Andrew Sarris

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]