Pauline Kael

One of the greatest of all movies...Falconetti's Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film.

Cheesy low farce, with Danny DeVito as a thieving millionaire who wants to kill his heiress wife (Bette Miler) and is overjoyed when she's kidnapped.

The most spirited satisfying Western epic in several years--it may seem a little loose at first, but it gets better and better as it goes along and you get the fresh, crazy hang of it.

For all his dedication to this ambitious project, the director, John Huston, must not have been able to keep up his energy level; at times, his work seems surprisingly perfunctory.

Hudson and Wyman are hardly an electric combination, but this Ross Hunter production is made with so much symbolism that some people actually see it as allegorical.

This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving.

One of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial. I think people will really fight about it. It's the story of a woman who has a second chance thrust on her; she knows enough not to make the same mistake again, but she isn't sure of much else. Neither is the movie. Alice is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don't believe in what's going on--when the issues it raises get all fouled up. [13 Jan 1975, p.74]

Costa-Gavras's antipathy to Americans appears to be so deep-seated that he can't create American characters. The only real filmmaking is in the backgrounds: in the anxious, ominous atmosphere of a city under martial law -- the sirens, the tanks, the helicopters, the feeling of abnormal silences and of random terror.

Ousmane Sembene's approach is thoughtful and almost reticent; the viewer contemplates a series of tragic dilemmas. Yet for all its intelligence, the movie isn't memorable--partly because the last section is unsatisfying.

William Wellman's direction is more leisurely than usual; he has such good material here that he takes his time.

An erratic, sometimes personal in the wrong way, and generally unlucky picture that is often affecting.

The script, by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale, is a mechanical demonstration of how greedy and unfeeling the townspeople are, and Don Siegel's directing lacks rhythm--each scene dies a separate death.

This is a film noir without malevolence or mystery. It's a Yuppie thriller: it has no psychological layers.

It's a very even work, with no thudding bad lines and no low stretches, but it doesn't have the loose, manic highs of some of Allen's other films.

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.

Walter Hill has a dazzling competence as an action director; he uses the locale for its paranoia-inducing strangeness (it suggests Vietnam), and he uses the men to demonstrate what he thinks it takes to survive. Its limitation is that there's nothing underneath the characters' macho masks.

M-G-M's wartime salute to gallant England, engineered to make the audience choke up.

A first-rate piece of work by a director who's daring and agile... It's heaven – alive in a way that movies rarely are. [9 Jan 1989]

Lester's decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don't want joke, joke, joke.

Sinatra sings pleasantly, and Brando and Simmons are ingratiatingly uneasy when they burst into song and dance, but the movie is extended and rather tedious. The Broadway version is legendary; the movie provides no clue as to why.

In its own sombre, inflated terms, the picture is effective, but it's dragged out so many self-importantly that you have time to recognize what a hopelessly naive, incompetent, and untrustworthy lawyer the hero is.

The film is one continuous spurt of energy...But the picture is abstract in an adolescent way. Miller's attempt to tap into the universal concept of the hero (as enunciated by Jung and explicated by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces") makes the film joyless.

This Australia film - the pictorial re-creation of a late-Victorian novel - shows considerable charm and craft, though it's essentially taxidermy.

The picture might have been a pop classic if it had stayed near the level of impudence that it reaches at its best. But about midway as Eddie has a crisis of confidence, and when Eddie locks his jaw and sets forth to become a purified man of integrity, the joy goes out of Newman's performance, which (despite the efforts of a lot of good actors) is the only life in the movie, except for a brief, startling performance by the 25-year-old black actor Forest Whitaker as a pool shark called Amos.

The film, directed by Perry Henzell, is feverish and haphazard, but the music redeems much of it, and the rhythmic swing of the Jamaican speech is hypnotic.

The best scenes--especially an assassination attempt at Royal Albert Hall--are stunning, but Hitchcock seems sloppily unconcerned about the unconvincing material in between the tricks and jokes.

