Pauline Kael

While other B-budget horror producers were still using gorillas, haunted houses, and disembodied arms, Lewton and the director, Jacques Tourneur, employed suggestion, creepy sound effects, and inventive camera angles, leaving everything to the viewers' fear-filled imagination.

If audiences enjoy the movie, it's largely because of the elderly actors and the affection that the young director, Ron Howard, shows for them.

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

Sean Connery manages to rise above the material; most of the rest of the cast plays in broad style, and there have rarely been so many small, sleazy performances in one movie.

I was surprised at how not-bad it is. It may fall into the category of youth-exploitation movies, but it isn't assaultive, and it's certainly likable. [1 Nov 1982, p.146]

There's a sweet, naive feeling to the movie even when it's violent and melodramatic and atrocious, and when it's good it's good in an unorthodox, improvisatory style.

Tomlin confirms herself as a star whenever she gets the material, and Dolly Parton's dolliness is very winning, but it's easy to forget that Jane Fonda is around - she seems to get lost in the woodwork. The director, Colin Higgins, is a young fossil who sets up flaccid, hand-me-down gags as if they were hilarious, and damned if the audience doesn't laugh.

The film is far from being a seamless work of art, but it probably comes closer to the confused attitudes that Americans had toward the Vietnam war than any other film has come, and so its messiness seems honorable.

The Marx Brothers in one of their niftiest corny-surreal comedies; it isn't in the class of their Duck Soup but then what else is?

Even though the movie retreats into its narrow story line, you come out with a sense of epic horror and the perception that this white master race is retarded.

Sam Peckinpah's happy-go-lucky ode to the truckers on the road--a sunny, enjoyable picture.

Fairly consistently funny.

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

Animated and bouncing, the movie is more Dickens than Austen; once one adjusts to this, it's a happy and carefree viewing experience.

This Ingmar Bergman film isn't a masterwork, or even a very good movie, but it is clearly a film made by a master.

Peckinpah's poetic, corkscrew vision of the modern world, claustrophobically exciting.

Eugene O'Neill's great, heavy, simplistic, mechanical, beautiful play has been given a straightforward, faithful production in handsome, dark-toned color.

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

The movie is no more than a novelty, but it may surprise you by making you laugh out loud a few times.

This rabble-rousing movie appeals to a deep-seated belief in simple, swift, Biblical justice; the visceral impact of the film makes one know how crowds must feel when they're being swayed by demagogues.

The chemistry of pop vulgarization is all-powerful here; factually, this life of Billie Holiday is a fraud, but emotionally it delivers.

It's bright and blithe, like the sound of the 60s girl groups on the track; the flimsy plot hardly matters.

Uneven and often clumsy, yet with a distinctive satirical charm, the picture is full of misfits and faddists and social casualties.

Visually, it’s an original, bravura piece of moviemaking, with a weirdly ingenious vertical quality: the camera always seems to be moving up and down, rarely across.

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.

Nostalgic, affectionate Southern Americana out of Faulkner; the style is a little too "beguiling" but it's an awfully pleasant comedy anyway.

Silly, but with zest; there are some fine action sequences, and the performers seem to be enjoying their roles.

Raising Arizona is no big deal, but it has a rambunctious charm. The sunsets look marvelously ultra-vivid, the pain doesn't seem to be dry – it's like opening day of a miniature golf course. [20 Apr 1987, p.81]

Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.

The director, Rouben Mamoulian, rather overdoes the pseudo-science at the beginning, but at some levels this story seems to work in every version, and this one, set in a starched mid-Victorian environment, suggests the lust that has to come out--and the attraction of the gutter.

This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood's leopard-skin past--it's narrated by a corpse-- is almost too clever, yet it's at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequences dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood.

Caine brings out the gusto in Naughton's dialogue and despite the obvious weaknesses in the film (the gratuitous "cinematic" barroom brawl, the clumsy witnessing of the christening, the symbolism of the dog), he keeps the viewer absorbed in Alfie, the cold-hearted sexual hotshot, and his self-exculpatory line of reasoning.

