Dave Kehr

Typically overstuffed MGM prestige product (1940), but one that came out surprisingly well, with a minimum of Eng. Lit. posturing and some elegance of design.

Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus.

No admirer of Mr. von Trier's work should miss this compelling rarity.

Homicide isn't easy to take, but its vision is chillingly persuasive. [18 Oct 1991, p.B]

Michael Ritchie keeps his dead-end cynicism in check and produces a genuinely funny comedy about a Little League team managed by a lovably drunken Walter Matthau. Sometimes Ritchie goes too far in avoiding the family-movie cliches the subject invites and indulges in some pointless vulgarity, but all in all, it's one of his best films.

Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet.

The material has been bowdlerized to the point of abstraction, which makes Richard Brooks's sweaty, emphatic direction look a little silly—there just isn't that much to get worked up about. But Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are highly entertaining as the nightmare parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Jack Carson has one of his last good roles as Newman's competitive older brother.

One of the most memorable of Walt Disney's live-action films, perhaps because it stays so close to the traumatic family themes of the cartoon features.

Tati hasn’t quite solved the structural problem he posed for himself, but if the film isn’t wholly satisfying, it’s still a very witty and suggestive work from the modern cinema’s only answer to Chaplin and Keaton.

A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.

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.

Mitchell Leisen's polished direction serves this 1941 melodrama written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

It's a well written, well staged and well acted piece, though there is something musty in its aesthetic - that of the huge, bellowing method performance, plastered over a flimsy, one-set world. [02 Oct 1992, p.A]

One of the most pleasant foreign films of the year, a funny, graceful and immensely good-natured work.

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

The thematics are rather cloying, but the mood—profoundly relaxed, bemused—eventually conquers.

Grandly entertaining.

The director, Hal Ashby, has affected a restrained, understated style to match the subtlety and precision of Sellers's performance. No one seems to know what to do with the allegorical undertone of Jerzy Kosinski's script, but as a whole this 1979 film maintains a fine level of wit, sophistication, and insight.

Brilliantly funny, bracingly smart and surprisingly moving. [22 June 1988]

This 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle.

The director, Henry Hathaway, is another old veteran, and the cinematographer is the great Lucien Ballard, but somehow it comes off like a TV celebrity roast.

Using telephoto lenses to bring us close to the characters, Techine directs Wild Reeds with an impeccable sense of tempo, unhurried by narrative pressures. The actors seem to find exactly the right, internal rhythm for each scene the leisurely rhythm of people discovering each other and discovering themselves. This is certainly one of the year's best films. [30 June 1995, p.54]

The script is funny and observant, full of shocks of recognition, but for all his progress as a writer, Allen's direction remains disconcertingly amateurish. Still, it remains perhaps the only film in which Allen has been able to successfully imagine a personality other than his own.

For my money, still the best Bond, with a screwball plotline that keeps the locales changing and the surprises coming—even when reason dictates that the picture should be over. Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw make a creepy pair, and Daniela Bianchi embodies the essence of centerfold sex, circa 1964.

Ripping entertainment overall, with just enough meat for amateur sociologists.

This 1958 film by Yasujiro Ozu (his first in color) is gentle, spare, and ultimately elusive, in a quietly satisfying way. [07 May 2009, p.28]

Based on the comic strip created in 1936 by Lee Falk, The Phantom is a handsomely produced, numbingly impersonal adventure film that fails to do anything new with the format. [7 June 1996, p.49]

With his perfect pacing, elegant narrative design, and depth of characterization, Richard Lester has made as good a matinee movie as could be imagined: it's a big, generous, beautifully crafted piece of entertainment, with the distinctive Lester touch in the busy backgrounds and the throwaway dialogue.