Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
93%
“Sound like fun? It is, mostly. But The Empire Strikes Back doesn't hit the exhilarating highs that its predecessor reached... Trash is fun, but "Empire" ruins our pleasure in it by straining for substance.” –
Boston Phoenix
Apr 23, 2025
Full Review
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
90%
“Spielberg is not really a great director and he hasn't made a flawless film: Close Encounters' piety gets a bit sticky at times... No matter: Close Encounters is still the most moving spectacle in decades.” –
Boston Phoenix
Apr 3, 2024
Full Review
Alien (1979)
93%
“There hasn't been a monster movie this scary since Jaws, and nothing else in the science-fiction genre can touch it; it turns your muscles into coleslaw. It's also kind of dumb. ” –
Boston Phoenix
Nov 16, 2023
Full Review
Raging Bull (1980)
92%
“Raging Bull feels like a tragedy, all right, but it's hollow at the center. I can't imagine anyone's seeing it without being awed; I also can't imagine anyone's really cherishing it. ” –
Boston Phoenix
Oct 10, 2023
Full Review
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
94%
“[Raiders] is at once comfortably familiar-and absolutely new, a wild assemblage of bric-a-brac and spare parts that suddenly, unexpectedly takes off into the stratosphere.” –
Boston Phoenix
May 2, 2023
Full Review
9 to 5 (1980)
69%
“A movie that's neither carefully observed enough to pass for satire, nor daring and iconoclastic enough to make it a subversive comedy.” –
Boston Phoenix
Mar 3, 2023
Full Review
The Deer Hunter (1978)
86%
“The Deer Hunter is terrific: an utterly satisfying look at how the myth of the great American hero was consumed by the war it created -- Vietnam. ” –
Boston Phoenix
Aug 30, 2022
Full Review
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
90%
“In writer-director Robert Benton's hands, it becomes something more: a coruscating tragedy, an agonizing search for values, and a story that's as convincing a testimony to the drama of ordinary lives as any I know. ” –
Boston Phoenix
Aug 5, 2022
Full Review
Chariots of Fire (1981)
84%
“There's no tension in this movie, no grit or suspense. And though one basks in the details of Cambridge life just after World War I, our pleasure depends on our believing what we see, and Colin Welland's screenplay rings false at every turn. ” –
Boston Phoenix
Jul 18, 2022
Full Review
Ordinary People (1980)
89%
“Does anybody need to be told yet again that bourgeois life mummifies people -- or that madness can await those who fight the smugness and placidity? ” –
Boston Phoenix
Jul 15, 2022
Full Review
Tess (1979)
81%
“It's not art at all. It's art-like. Tess feeds on a sort of romanticized self-pity. If indeed Polanski sees himself mirrored in Tess's story, it's not as the resilient, sensual, quietly outraged character that Hardy imagined, but as a victim.” –
Boston Phoenix
Jun 17, 2022
Full Review
Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)
84%
3/4
“A careful, touching adaptation of the autobiography of the country singer Loretta Lynn, which floats along very beautifully for an hour and then falls to pieces. ” –
Boston Phoenix
Apr 7, 2022
Full Review
Julia (1977)
73%
“Engrossing, moving and well-crafted, the film takes risks without flaunting them and, despite its Major Motion Picture stodginess, succeeds in expanding what's permissible in big-budget Hollywood product.” –
Boston Phoenix
Oct 8, 2021
Full Review
True Confessions (1981)
69%
“Spanning the world of the priest and the world of the cop, True Confessions is at once terribly refined and terribly with it -- holier-than-thou and hipper-than-thou at the same time.” –
Boston Phoenix
Oct 8, 2021
Full Review
To Be or Not to Be (1983)
55%
“It's the best Brooks movie since Young Frankenstein.” –
Vanity Fair
Jan 27, 2020
Full Review
The Eyes, The Mouth (1982)
“The movie is at once feverish and majestic; its characters keep scooting between damnation and transcendence.” –
Vanity Fair
Jan 27, 2020
Full Review
Terms of Endearment (1983)
81%
“It's bad enough when a movie uses terminal cancer as a premise; it's even worse when it uses terminal cancer as a payoff.” –
Vanity Fair
Jan 27, 2020
Full Review
Dance With a Stranger (1985)
91%
“There's a very good reason to see this movie, and her name is Miranda Richardson. Dance with a Stranger is her first picture, and while her portrayal of Ruth stops just short of being great, it's undeniably virtuosic.” –
Vanity Fair
Jul 10, 2019
Full Review
Wetherby (1985)
67%
“The trouble with Wetherby is that, unlike Pinter's creepy exercises, it turns out to be that dreary thing, a wellmade play: a theatrical puzzler with a solution that, when it arrives, seems at once obvious and not particularly helpful.” –
Vanity Fair
Jul 10, 2019
Full Review
Angelo, My Love (1983)
100%
“Angelo, My Love isn't good moviemaking, but it's terrific material: a peep into a remote and isolated culture that makes its home in New York City.” –
Vanity Fair
May 30, 2019
Full Review
Superman III (1983)
29%
“It looks like a comic book, and Lester has seized upon the anything-goes cartoonishness to create a haywire comedy of absurdities and non sequiturs that matches the cuckoo rhythms of the screenplay.” –
Vanity Fair
May 30, 2019
Full Review
The Moon in the Gutter (1983)
20%
“It's suffocatingly serious, stylized, and dull.” –
Vanity Fair
May 30, 2019
Full Review
Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
60%
“Almost nothing in [Joe Dante's] energetic segment has the sodden Aesop-on-Mars aura of the Serling oeuvre: it's the only one you don't feel you've already seen -- in black-and-white, twenty years ago, for FREE.” –
Vanity Fair
May 30, 2019
Full Review
Pauline at the Beach (1983)
94%
“A pretty little toy of a movie, one of those elegantly spare contraptions you can watch for hours without discovering its mechanism.” –
Vanity Fair
May 30, 2019
Full Review
Heat and Dust (1983)
79%
“Only James Ivory's somnolent good taste could make this passage to India so drab, but he gets a bright performance from Julie Christie... and a ravishing one from Greta Scacchi.” –
Vanity Fair
May 30, 2019
Full Review
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