Film

...2001, four years in the making, was directed and co-scripted by Stanley Kubrick and filmed by two unusually talented cin-ematographers, Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott...

...Spaceship interiors and exteriors from 2001 have been reconstructed, though they are photographed much less effectively...

...M Hits and Misses Dune A thoroughly preposterous movie—part space fantasy, part sword-and-sorcery epic, part demented hallucination—which is easily the best big-budget film of the 1984 holiday season...

...Hyams, on the other hand, offers a fantastic conclusion, but strives for visual and dramatic realism...

...But twenty-four-year-old Australian writer-director Richard Lowenstein was so intent on capturing the details of social realism that he neglected to endow his film with dramatic punch...

...After some difficulties, the mission is accomplished...

...Strikebound has good acting in the lead roles and the best underground photography I've ever seen (most of it shot on super-fast film stock using only available light...

...The return requires renewed cooperation between Yanks and Russkies...

...Given these differences, the sequel offers no more than one might expect...

...All but the most devout moviegoers can miss it without regret...

...The pre-credit sequence of 2010 presents a summary report on the 2001 mission to Jupiter...

...Admittedly, 2010 provides some impressive special effects, including state-of-the-art computer graphics and remarkably credible "on location" shooting near Jupiter...

...Protocol Mildly amusing sociopolitical comedy which turns out to be a remake, with a female lead (Goldie Hawn), of Frank Ca-pra's Mr...

...So the two governments reluctantly decide to cooperate...

...The plot is almost impossible to follow, the characters are mostly of the comic book variety, and the final half hour seems rather disjointed...

...The film concludes with extravagantly picturesque shots of Earth landscapes and the suggestion that the wonderful something has so impressed the people of our planet that they have decided to live in peace...

...But in other respects the film fails...

...And insofar as the film suggests that human salvation will be achieved by extraterrestrial intervention, it is also a cop-out...

...A Nos Amours Deserved winner of the 1983 Cesar award (the French Oscar) for best feature film...

...Hyams's 2010 takes us on a second voyage to Jupiter in an effort to discover what went wrong with the first one and, if possible, to reactivate and retrieve the still orbiting Discovery spaceship...

...For the sake of "realism," six expatriate Russians and a Czech are cast as Soviet crew members, but they add no special authenticity to the film and appear no more genuinely Soviet (or astronautic) than their captain, who is portrayed by a British Shakespearean actress, Helen Mirren...

...The characters are too vaguely drawn to engage our concern, except for a landlubber engineer (John Lithgow) who is dis-armingly terrified by an unavoidable space walk...

...2001 was a mythic, visionary film that set new standards for cinematic expression—a movie not to be missed...

...2010, made in a mere eighteen months, was directed, written, produced, and photographed by Peter Hyams, whose best works have been the forgettable Capricorn One and Outland...

...When Kubrick sought to create something like a "controlled dream" in 2001, he compensated for an elliptical narrative and deliberately desensitized characters with striking visual expressiveness...

...But the design of the production is spectacular, and director David Lynch (Eraserhead, Elephant Man) has brought the whole thing together with imagination and daring...

...Smith Goes to Washington...

...Maurice Pialat (Loulou) wrote, directed, and starred in this drama of exceptional honesty and intensity...

...2010 is designed to evoke contemporary television transmissions and photos from the space shuttle...

...2070 is a relatively unimaginative piece of work that eschews risks...

...Strikebound Well-intentioned dramatization of the communist-led strike in the Gippsland coal fields of Australia in the 1930s...

...No surprises...

...The narrative hinges on the film's simplistic appeal for superpower cooperation, and the wonderful payoff repeatedly promised turns out to be a dud...

...At this suspenseful moment, the embodied spirit of Dave Bowman (or some such foolishness) appears to the American mission leader, warns that the astronauts must return immediately to Earth, and announces that "something's going to happen—something wonderful...

...But things have not been going well on Earth...

...For the first half hour or so the film offers a pedestrian exposition intended to explain why this mission is conducted as a joint U.S.-Soviet venture...

...It seems that the Russians and the Americans still don't get along in 2010, but Discovery is falling from its orbit, only the Russians have a spaceship ready for an early launch, and only the Americans can reactivate Discovery...

...And moments of high significance in the new release are accompanied by the familiar strains of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Gyorgy Ligeti's Lux Aeterna...

...His focus is a girl's sexual development and the psychological tensions of her middle-class family...

...War between the two superpowers appears imminent after the United States has imposed a naval blockade on Central America and sunk a Soviet ship attempting to run through it...

...As they leave Jupiter's orbit, something wonderful does, indeed, occur...

...The Flamingo Kid Adolescent-level social comedy in which a basically good kid from Brooklyn (Matt Dillon) is carried away by the gaudy affluence of a vulgar Long Island beach resort, but in the end returns to the fold and to his senses...

...The two stars of the earlier work, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and the computer HAL (the voice of Douglas Rain), are resurrected to play supporting roles...