Dave Kehr

The film excels as a visual exercise, as a study in adolescent psychology, and even as astute political analysis (it's the dragon who holds the fiefdom together).

Patton's personality--conveyed with pointed theatrical flair by George C. Scott--is registered in rich tones of grandeur and megalomania, genius and petty sadism.

Clint Eastwood wisely chose a strong, simple thriller for his first film as a director (1971), and the project is remarkable in its self-effacing dedication to getting the craft right—to laying out the story, building the rhythm, putting the camera in the right place, and establishing small characters with a degree of conviction.

The film is long (142 minutes), claustrophobic, and intense, yet it works with elegance and rigor, like a philosophical problem stated and solved.

It's a highly professional piece of Hollywood sentimentalism.

Here is a rich tale of our times, very well told with an appropriate minimum of means.

Efficient and absorbing...In spite of Kaufman's frequent faults of taste and judgment, the film flies on the strength of its collective performances—which range from the merely excellent (Scott Glenn) to the sublime (Ed Harris).

Under Minnelli’s direction it becomes a fascinating study of a man destroyed by the 50s success ethic, left broke, alone, and slightly insane in the end.

This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing.

If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.

An awesomely, stiflingly professional piece of work, with a fleet, superficial visual style, perfectly placed climaxes, and a screenplay (by Douglas Day Stewart) that doesn't waste a single character or situation - everything is functional, and nothing but functional.

The film has a fine grasp of tenuous emotional connections in the midst of a crumbling moral universe. Wenders's films (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities) are about life on the edge; this is one of his edgiest.

John Badham, a last-minute replacement on the project, impresses with his Spielberg-inflected direction of the young actors and his efficient management of competing plot levels. But much of the credit should go to Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, and Walon Green, whose screenplay deftly links the boy's sexual and moral maturation with a similar development on the part of the computer, thus accomplishing the thematic goal of “humanizing” technology that all the video-game movies—and video games themselves—have been striving for.

It's a good character for Dangerfield, one that veers him away from the “I don't get no respect” pathos that comes too easily to him, and enough attention is paid to the minimal plot to integrate Dangerfield's classically constructed one-liners into something like a dramatic situation. This is what they mean by “a good vehicle.”

This thriller draws its effectiveness less from the intelligence of the direction (by Terence Young) than from the unbridled sadism of the concept: Audrey Hepburn is a blind woman in unknowing possession of a doll stuffed with pure heroin. Alone in her New York apartment, she's terrorized by a gang of thugs that includes slobbering psycho Alan Arkin and smooth-talking Richard Crenna.

In these risk-averse times, it is a pleasure to see a film that fails by attempting too much. Frustrating and demanding as it may be, La Commune (Paris, 1871) is essential viewing for anyone interested in taking an exploratory step outside the Hollywood norms.

Very well edited by Laura C. Murray and set to an effective score by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, People Say I'm Crazy is a small film but an extremely affecting one.

It may be questionable history (though the film is anything but jingoistic), but it is superb filmmaking, personal and vigorous.

It's easy to drift away from the story and become absorbed in Minnelli's impossibly delicate textures, but there is a little something here for everybody.

The extraordinary child actress Ana Torrent (Cria) made her debut here at the age of five. Much in the film is derivative, but Erice excels in precise evocations of childhood feelings.

It isn't easy when you're up against the likes of Reed, writer Graham Greene, and producer David O. Selznick, but Welles still manages to dominate this 1949 film, both as an actor and as a stylistic influence. What's missing is the Welles content.

A photographer for magazines like Vanity Fair and GQ, as well as a veteran director of commercials, Mr. Jones brings a trained eye to this, his first documentary. The low gray skies of Chicago prove once again to be a boon to photography, and the city has seldom looked better than it does here, in its chilly, minimalist beauty.

It is enough of an act of optimism just to raise the specter of heroic nobility, something that Virgil Bliss accomplishes with subtlety and poignancy.

Like his father, Mr. Brown has the magical ability to take his public on a two-hour vacation. It's the next best thing to being there, and you don't need to worry about sand in your beer.

Ultimately this is a film of rare and pleasing smoothness—Hollywood as it was meant to be.

Not first-rank Scorsese, but still impressive.

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.

Rather than a feminist martyr, her film presents an artist with a rich body of work, one who still fascinates and continues to cast a wide influence.