Dave Kehr

A masterpiece of the art of animation. The concept and some of the episodes are tainted with kitsch, but there's no other animated film with its scope and ambition—it is, in Otis Ferguson's words, “one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world.”

A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous.

Warren Beatty's shapely 1981 epic, based on the life of radical journalist John Reed, is a stunningly successful application of a novelistic aesthetic—a film that makes full and thoughtful use of its three-and-a-half-hour length to develop characters, ideas, and motifs with a depth seldom seen in movies.

Droll, pungent, and superbly told, Peggy Sue Got Married is more than a return to form for Francis Coppola. It's a film that reveals a new depth, a new sensitivity and a new sureness of technique for the 47-year-old director, a film that marks Coppola's entry into a rich, mature period.

An enduring masterpiece--dark, deep, beautiful, aglow.

Charles Chaplin’s 1952 film is overlong, visually flat, episodically constructed, and a masterpiece—it isn’t “cinema” on any terms but Chaplin’s own, but those are high terms indeed.

This is filmmaking at the very peak of the medium`s potential.

Though it was made during a bitter artists' strike in 1941, it's one of Disney's most charming and perfectly proportioned films, uninflated by the cultural pretensions Uncle Walt was fond of slipping in.

Blake Edwards's 1982 sex comedy has the most beautiful range of tones of any American film of its period: it is a work of dry wit, high slapstick, black despair, romantic warmth, and penetrating intelligence.

One of the forgotten masterworks of Disney animation...No other Disney feature achieved this level of exuberant abstraction, or displayed the same sheer pleasure in the magic of the animator's art.

If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility.

As emblems of sexual tension, divine retribution, meaningless chaos, metaphysical inversion, and aching human guilt, his attacking birds acquire a metaphorical complexity and slipperiness worthy of Melville. Tippi Hedren's lead performance is still open to controversy, but her evident stage fright is put to sublimely Hitchcockian uses.

In many ways, the ultimate Billy Wilder film, replete with breathless pacing, transvestite humor, and unflinching cynicism. Most of it is hilarious, but there is something disquieting in the way Wilder dances around his sexual theme—the film never really says what it's about, which might be just as well

It's American filmmaking at its finest—clean, clear, and direct—and it's also the most optimistic masterpiece on film, valiantly shoring fragments against human ruin.

Fascinated by the technology of movies as much as by the technology of space—it presents film as a fabulous, exciting plaything, reviving Orson Welles's observation that a movie set is "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had."

Time has revealed its brilliance, as well as the apparent impossibility of its like ever being seen again.

Strange and wonderful.

It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.

It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]

The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling.

A film so rich in ideas it hardly knows where to turn. Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality.

Its Paris opening in 1939 was a disaster: the film was withdrawn, recut, and eventually banned by the occupying forces for its “demoralizing” effects. It was not shown again in its complete form until 1965, when it became clear that here, perhaps, was the greatest film ever made.

The quintessential American love story --the one between the spoiled heiress and the spontaneous, fun-loving guy from the wrong side of the tracks--has seldom been more elegantly and entertainingly told.

Gremillon seems the master of every style he attempts, but his genius lies in the smooth linking of those various styles; the film seems to evolve as it unfolds, changing its form in imperceptible stages.

The one Welles film that deserves to be called lovely; there is also a rising tide of opinion that proclaims it his masterpiece.

The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford.

Martin Scorsese transforms a debilitating convention of 80s comedy--absurd underreaction to increasingly bizarre and threatening situations--into a rich, wincingly funny metaphysical farce. A lonely computer programmer is lured from the workday security of midtown Manhattan to an expressionistic late-night SoHo by the vague promise of casual sex with a mysterious blond.

As an actor, Eastwood has created his most complex, fully dimensional characterization in Tom Highway; as a director, he has worked to put that characterization in a remarkably mature, self-critical context. Heartbreak Ridge is a film of genuine substance and courage.