It’s plain and uncondescending in its re-creation of what it means to be a high-school athlete, of what a country dance hall is like, of the necking in cars and movie houses, and of the desolation that follows high-school graduation.

It's a tenderhearted feminist picture.

This show-business farce is the first film directed by Richard Benjamin, and it's a creaky job of moviemaking, but it has a bubbling spirit; Benjamin is crazy about actors--not a bad start for a director.

The Director, Douglas Sirk, shows his talent for whipping up sour, stylized soap operas in posh settings.

No one could say this wasn't a rousing movie. It's also romantic, big, commercial, and slick, in the M-G-M grand manner.

The message is not very different from that of Hello, Dolly! or Mame, but Harold's flaccid asexuality (he's like a sickly infant, a limp, earthbound Peter Pan) and Maude's advanced stage of pixiness give that message a special freaky quality. And the film has been made with considerable wit and skill.

Jarmusch keeps the picture formal and cool, and it has an odd, nonchalant charm; it's fun. But it's softhearted fun--shaggy-dog minimalism--and it doesn't have enough ideas (or laughs) for its 90-minute length.

Bad fun. This sophisticated variant of the LA. cops-and-coke-and-art-world thrillers has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused.

The dialogue is crisp and often quite startling, and though the editing may be a little too showy and jumpy, the picture has originality and depth, and it’s full of sharp, absurdist humor.

The characters of the husband and wife are too simplified and their comic turns too forced, but the general giddiness and Barrymore keep the picture going.

There are some good silly gags, and the animals look relaxed even in their dizziest slapstick scenes. And the picture certainly never starves the eye; the cinematography is by the celebrated Pasqualino De Santis.

For all its bone-crunching collisions, it's almost irresistibly good-natured and funny.

This joyously square musical succeeds in telling one of the root stories of American Life.

Gable certainly doesn't have the animal magnetism he had in the earlier version, but when Gardner and Kelly bitch at each other, doing battle for him, they're vastly entertaining anyway.

Most of the plotting is ingenious, and soft-faced Mary Steenburgen, as the woman from 20th-century San Francisco who is charmed by the Victorian Wells, makes it all semi-engaging.

It's a smooth, proficient, somewhat languorous thriller, handsomely shot with some showy long takes. It's quite watchable, but the script is clever in a shallow way; the people need more dimensions.

Heavenly, corny nonsense.

The romantic star chemistry of Redford and Streisand turns a half-terrible movie into hit entertainment -- maybe even memorable entertainment.

An absorbing and impressive piece of work.

Cukor's work is too arch, too consciously, commercially clever, but it's also spirited, confident.

It's pure nostalgia--the past sweetened and trivialized. The mood is soft regret: he treats the old songs as a value that we've lost.

The film is pretty fair Hitchcock, though not as sexy or as witty as the 39 Steps.

The picture is just a flimsy, thrown-together service comedy about smart misfits trying to do things their own way in the Army. But it has a lot of snappy lines (the script is by Len Blum, Dan Goldberg, and Ramis), the director, Ivan Reitman, keeps things hopping (it's untidy but it doesn't lag), and the performers are a wily bunch of professional flakes.

The decor and effects in Roger Vadim's erotic comic strip are disappointing, but Jane Fonda has the skittish naughtiness of a teen-age voluptuary. She's the fresh, bouncy American girl triumphing by her innocence over a lewd, sadistic world of the future.

Though it has few dimensions it has pace and "entertainment value."

Bonnie Bedelia, who plays Shirley from 16 to 40, gives a tightly controlled starring performance; she's compelling and she brings the role a dry and precise irony.

Michael Pertwee, who wrote such English comedies as Laughter in Paradise and Your Past Is Showing for the director Mario Zampi, had a good idea here, too.

The film has the tawdry simplicities of many of the 30s movies that were built out of headline stories, but it also has more impact than most of the melodramas played out in more elevated surroundings.

You want to go to the town; you want to go back to the movie. It has a mellow, dotty charm.