One of the best of the lighthearted rah-rah collegiate musicals.

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

It was a Broadway musical comedy, slightly adapted, and filmed in Astoria--and it looks stagey. But the film is too joyous for cavilling.

Tyson's performance and Korty's tact are more than enough to compensate for the flaws.

Tony Richardson whizzes through the Henry Fielding novel, but he pauses long enough for a great lewd eating scene.

The film is peculiarly masochistic and self-congratulatory.

So inept you can't even get angry; it's like the imitations of sophisticated entertainment that high-school kids put on.

It's clever and has some really chilling moments.

As Mike Nichols has directed the material, the effects are almost all achieved through the line readings, and the cleverness is unpleasant -- it's all surface and whacking emphasis.

It's intended to be a thriller, but there's little suspense and almost no fun in this account of a schizophrenic ventriloquist.

The pictures seems dogged and methodical, though it is graced with a beautiful performance by Kotto.

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

It's an enormous pleasure to see a movie that's really about something, and that doesn't lay on any syrupy coating to make the subject go down easily.

We don't get enough understanding of Stroud to become involved in how he is transformed over the years.

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

Rob Reiner's film, taken from Stephen King's autobiographical novella "The Body," overdoses on sincerity and nostalgia. Seeing it is like watching an extended Christmas special of "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie" - it makes you feel virtuous. All that stays with you is the tale that Gordie, the central character, tells his friends around the campfire.

The subject - the romantic life of an American Communist - may be daring, but the moviemaking is extremely traditional, with Beatty playing a man who dies for an ideal. It's rather a sad movie, because it isn't really very good.

A huge, mawkish, trite circus movie directed by Cecil B. De Mille in a neo-Biblical style.

Processed schlock. This could only have been designed as a TV movie and then blown up to cheapie-epic proportions.

Within its own terms the picture is sensitive and very well done, but it's also tiresomely fraudulent -- an idealization of a safe, shuttered existence, the good life according to M-G-M.

Somewhat silly, but with fine sequences, and Miss Samoilova, a grandniece of Stanislavsky, does him honor.

It isn't particularly entertaining; it's just busy.

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.

Billy Wilder's inane yet moderately entertaining version of an Agatha Christie courtroom thriller, with Charles Laughton wiggling his wattles.

Morton DaCosta, who had also directed the stage version, isn't comfortable with the camera, and the material seems too literal, too practical, too set. But the star, Robert Preston, has a few minutes of fast patter--conmanship set to music, that constitute one of the high points in the history of American musicals.

Fast and enjoyable, with Poitier's color used for comedy.

It's noisy and brutal, with sentimental flourishes.

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

Lester's decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don't want joke, joke, joke.

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

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.

It's apparent that the decor and color were intended to create moods, but the whole thing seems to be the product of an aberrant, second-rate imagination that confuses decor with art.

It's an ambitious movie made with an inept, sometimes sly, and very often equivocal script...But it's by no means a negligible movie.

This epic is a compendium of kitsch, but it’s kitsch aestheticized by someone who loves it and sees it as the poetry of the masses. It isn’t just the echoing moments that keep you absorbed—it’s the reverberant dreamland settings and Leone’s majestic, billowing sense of film movement. 

Despite Peckinpah’s artistry, there’s something basically grim and crude in Straw Dogs. It’s no news that men are capable of violence, but while most of us want to find ways to control that violence, Sam Peckinpah wants us to know that that’s all hypocrisy.

The case itself had so many dramatic elements that the movie can't help holding our attention, but it's a very crude piece of work, totally lacking in subtlety; what is meant to be a courtroom drama of ideas comes out as a caricature of a drama of ideas, and maddeningly, while watching we can't be sure what is based on historical fact and what is invention.

Undiluted pleasure and excitement. The scriptwriter, W.D. Richter, supplies some funny lines, and the director, Phil Kaufman, provides such confident professionalism that you sit back in the assurance that every spooky nuance you're catching is just what was intended.

