Dave Kehr

Though The burbs is hardly an actor's film, Hanks continues to demonstrate the ease and maturity that has been his since Big, while Dern, Ducommun and Feldman lend broad but effective support.

The Witches of Eastwick is filmmaking of a very high order; it's also a great time at the movies.

The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?

Malle's slow, deliberate direction tends to flatten out the script's emotional rhythms—he's stern and arty where a lighter sensibility might have been more appropriate—but the film is still a shimmering success.

Though the shocks are well conveyed, it's the sweetness that lingers, making this the first cute and cuddly entry in the genre.

The film slides into its situation in a clever, fresh way, and the balance of wit and horror is well maintained throughout, though Sayles's decision to divide up the protagonist's chores among four main characters costs him something in the intensity of audience identification.

There's a lot of allegorical baggage on board, but the film's virtues lie in its relative simplicity.

This tiny film is heartfelt, well made and worthy of attention.

Lagaan may look naïve; it is anything but. This is a movie that knows its business — pleasing a broad, popular audience -- and goes about it with savvy professionalism and genuine flair.

As in The Human Factor, Preminger approaches the mystery of human irrationality and emotion through logic and detachment; the effect is stingingly poignant.

This 1946 film is a key work of the postwar period, dripping with demented romanticism and the venom of disillusionment. Tay Garnett directed, finding the pull of obsession in every tracking shot.

Saving the big number for the climax, like any good musical director, Mr. Yuen finishes up with a spectacular variation on the traditional kung fu pole fight.

James Whale's 1933 film plays more like a British folk comedy than a horror movie; it's full of the same deft character twists that made his Bride of Frankenstein a classic.

It's a highly stylized, roaringly dynamic action film that shuns plot and characterization in favor of a crazy iconographical melange—it's like the work of a western punk trucker de Sade...The climactic chase, with its deft variation of tempo and point of view, is a minor masterpiece.

For director James Bridges, the film looks like a hack job, particularly after the personal anguish of 9/30/55, but it's a very good hack job: strong, simple, and perfectly paced, until the last reel flounders in a bit of overkill.

A well above average sketch film from 1977, highlighted by a lengthy, hilariously deadpan kung fu parody, A Fistful of Yen.

One of the funniest awful movies ever made.

The most elegant title for a sequel in film history belongs, happily, to one of the most elegant sequels.

The dialogue is sharp and justly famous, though writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz has trouble putting it into the mouths of his actors: nothing sounds remotely natural, and the film is pervaded by the out-of-sync sense of staircase wit—this is a movie about what people wished they'd said. The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.

With Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton, in hog heaven as Long John Silver.

Deep down inside, a very good film.

Raoul Walsh’s heroes had a knack for going too far, but none went further than James Cagney in this roaring 1949 gangster piece.

What's oddly appealing about this film is the sweetness that the director, François Velle, manages to extract from Craig Sherman's rather bitter screenplay.

A dubious proposition, but in Sturges’s hands a charming one, filled out by his unparalleled sense of eccentric character.

Paul Newman tells 'em where to get off in this slick, popular antiestablishment drama set in a prison camp. Stuart Rosenberg's direction is a horror, but the cast teems with so many familiar faces that this film can't help but entertain.

A tiny film that reflects a large talent.

For older kids and adults, it's an amazing piece of work, far more complex in its talking-animal effects and far more ambitious in design than the first film.

As an artist, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed this early achievement many times in his career, but for sheer entertainment value it still stands in the forefront of his work.