The Girl on a Motorcycle (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) is not a title likely to attract studious filmgoers, and on the whole it is perhaps just as well. But the movie succeeds at what is seldom attempted — re-creating a poetic novel’s imagery in visual terms.

I have never been able to get behind director Vittorio De Sica as much as the critical consensus tells me I should. His neorealist classics — Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D. — seem to me flaccid, concerned with whipping up pathos to the exclusion of all else, and not always employing the most respectable means. When he made The Roof in 1956, it became clear that neorealism had reached a dead end...

Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (Allied Artists) was the hit of the 1966 Venice Film Festival and enjoyed a highly successful run in New York the following year. The film would be welcome at any time; considering the junk we have been asked to watch so far this year, it is an especially great pleasure.

Deep End (1970, Paramount) is Jerzy Skolimowski’s seventh film, but the first to get a run in these parts. In 1968 Christian Braad Thomsen called him “probably the most explosive and original film-maker in Eastern Europe.” That is a bit much (Jancsó? Makavejev?), but his work is important and Deep End is representative of it.

Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (Warner Bros.) represents a considerable advance over the first film he directed, but what wouldn’t? The Sterile Cuckoo was an abomination, from the clunky camera set-ups and music to Liza Minnelli’s uncontrolled performance, all emotion and no design.

No doubt about it, Richard Lester has “the knack”: considerable intelligence, explosive visual invention, unequalled cleverness with a camera. Petulia, his latest, parades these virtues – and reveals the defects which prevent him from becoming a major artist. Petulia starts with an almost insurmountable disadvantage...