Andrew Sarris

The plot is sometimes too odd, the style too strained, but the movie holds you just the same. Jack Nicholson plays skillfully and honestly against the sure-fire pathos of the alienated loner, the fallen angel in life’s game of musical chairs.

If it were even remotely realistic, it would be intolerable, but the first half of its premise, Bronson as a bleeding-heart liberal who turns, because of a personal tragedy into a gun-toting vigilante, is so patently unconvincing as to make the payoff an irresistibly entertaining exercise in backlash titillation. [29 Aug 1974, p.65]

The War Wagon is good for a few laughs and some spectacle while John Wayne and Kirk Douglas are taking Bruce Cabot and an outlandishly armored wagon apart. [14 Sep 1967, p.31]

Let me report simply that A Clockwork Orange manifests itself on the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy...The last third of the movie is such a complete bore that even audiences of confirmed Kubrickians have drowned out smatterings of applause with prolonged hissing.

The problem is not with the subject, nor even with its presumably escapist spirit. The problem is that Mike Nichols and Buck Henry fail to bring it off successfully. [27 Dec 1973, p.51]

A pleasure to watch from beginning to end. [21 Oct 1965, p.21]

It is not even bad enough to be perversely amusing. Liz's first entrance is grotesque enough to prepare us for that high point of self-parody when she asks Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) if he smells anything burning as the library of Alexandria goes up in smpke, but there are not enough of these pungent moments to relieve the soul-destroying tedium of little people lost on big sets in the most expensive session of hide-and-seek ever to masquerade as a movie. [20 June 1963, p.13]

The Ipcress File was reasonably entertaining while I was watching it, but after it was over I felt I'd been had... Among the tiresome directorial tricks in The Ipcress File is the repetitively off-angle anti-climax with the heavies feeding parking meters, hibernating in libraries, and plotting at band concerts. Nothing happens most of the time, and this is supposed to be funny and ironic.

Pleasantly inoffensive. [29 Jul 1965, p.8]

Psycho should be seen at least three times by any discerning film-goer, the first time for the sheer terror of the experience, and on this occasion I fully agree with Hitchcock that only a congenital spoilsport would reveal the plot; the second time for the macabre comedy inherent in the conception of the film; and the third for all the hidden meanings and symbols lurking beneath the surface of the first American movie since “Touch of Evil” to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films. [This was Mr. Sarris's first appearance in the Voice.]

The Last Detail is the first good honest-to-goodness American movie of 1974.

Point Blank never makes too much sense. But the forward momentum of Lee Marvin's mysterious vendetta against the skyscraper underworld manages to overcome Boorman's laborious exposition. [19 Oct 1967, p.31]

Jules and Jim is that rarity of rarities, a genuinely romantic film. [03 May 1962, p.11]

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes emerges ultimately as a poetic parable of both storytelling and moviemaking, and somehow it all fits together. [12 Nov 1970, p.59]

Nichols has actually committed all the classic errors of the sophisticated stage director let loose on the unsophisticated movies. For starters, he has underestimated the power of the spoken word in his search for visual pyrotechnics.

Easy Rider displays an assortment of excellences that lifts it above the run and ruck of its genre. [03 Jul 1969, p.45]

Unfortunately, Support Your Local Sheriff is basically serial material that in straining to be something more ends up being something less. [08 May 1969, p.47]

Tommy is turning out to be the kind of movie most people probably like more than they care to admit. Modest charm and unpretentiousness are hardly the qualities that I ever thought I would associate with Ken Russell, but there you are, and there Tommy is. [31 Mar 1975, p.68]

After two hours of which I felt almost every minute, I could find only a handful of positive things to say about this production. [25 Jul 1974, p.67]

I thought there were about 11 good minutes in it, and the rest confused and uncertain. [22 Jul 1971, p.55]

The film doesn't succeed even on its own dubious terms, the phony soliloquies of the salesmen while driving ostensibly alone being particularly disconcerting and unconvincing and ultimately unrevealing. [01 May 1969, p.48]

A triumph of bounce over banality. [19 Mar 1964, p.12]

The Long Goodbye rides off furiously in too many different directions with too many gratuitously Godardian camera movements to make even one good movie. [29 Nov 1973, p.84]

There is no test of behavioral range in Limelight that Chaplin does not pass superbly. [01 Oct 1964, p.15]

California Split never comes to a very fine point in the psychological development of its characters. California Split is thus more about moment-to-moment living than momentous life. [03 Oct 1974, p.81]

A pretentious parable that manages to shrivel into drivel.

Sam Peckinpah's Convoy is not merely a bad movie, but a terrible movie. Anyone can make a bad movie--only a misguided talent can manage to be terrible. [17 July 1978, p.44]

Help does not indicate that Lester has depleted his bag of tricks, but rather that he is too addicted to fragmentation for its own sake. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]

The Birds is here, and what a joy to behold a self-contained movie which does not feed parasitically on outside cultural references—Chekhov, Synge, O’Neill, Genet, Behan, Melville, or what have you. Drawing from the relatively invisible literary talents of Daphne DuMaurier and Evan Hunter, Alfred Hitchcock has fashioned a major work of cinematic art, and cinematic is the operative term here, not literary or sociological.

