]

Some of the intuitions and sentiments shared by Ashby and the cast result in affecting interludes, but on the whole the material is too diffuse and complacently wistful to accomplish its ultimate goal of getting you there, breaking your heart, scaling the summit of old Mt. Pathos.

Like the Dustin Hoffman film Straight Time, Schrader's picture sustains a certain interest despite its faults. You stick with both movies because of the promise of something authentic and tragically revealing, even though the promise is never fulfilled. These films don't really work, but they're the sort of films that don't work in interesting ways. [24 Mar 1978, p.D1]

The finished film has no thematic or emotional integrity. It flip-flops withdesperate hypocrisy between clownish antics and indignant orations. [09 Feb 1978, p.B13]

Ridley Scott has made a triumphant directing debut by creating a film that looks beautiful but never loses sight of the capacity for animosity and conflict lurking in the human psyche. [08 Mar 1978, p.D1]

There is no attempt to explain why an actress would go to pieces when she discovers a point of identity with her role; nor why an actress who is constantly loony, drunk, abusive or all three would not be understudied, let alone replaced. It should be noted that the play-within-the-movie is even worse than the movie-about-the-play. [14 Apr 1978, p.18]

Some of the jokes are so raucously or goofily low-minded that you may laugh out of a kind of shocked weakness.

Vicious and hypocritical as it is, The Gauntlet remains an entertaining sort of disreputable show, considerably more proficient and interesting than junk melodramas in a dogged vein.

Candleshoe isn't immobilized by wholesomeness, as Disney movies go, it's unsually spirited as well as pleasant. [11 Feb 1978, p.E1]

The Goodbye Girl itself represents a satisfying step back in the right direction for the purposes of light, optimistic film romance. Its appeal isn't exactly novel, but it is ingeniously and refreshingly traditional. [21 Dec 1977, p.D1]

Well supplied with both raunchy humor and star appeal, particularly in the person of Burt Reynolds, the film seems certain to become a crowd-pleaser.

The most attractive and persuasive movie about ballet performers ever created for a mass audience.

It is a beautiful, moving tale, a love story even, sad without being schmaltzy, full of funny, knee-slapping moments and sufficiently thrill-packed without the usual padding of cheap thrills. Despite the dramatic imbalance, and the need for some fine-tuning in an otherwise sensitive script, Heroes, directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan, remains a stunning film. [04 Nov 1977, p.11]

It must weather some bummy mid-passage exposition, but the movie survives its flaws triumphantly, evolving into a uniquely transporting filmgoing spectacle.

"Dragon" was apparently meant to be a big, rousing musical comedy-fantasy, but it's staged and photographed without musical-comedy energy, flair or coordination. [17 Dec 1977, p.D7]

Rolling Thunder certainly has enough to recommend it to Walking Tall fans with strong stomachs. But moviegoers yearning for a sensitive attempt to graft the nation's most recent scar tissue onto the screen will have to wait. [04 Nov 1977, p.11]