Pauline Kael

The picture has an almost Kafkaesque nightmare realism to it, but the story line wanders diffusely instead of tightening, and the developments become tedious (thought the final discovery of the right man is chillingly well done).

The film has an original, feathery charm.

The picture seems to crumble... because the writer and director don't distinguish Loew's fantasies from his actual life... But with Cage in the role we certainly see the delusions at work. This daring kid starts over the top and just keeps going. He's airily amazing. [12 June 1989]

Williams doesn't seem sure how to resolve the movie, but it's wonderfully entertaining.

He hardly bothers with the characters; the movie is a ventriloquial harrangue. He thrashes around in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.

This is a bizarre and surprisingly entertaining satirical comedy--the story of the search beyond theatre turned into theatre, or, at least, into a movie.

This adaptation of one of the S.E. Hinton novels that became favorites of high-school kids in the 70s has an amiable, unforced good humor that takes the curse off the film's look and even off its everything-but-the-bloodhounds plot. The earnest naivete of this movie has its own kind of emotional fairy-tale magic.

Moonstruck isn't heartfelt; it's an honest contrivance – the mockery is a giddy homage to our desire for grand passion. With its special lushness, it's a rose-tinted black comedy. [25 Jan 1988, p.99]

The backstage story is pleasantly tawdry and corny.

It isn’t a dialogue comedy; it’s visceral and lower. It’s what used to be called a crazy comedy, and there hasn’t been this kind of craziness on the screen in years. It’s a film to go to when your rhythm is slowed down and you’re too tired to think. You can’t bring anything to it (Brooks’ timing is too obvious for that) ; you have to let it do everything for you, because that’s the only way it works.

The tragedy of these two peoples, killing each other because each has just claims to the same plot of ground, is presented with efficient, impersonal evenhandedness, so that we care about neither of them.

One of the most likable movies of all time.

It's a beautifully made gothic-romantic classic, with many memorable scenes.

It's enjoyably trivial – a piece of charming foolishness. [24 Mar 1986, p.112]

A rowdy burlesque of the Dracula movies, set in Manhattan, with dilapidated stuffed bats and a large assortment of gags; some of them are funny in a low-grade, moldy way, and some are even stupidly racist, but many are weirdly hip, with a true flaky wit.

The theme is richly comic, and the film is great fun, even though it sacrifices Serpico's story--one of the rare hopeful stories of the time--for a cynical, downbeat finish.

Exciting, handsomely staged, and campy.

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lighting-fast choreography.

Truffaut's The Wild Child is a more beautifully conceived picture on the same theme, but even with its imperfections and staginess this early Penn film is extraordinary.

It has charm and a lot of entertaining kinkiness, too.

Not as stirring a piece of mythology as the Errol Flynn version (The Adventures of Robin Hood), but a robust, handsome production; made in England, it's a Disney film that doesn't look or sound like one. (That is a compliment.)

This is a visually claustrophobic, mechanically plotted movie that's meant to be a roguishly charming entertainment, and many people probably consider it just that.

Irresistibly enjoyable.

A debonair macabre thriller--romantic, scary, satisfying.

Vincente Minnelli directed, in a confident, confectionery styles that carries all--or almost all--before it.

It has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in films that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium.

A wonderful movie...It isn't remarkable visually, but features some of the best young actors in the country.

Robert Altman finds a sure, soft tone in this movie, from 1974, and he never loses it. His account of Coca-Cola-swigging young lovers in the thirties is the most quietly poetic of his films; it’s sensuous right from the first pearly-green long shot, and it seems to achieve beauty without artifice.

Irvin Kershner, who directed this one, is a master of visual flow, and, joining his own kinks and obsessions to Lucas's, he gave Empire a splendiferousness that may even have transcended what Lucas had in mind...The characters in this fairy-tale cliff-hanger show more depth of feeling than they had in the first film, and the music - John Williams' variations on the Star Wars theme - seems to saturate and enrich the intensely clear images. Scenes linger in the mind.

There are few thrills in this romantic comedy-thriller--it's no more than a pleasant minor diversion, but it does have a zingy air of sophistication.

Ray's tense choreographic staging and tightly framed compositions give the film a sensuous, nervous feeling of imminent betrayal. Yet this film-noir stylization, elegant in design terms and emotionally powerful, is also very simplistic; the movie suffers from metaphysical liberalism--social injustice treated as cosmic fatalism.

You have to have considerable tolerance to make it through Chayefsky's repetitive dialogue, his insistence on the humanity of "little" people, and his attempt to create poetry out of humble, drab conversations.

The movie starts out with a promising satiric idea and winds up in box-office romance, but it's likable and well-paced even at its silliest.

Shot in grainy black and white, the material is rather unformed. It's dim and larval, like Danny. Allen leaves us in the uncomfortable position of waiting for laugh lines and character developments that aren't there. The picture has a curdled, Diane Arbus bleakness, but it also has some good fast talk and some push. Allen plugs up the holes with gags that still get laughs; he remembers to pull the old Frank Capra, cutrate Dickens strings, and he keeps things moving along.

Though the story builds slowly (and the first half may seem a little pokey), the characters are more red-blooded and vigorous and eccentric than in most other Zinnemann films.

Superman doesn’t have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us—but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone.

When the film came out, Michelangelo Antonioni's mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seemed to have a numbing fascination for some people which they associated with art and intellectuality.

Roman Polanski’s version, from 1980, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is textured and smooth and even, with lateral compositions subtly flowing into each other; the sequences are beautifully structured, and the craftsmanship is hypnotic. But the picture is tame.

A dazzling romantic melodrama.

Whatever the omissions, the mutilations, the mistakes, this is very likely the most exciting and most alive production of Hamlet you will ever see on the screen.