By any interpretation, Donovan's Reef is a beautiful example of cinematic art, and the atavistic desire to let the movie sweep over the spectator without disruptive analysis is at least understandable. [01 Aug 1963, p.13]

Mart Crowley's brilliantly bitchy lines are worth standing on line for, and the original off-Broadway cast stands up well on the screen. [28 May 1970, p.53]

Kubrick goes through the motions with a hula hoop and the munching of potato chips, but there is nothing intuitive or abandoned about the man-nymphet relationship. The Director's heart is apparently elsewhere. [05 Jul 1962, p.11]

By any formal standards, it is a mess, but, surprisingly often, a moving mess. [23 Nov 1972, p.77]

Like it or not, Walking tall is saying something very important to many people, and it is saying it with accomplished artistry. [21 Feb 1974, p.61]

The spectacle of people in Hollywood trying to do something different in a western at this late date is curiously reassuring. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]

The director's deepest instincts are less epic than dramatic, with the result that he gets sidetracked more often than his errant hero. The picturesque is gained too often at the expense of the picaresque, and the contour of a legend is obscured time and again by the pointless intimacy of a close-up. [09 Jan 1964, p.12]

Considerably weaker than The Nutty Professor. [10 Sep 1964, p.17]

The Conversation could have used a great deal more vulgar curiosity about its own plot and its own characters. Coppola's good taste has been misplaced on this occasion, but he remains one of our most promising new filmmakers nonetheless. [20 June 1974, p.78]

True Grit is well worth seeing, but it is hardly a monument either to Wayne or to the western. [21 Aug 1969, p.37]

I thoroughly enjoyed There Was A Crooked Man for its inhaling the fresh air of liberty on today's screen without its gagging on the fumes of gratuitous license. [31 Dec 1970, p.39]

Zardoz quickly degenerates from a voyage through a labyrinth into an ego trip round and round the inside of a goldfish bowl. [28 Feb 1974, p.62]

George C. Scott's full-bodied performance and Franklin Schaffner's chillingly stylized direction will satisfy neither the doves nor the hawks, but it does reverberate with paradoxical impressions. [28 May 1970, p.60]

The parts are better than the whole. [24 Feb 1975, p.58]

But why would so many critics fall for a piece of cheese like “The Candidate?” Robert Redford cultism? Partly, I suppose.

Longer on charm and cheer than on humor of knee-pounding hilarity...the funniest film of the season by default.

The film is intelligently realistic about all the interlocking hypocrisies of the amateur code, and there is nothing fakey-humanistic about the sexual encounters with a ski-manufacturer's secretary (Camilla Sparv) and the unbilled but unforgettable girl back home always ready, willing, and able to hope in the back seat for auld lang syne.

There doesn't seem to be enough plot for a minute commercial, much less 100 minutes plus of madcap farce. [12 Jun 1969, p.53]

Despite its horror or rather partly because of it, The Honeymoon Killers is memorable more as a deliriously freakish love story than as a grand guignol.

The humor isn't much here either despite a trio of classic bad goon performances by Jack Elam, Strother Martin, and Ernest Borgnine. [06 Jul 1972, p.49]

Welles displays here a sensibility from the '30s and '40s when choices, however anguished, still seemed morally meaningful. [30 Mar 1967, p.35]

Murder on the Orient Express falls down so badly as escapist entertainment that it is as if it were designed to prove the proposition that movies and mysteries don't mix.

Plaza Suite is a strenuous bore, far less amusing than the play, but no less empty and heartless in its insistence on creating grotesques for easy laughs and then forcing them to feel sorry for even easier pathos. [20 May 1971, p.61]

I found myself reasonably absorbed in this grown-up though not sufficiently lived-in and thought-through entertainment. [01 May 1978, p.45]

The plot has many twists, few surprises, and one gaping hole, which becomes apparent only after you walk out of the theater and have a chance to think. But pure popcorn like this is hardly worthy of serious analysis...Fortunately, the stars have not lost their charm and authority.

Ronald Neame's civilized anemia is appropriate enough for the direction of material that is going in no direction in particular. [23 Feb 1967, p.23]

Shaffner has really made an exhilarating movie out of the most dangerously depressing material. [10 Jan 1974, p.56]

It is refreshing to find a director who is still making talkies instead of gawkies, and who thus still believes in the spoken word as a vehicle of expression. [23 Dec 1974, p.83]

Many reviewers have given the current exhibit low marks for vitality and originality, but then, most reviewers have never been wild about any of the Pink Panther movies. It is the public, not the critics, that made the Clouseau creations the highest grossing comedy series in the history of theatrical motion pictures. It is the perfect entertainment for children of all ages because it is not really designed as the perfect entertainment for children of all ages. [31 July 1978, p.35]

Reasonably effective entertainment. [11 Dec 1969, p.55]

The sobriety of the entire enterprise is ill-suited to the lurid period in history it represents. [23 Dec 1971, p.61]

Carnal Knowledge is a movie that almost lives up to it's brilliant title. [08 Jul 1971, p.34]

Gene Saks directs his first film so clumsily that he even muffs Mike Nichol’s exploitation of the climbing the stairs gag that kept Neil Simon’s feeble farce running for 79 years on Broadway.

I hate to go out on a limb after only one viewing, but Nashville strikes me as Altman’s best film, and the most exciting dramatic musical since Blue Angel.

Husbands confirms, if indeed any confirmation were needed, that John Cassavetes is one of the major American film-makers of the past decade, and one of the most tortured and turgid as well. [10 Dec 1970, p.69]

Things pick up a little bit when Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen stumble into the scene, but the total experience remains boringly incoherent.