The 25-year-old Errol Flynn has the smile and dash to shout "All right my hearties, follow me!" as he leaps from his pirate ship to an enemy vessel.

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.

B-budget science-fiction and simple stuff, but with more consistency and logic than usual, and with some rather amusing trick photography.

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]

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.

In the person of Alec Guinness, Fagin the Viper, the corrupter of youth, has a sly, depraved charm.

One of John Ford's most popular films--but fearfully Irish and green and hearty.

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

Kurosawa seems to be saying that wisdom dictates caution, security, stasis, but that to be alive is to be subject to impulse, to chaos.

The director, Vincente Minnelli, has given the material an hysterical sytlishness; the black-and-white cinematography (by Robert Surtees) is more than dramatic--it has termperament.

[A] generation-gap soap opera of the 50s, which had more emotional resonance for the teenagers of the time than many much better movies.

The point of the film gets to you, and though you may wince at the lines Maxwell Anderson wrote (every time he opens his heart, he sticks his poetic foot in it), you know what he means.

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.

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 Anglo-American production doesn't go in for romance or comedy; it sticks to suspense, and it's really good at what it does (except for a rather tacky escape by air).

[May] has a knack for defusing the pain without killing the joke.

Tennyson wrote Enoch Arden in 1864, and the movies have been making versions of it ever since D.W. Griffith did it in 1908 (and again in 1911). This one is the most famous and the funniest.

It's not a great picture; it's too schematic and it drags on after you get the points. However, the episodes and details stand out and help to compensate for the soggy plot strands, and there's something absorbing about the banality of its large-scale good intentions; it's compulsively watchable.

Working out of themselves (as his actors do), they can't create characters. Their performances don't have enough range, so we tend to tire of them before the movie is finished. Still, a lot of people found this psychodrama agonizingly true and beautiful.

The movie doesn't find a way to give us the emotional texture of the interrelationships and dependencies in the book (one can probably enjoy the film much more if one knows the book) but the principal actors (Marlon Brando, Brian Keith, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Harris) were able to do some startling things with their roles.

Whatever one's reservations about this famous film, it is impressive, and in the love scene between Taylor and Clift, physical desire seems palpable.

A pedagogical tone, reminiscent of the 30s, is maintained throughout much of the movie: these strikers are always teaching each other little constructive lessons, and their dialogue is blown up to the rank of folk wisdom.

Often underrated, Jerry Schatzberg can make viewers feel the beauty and excitement of everyday grit.

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.

Miss Crawford's heavy breathing was certified as acting when she won an Academy Award for her performance here.

It's giddy in a magical, pseudo-sultry way -- it seems to be set in a poet's dream of a red-light district.

This ghost movie has an overcomplicated plot, but it has a poetic feeling that makes up for much of the clutter.

Once you get past the clumsily antic early scenes, the moody texture can take hold of your imagination. At its best, the film is a soft Irish kiss.

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

The script goes from one formula to the next, and it reworks the pranks of generations of male service comedies, but the director, Howard Zieff, refurbishes the stale material with smart small touches, and Goldie Hawn has such infectious frothy charm that she manages to get laughs out of ancient routines about a tenderfoot going through the rigors of basic training.

A London-set Hitchcock silent thriller that was in part reshot and in part dubbed to make it a sound film--and an unusually imaginative and innovative one.

It's very well worked out in terms of character and it has a sustained grip, but it certainly isn't as much fun as several of his other films.

As a wisecracking , intermittently violent lunatic, Michael Keaton electrifies this quirky farce. The film isn't the knockout it might have been if it had a few big wild routines. And yes, it's sentimental. But the sentimentality isn't overplayed, and Keaton's fast rap cauterizes much of it.

This came late in the series but it's still fairly cheerful.

It has so many unpredictable spins that what's missing doesn't seem to matter much. The images sing. [10 July 1989]

It's a creditable though unadventurous film, handsomely staged in the M-G-M backlot style for classics.

The film is like an expanded, beautifully made TV "Movie of the Week."