No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra can - but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.

After the almost incredible lack of depth of the first half-hour, the film begins to acquire a fascination because of its total superficiality--it becomes something resembling Minimal art.

Foote can't make poetry out of material as laundered and denatured as what he comes up with here. The movie is intended to by a hymn, but all he and Masterson can do is give some of the characters a limp, anesthetized grace.

Jane Fonda in possibly her finest dramatic performance, as Bree, an intelligent, high-bracket call girl, in Alan J. Pakula's murder-melodrama.

Great fun in the uninhibited early-30s style, made at M-G-M before fear of church pressure groups turned the studio respectable and pompous.

One of M-G-M's powerhouse moralizing "family" entertainments, it's beefy and rousing, with almost guaranteed tears and laughter for children.

It's a very simple and, in some ways, tawdry film, but Fellini shows his extraordinary talent for the dejected setting, the shabby performer, the fat old chorine, the singer who will never hit the high note.

James Stewart is charming and even a little bit sexy as the mild-mannered Destry.

A competent director (Peter Yates), working with competent technicians, gives a fairly dense texture to a vacuous script about cops and gangsters and politicians. The stars are Steve McQueen with his low-key charisma, as the police-officer hero, and the witty, steep streets of San Francisco.

Extraordinarily simple, yet deeply, emotionally rich.

This baseball weeper was very clumsily directed by John Hancock; everything stops dead for the dialogue scenes.

If you fed the earlier gangster movies into a machine and made a prototype, you'd come up with this picture.

It has some silly, yet irresistibly wonderful examples of Busby Berkeley's pinwheel choreography.

It's a pity the film, directed by Fred Wilcox, didn't lift some of Shakespeare's dialogue: it's hard to believe you're in the heavens when the diction of the hero (Leslie Nielsen) and his spaceshipmates flattens you down to Kansas.

Williams acts all over the place, yet the movie - 2 hours and 47 minutes of documentary seriousness - is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what's going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends...Things don't begin to come together until you're heading into the third hour.

The plot is trivial French farce (about mistaken identities), but the dances are among the wittiest and the most lyrical expressions of American romanticism on the screen.

The title is accurate: this is a crudely powerful prison picture.

A true nightmare.

A good picture, even if the theme music is "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."

So calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness. What makes the movie unusual is the metallic elegance and the singleminded proficiency with which it adheres its sadism-for-the-connoisseur formula.

Bunuel's daring is fully apparent.

Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It's far from a bad movie, but it doesn't quite click together, either. The director doesn't shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.

It's a tenderhearted feminist picture.

Wild, marvelously enjoyable comedy, adapted from Nabokov's novel.

This is one of the most entertaining science-fiction fantasies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Michael Ritchie's direction is highly variable in quality, but he's a whiz at catching details of frazzled behaviour.

The script has first-rate, hardheaded, precise, sometimes funny dialogue, but it errs in bringing this girl too much to the center. Dramatically, the film lacks snap; there isn't enough tension in the way Max destroys his freedom, and so the story drags--it seems to have nowhere to go but down.

Most of the players give impossibly bad performances—they chew up the camera. But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, “stars” were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.

Wenders' unsettling compositions are neurotically beautiful visions of a disordered world, but the film doesn't have the nasty, pleasurable cleverness of a good thriller; dramatically, it's stagnant -- inverted Wagnerism.

Ben Kingsley, who plays the Mahatma, looks the part, has a fine, quiet presence, and conveys Gandhi's shrewdness. Kingsley is impressive; the picture isn't.

The director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, has his own primitivism: he doesn't seem to have discovered crosscutting yet. What's fun in the movie is the makeup, and the way that the faces of the three warriors are simian and yet attractive; the 60s have made the ape look seem hip.

George Cukor directed--beautifully. It's as close to perfect as you'd want it to be.

The picture draws out the obvious and turns itself into a classic. [26 June 1989]

Screenwriter Oliver Stone and the director, Alan Parker, have subjected their Billy (Brad Davis) to the most photogenic sadomasochistic brutalization that they could dream up. The film is like a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin. It rushes from torment to torment, treating Billy's ordeals hyponotically in soft colors -- muted squalor -- with a disco beat in the background.

Good-natured, full of verbal-visual jokes, and surprisingly entertaining, though the love is less impressive than the music.

Rapturous fun.

There are agreeable overtones of Mark Twain tall tales in this good-humored, though uneven, version of the paradoxical life of Judge Roy Bean, with Walter Brennan in the part.

What happened to the Kubrick who used to slip in sly, subtle jokes and little editing tricks? This may be his worst movie. He probably believes he's numbing us by the power of his vision, but he's actually numbing us by its emptiness. [13 July 1987, p.75]

Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.

The movie doesn't have Dahl's narrative confidence and it goes in for a little sweetening, but it has major compensations.

Although the script is a conventional melodrama, the director, Edward Zwick, has made something more thoughtful than that.

The film is said to be honest and about real people, and it affects some viewers very powerfully.

A very pleasurable surprise. Lighted by Freddie Francis, this film is perhaps the most beautiful example of black-and-white cinematography in about 15 years.

The aviation footage is still something to see, with great shots of zeppelin warfare...But the First World War story, involving two brothers...is plain awful.

The movie is ungainly – you can almost see the chalk marks it's not hitting. But it has a loose, likable shabbiness. [19 Oct 1987, p.110]

The picture is a pile of poetic mush set in some doom-laden, vaguely universal city of the past and/or the future.

It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it's like a well-cared for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good, until the last half hour or so.

Yet, with all the obvious ingredients for success, Spellbound is a disaster.

The picture is a piece of technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment; basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races.

A methodical, pointlessly grueling movie.