Dave Kehr

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift star in Howard Hawks’s epic 1948 western—one of the few such projects in which the human element takes its rightful precedence over spectacle.

A very sophisticated, very effective piece of work spun from primal images, with an excellent cast.

George Cukor gives it the royal treatment with a splendid supporting cast.

This is one of the greats, and I’m too much in awe of it to say much more than: See it—as often as you can.

Ford's admirers have rightly tended to play this down in favor of his later and more personal westerns, but there's much to admire here in Gregg Toland's sun-beaten photography and Henry Fonda's meticulous performance as Steinbeck's dashboard saint, Tom Joad.

Though the film isn't as psychologically penetrating as some of Disney's later work, it retains the Freudian ferocity of the Grimm brothers fairy tale, as well as a fair measure of the scatological humor of the Disney shorts. David Hand was the supervising director, but Uncle Walt passed on every frame.

Martin Scorsese's intrusive insistence on his abstract, metaphysical theme—the possibility of modern sainthood—marks this 1973 film, his first to attract critical notice, as still somewhat immature, yet the acting and editing have such an original, tumultuous force that the picture is completely gripping.

Preston Sturges extended his range beyond the crazy farces that had made his reputation with this romantic 1941 comedy, and his hand proved just as sure.

Charlie Chaplin finally got around to acknowledging the 20th century in this 1936 film, which substitutes machine-age gags for the fading Victoriana of his other work. Consequently, it's the coldest of his major features, though no less brilliant for it.

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 frightening and consistently inventive horror story... It's busy on the surface and empty in the center, but somehow it works.

Cukor doesn't try to hide the stage origins of his material; rather, he celebrates the falseness of his sets, placing his characters in a perfectly designed artificial world. Every frame of this 1964 film bespeaks Cukor's grace and commitment—it's an adaptation that becomes completely personal through the force of its mise-en-scene.

Wilder trades Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives.

The miracle of Murnau’s mise-en-scene is to fill the simple plot and characters with complex, piercing emotions, all evoked visually through a dense style that embraces not only spectacular expressionism but a subtle and delicate naturalism.

The film was hugely successful and widely praised in its time, though it's really nothing more than the old C.B. De Mille formula of titillation and moralizing--Roman orgies and Christian martyrs--with only a fraction of De Mille's showmanship.

Hawks’s great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways.

Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop is a stylish piece of work that leaves a sour aftertaste. [17 Jul 1987]

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

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.

It seems a small miracle that The Manchurian Candidate is able to maintain its mad balancing act as long as it does. That the film slips near the end is a sign of how very hard it is. [11 Mar 1988, p.A]

It's 88 minutes of solid, inventive music, filmed in a straightforward manner that neither deifies the performers nor encourages an illusory intimacy, but presents the musicians simply as people doing their job and enjoying it.

Hitchcock's discovery of darkness within the heart of small-town America remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death.

Vincente Minnelli created one of his masterpieces with this loosely plotted but tightly structured 1944 story of a middle-class family waiting through spring, summer, and fall for the opening of the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904.

The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece.

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

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.

This 1971 thriller about a heroin bust is solid, slick filmmaking, full of dirty cops, shrewd operators, and slam-bang action. Friedkin's close study of Raoul Walsh pays off in the justly celebrated chase sequence.

Irons' Von Bulow is easily the most attractive and entertaining movie heavy since James Mason's villain in ''North by Northwest,'' a figure with whom he shares a taste for elegant homes and wry understatement. [17 Oct 1990]