Michael Wilmington

It may be the most serene and optimistic film Rivette has made in France. Yet even the art-house audience may undervalue it, miss the beauty, style and wit.

After "Ninotchka," this is the best Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script filmed by somebody else: a terrific romantic swindle comedy set in Paris, starring Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore. [26 Sep 2003, p.C5]

The movie itself is as slick, fast and terrifyingly violent as a top-grade American crime thriller, but a lot smarter than most.

Gregg Toland's cinematography here makes you yearn for what he might have done on a Ford Western. [17 Oct 1996, p.11]

The film has a marvelous first half. All of Zinnemann's best qualities -- tact, taste, integrity, quiet intellect and idealism -- shine through in the convent scenes, as does the acting. However, good as Peter Finch is (as an agnostic doctor), the second half seems hurried, over-reticent. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]

The suspense is pulse tearing, but Hitchcock, in a movie made explicitly for the war effort, gives it an extra edge. Also, in his favorite and most ingenious cameo role, Hitch solves the problem of appearing in a film with no extras -- the cast consists only of the other shipwreck survivors -- by having himself photographed before and after losing 100 pounds on a special crash diet. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]

It's a brutally convincing movie about two hell-bent young Turkish-German lovers dancing on the edge of destruction in a Hamburg underworld of drugs and casual sex. Yet it's also compassionate and even tender.

Unlike many “adult” moviemakers, Henson believed his core audience capable of appreciating wit, irony, topical humor, idealism, intense emotion and bemused reflections on real life and all its complexity. All these, and more, are present in The Witches.

A movie which, like all the best blues, makes good times out of bad times, makes smiles out of hurt, makes tears taste like honey.

In the end, grips us precisely because its actors are so utterly absorbed in their roles, so unfettered and nakedly expressive. This is the kind of acting we always look for, but rarely see.

His (Dafoe's) re-creation of Schreck is an Oscar-level performance, but more than that, it's an unforgettable one: great, scary, horrifically funny.

A film of great spiritual intensity and haunting minimalism that enlarges your concepts of movies and of life. Like the monks of the Carthusian order, it distills something intoxicating through a style that's pure and rigorous.

Another masterpiece from one of the world's more neglected great directors, a master artist who here reveals the soul of another.

The film does succeed in making the story universal, giving us the drama as well as the history, the fire as well as cool examination. It's a movie that haunts you afterward.

This film carries us so touchingly into their world, it would take a heart of stone, finally, to ignore them.

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

Bigelow gets a scary poetry out of these landscapes--and though the film is erratic, it has force and passion...It works on your nerves--not necessarily through its big shock scenes, but through the atmosphere it creates: the sense of dread, no exit, lives plunging out of control, the secret mad pull of murder and outlawry.

Told with such sadness and exaltation, such mastery of image and sound, that watching it makes you feel renewed and hopeful.

It's an exciting but brainy, cross-cultural thriller about modern London and life in a contemporary urban pressure cooker, and it depends more on plot, character and atmosphere than it does on chases and gunfire.

An Adam Sandler movie with class, and if that sounds like an oxymoron, so be it. The movie is a happy nightmare of silly-smart movie comedy that defies category - and challenges expectations involving Sandler and his pictures.

Chungking Express is a breezy little Hong Kong movie that has more life, energy, humanity and sheer visual zing than most other shows you'll see in a month or so. And, an hour after watching it, you may indeed be hungry for more. Not necessarily because the show is shallow or unsatisfying, or doesn't leave a strong impression, but because the spontaneity and high energy of it is what's so much fun.

One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made in the American studio system. It's a shining example of qualities we don't normally see in our big theatrical pictures: vast ambition, huge resources and technical genius mated to a unique and compelling vision of life.

Based on Francis Beeding's The House of Dr. Edwardes, scripted by Ben Hecht, and with Salvador Dali's notorious surreal dream sequence as a shocking interlude, this was one of Hitchcock's most romantic and popular '40s movies; it's also the source of most of Mel Brooks' parody High Anxiety. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Showing us a world through a child's eyes, A Time for Drunken Horses speaks so truthfully and well that it breaks the heart and scars the conscience.

One of the most appealing, beautifully made and well-loved of all the classic children's animal movies. [21 Sep 2001, p.C1]

Great direction, script (A.I. Bezzerides), score (Bernard Herrmann). [25 Aug 2006, p.C7]

Heavily influenced by Sternberg's "Underworld," this is one of Ozu's oddest, most enjoyable departures; it reveals him as a first-rate noir director. [09 Jan 2005, p.C11]