Dave Kehr

Way too flabby at 168 minutes, but once this 1963 feature gets going it's good, solid stuff, directed with an unusual lack of rhetoric by John Sturges.

A very good movie (1946), and by far the best Raymond Chandler adaptation, but it isn’t one of Howard Hawks’s most refined efforts—it lacks his clarity of line, his balance, his sense of a free spirit at play within a carefully set structure.

Brian De Palma demonstrates the drawbacks of a film-school education by overexploiting every cornball trick of style in the book: slow motion, split screen long takes, and soft focus abound, all to no real point...He's an overachiever—which might not make for good movies, but at least he's seldom dull.

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

A fascinating anomaly.

Jarmusch's eye for blighted landscape (he films in a grainy black and white) is hilariously sharp, and he sends his performers on their zomboid rounds with a keen sense of rhythm and interplay.

It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films, but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.

Decent 1961 adaptation of the Bernstein-Robbins musical, if you can handle Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood in the leads.

Travels fast and straight down a linear plot, and the ceaseless rush quickly becomes monotonous.

Complex, knotty and at times even uncomfortable; its world has a weight and heft that makes its ultimate romanticism seem genuinely transcendant, genuinely magical. [14 April 1989]

For all its overfamiliarity, this is a good play, easily Simon's best, and Matthau and Lemmon inhabit it with grace and style.

Caustic and chaotic in the arch Sturges manner, it's probably his funniest and most smilingly malicious film.

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.

The late '40s world Coppola has put together for Tucker is an extremely stylized one: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography has the bright, hard, almost lacquered look of old Technicolor; Dean Tavoularis' sets, built with slanting floors and surfaces, create an imaginary, compacted space in which actors and objects seem to be thrusting out toward the camera; and the transitions between scenes, based on visual rhymes and elaborate wipes, effectively remove the movie from the orderly flow of normal film time. [12 Aug 1988]

A gripping and original piece of work, itself sure to be remembered as one of the finest films of the year.

Although the film in no way measures up to the features made under Disney's personal supervision, it does contain some far more imaginative and adept animation than the last several post-Walt titles.

Z doesn't communicate anything—except for the doubtful propositions that pacifists are more threatening to right-wingers than communists and that fascist terrorism and homosexuality go hand in hand.

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.

Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.

Freely adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent, this 1936 study of murderous intimacy is ripe for reevaluation as the masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock's British period.

The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.

James Jones's antiwar novel was blandly realized by the usual bunch of Hollywood do-gooders in 1953...Sominex is cheaper and probably safer.

Finally fails to escape the conventions of the Hollywood cinema it so proudly deplores.

The most delicate and nuanced of film noirs, graced with a reflective lyricism that almost lifts it out of the genre.

Strange and wonderful.

It's a very funny, very moving work, graced by the cinema's cleanest, most classical style.

The masterpiece of the Disney Studios' postwar style. The animation has been stripped down, in accordance with economic imperatives, but what the images lose in shading and detail they gain in strength and fluidity.

Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space.