The salesmen's scams are entertaining, but their spritzing is too tame, and the action is prolonged with limp, wavering scenes. Levinson wants to be on the humane side of every issue, The best work is done by the supporting players.

The film loses its imaginative energy once it moves out of the ripe, sleazy carny milieu, and from the start the technique of the director, Edmund Goulding, is conventional, even a little stodgy. Still, the material, adapted from William Gresham's novel by Jules Furthman, is unusual and the cast first-rate.

Jarmusch's passive style has its wit, but the style is deadening here until he brings in Roberto--a character out of folk humor. And without the boredom of the first three-quarters of an hour Roberto wouldn't be so funny.

The film's mixture of parody, cynicism, and song and dance is perhaps a little sour; though the numbers are exhilarating and the movie is really much more fun that the wildly overrated On the Town, it doesn't sell exuberance in that big, toothy way, and it was a box office failure.

It's an idiosyncratic film, it's cuckoo--an old man's film (partly directed from a wheelchair)--but it's very likable.

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

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

There's something to be said for this kind of professionalism: the moviemakers know how to provide excitement and they work us over.

The director, Claude Berri, who did the adaptation with Gerard Brach, aimed for fidelity to the novel; he said it was his task to give the material "a cinematic rhythm," but "there was no need for imagination." That's what he thinks.

A great, intense movie about war and rape...Directed by Brian De Palma, the movie is the culmination of his best work. Sean Penn gives a daring performance as the squad's 20-year-old leader; Michael J. Fox is impressive as the solider who can't keep quiet.

A virtuoso piece of kinetic moviemaking. Working with material that could, with a few false steps, have turned into a tony reality-and-illusion puzzle, the director, Richard Rush, has kept it all rowdy and funny -- it's slapstick metaphysics.

It's marred by a holiday family-picture heartiness--the M-G-M back-lot Americana gets rather thick.

It's not a great movie, or even a very good one (it's rather mechanical), but it touches one's experience in a way that makes it hard to forget.

You keep wanting it to turn into wonderful romantic fluff, but it's only spottily successful.

Coppola's efforts to bring depth to this material that has no depth make the picture seem groggy. It's as if he were trying to direct the actors to bring something out of themselves when neither he nor anyone else knows what's wanted.

Often seems on the verge of being funny, but the humor is too clumsily forced.

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.

It's a graceful picture, but it dawdles, and Stephens doesn't seem to have the star presence that Holmes requires.

Southern idiom, delicious fish fries, and naive theology are fused with awe and wonder.

Heavenly, corny nonsense.

What the play was supposed to be about -- which was dim enough in the original -- is even more obscure in the script that he and Richard Brooks (then a screenwriter) prepared, but the movie is so confidently and entertainingly directed that nobody is likely to complain.

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 chemistry is great, but the plot and tone are wobbly.

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.

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

It's not only a musical entertainment but an imaginative version of the novel as a lyrical, macabre fable.

In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess.

With Arthur hiller in charge, much of the dialogue turns into squawking, and the movie is flattened out and rackety, with Midler doing her damnedest to pump sass and energy into it.

Ragged when it tries for philosophical importance, but it's fun to see so many stars at an early stage in their careers.

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.

The New York-set movie doesn't tell you much you don't know. Worthy, but a drag--despite the many incidents, it feels undramatic.

One of the most sheerly enjoyable films of recent years, this sophisticated horror comedy, written and directed by Brian De Palma, is permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts.

It's one of those movies in which the hero has to be a man of few words because if he ever explained anything to the other characters they wouldn't get into the trouble they get into that he has to get them out of, and there wouldn't be a movie. There isn't much of one anyway.

Doris Day is at her friendliest and most likable as the tomboy heroine of this big, bouncy Western musical about Jane's romance with Wild Bill Hickok.