Costa-Gavras’ Z predisposes one to admire it, as the first film to indict the brutal military regime in Greece; in fact, the music by the long-imprisoned Mikis Theodorakis had to be smuggled out of the country. From the bitter opening title card (“Any similarity to actual events, or persons living or dead is not coincidental. It is intentional”) our sympathies are engaged.

In The Hospital the screenwriter – director team of Paddy Chayefsky and Arthur Hiller does for modern medicine what it did for war heroism in The Americanization of Emily: They set out to score cheap, quasi-satiric points off a target so large and helpless that one is almost inclined to take pity on it, and fail even on their own cowardly terms.

Volker Schlöndorff’s Young Törless, which shared the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival with Resnais’ La guerre est finie, has finally arrived here, and it emerges as a strange, hypnotic work with deep implications.

Every chronicle play is a reduction of history. In a great chronicle play, this reduction means compression of events, intensity, selection — an artistic vision of history; Marlowe’s Edward II concentrates 24 years (1307-1330) into five credible acts. The Lion in Winter is another sort of reduction: It diminishes a struggle for the English crown into situation comedy.

"This Sporting Life," Anderson’s first, had large virtues (powerful acting, assured technique, excellent sense of locale) and equally strong defects (pasting Resnais fragmentation on a naturalistic story, jarring symbolism, a whole considerably less than the sum of its parts). If…. shows his two sides even more sharply divided; it is less good, ending in confusion.

In 1967 George Lucas, a student at the University of Southern California, made Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB, a 15-minute short about a computerized society; it won a National Student Film Award and Warner Bros. financed its expansion into this feature. (EB stood for Earth Born.) THX 1138 has problems but it establishes Lucas, at 25, as someone to follow.

The Go-Between (1971, Columbia) is the third film Joseph Losey has directed from a Harold Pinter script. Its virtues and defects are so much those of the first two (The Servant, 1963, and Accident, 1967) that Pauline Kael’s judgment on Accident fits — “a fascinating, rather preposterous movie, uneven, unsatisfying, but with virtuoso passages of calculated meanness.”

As an entertainment (“chewing gum for the eyes,” to apply John Mason Brown’s view of TV), Bullitt (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) must be considered “a good buy”: It holds the attention for the whole of its 114 mins. Problems are mostly concealed by the film’s hip stances.

Dario Argento’s debut feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (UM Film Distributors), is assured, inventive, put together with a self-renewing energy and glee. No explanation is necessary and none should be permitted.

Fogged with the Easy Rider air of self-defeat, Five Easy Pieces is much stronger on feelings than on insight. It’s not art but still affecting; the actors under Bob Rafelson’s direction lend a certain truth.