"The Last Wave - " except for the first sequence The Last Wave is over-deliberate..Richard Chamberlain,..a Sydney corporation lawyer..is some sort of spiritual throwback to a primordial race of seers...This plot is also a throwback - to the B movies of the thirties and early forties. The dialogue is vintage R.K.O. and Universal. The police doctor, who cant determine the cause of the aborigines death - it was the result of a shamans pointing a death bone at him - finishes the autopsy, looks up and says, "Theres something about this...""
"The Man Who Fell to Earth - " He has come to earth to obtain the water that will save his people, who are dying from drought, but he is corrupted, is distracted from his mission...[he] can be said to represent everyone who feels misunderstood, everyone who feels sexually immature or different, everyone who has lost his way, everyone who has failed his holy family, and so the film is a gigantic launching pad for anything that viewers want to drift to."
"The Story of Adèle H. - " a musical, lilting film with a tidal pull to it. Its about a woman who is destroyed by her passion for a man who is indifferent to her - a woman who realizes herself in self-destruction...The subject of the movie is the self-destructive love that everyone has experienced in one form or another. Adèle is a riveting, great character because she goes all the way with it...Its a great film, I think - the only great film from Europe Ive seen since Last Tango in Paris."
"Rancho Deluxe - " a flip, absurdist modern Western..Rancho Deluxe is far from stupid, but it isnt very likable.."
"The Hindenburg - " the Hindenburg - filled with explosive hydrogen - blew up while coming down for a landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937,..the ten minute climax, which is the famous newsreel footage extended and intercut with newly shot scenes showing the actors - is fundamentally insensitive: how can a viewer look at true horrors and be a jaded connoisseur of movie thrills in practically the same instant?"
"Fun with Dick and Jane - " a nitwit comedy on the order of For Petes Sake, though its much worse made...Ted Kotcheff is the kind of director who thinks ugliness is funny. He really should be locked up for what he does to the performers...everything about it feels cheap."
"Smile - " a comedy set in Santa Rosa during the Jaycee-sponsored California final of the national Young American Miss pageant...When the girls are interviewed, or when they have to perform in public, they look dumb, but theyre not. They stumble and blurt out idiocies because what theyre saying isnt what they feel at all...In Smile Michael Ritchie really appears to like most of the people on the screen."