Pauline Kael

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.

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.

A beautiful piece of new-style classical moviemaking. Everything is thought out and prepared, but it isn't explicit, it isn't labored, and it certainly isn't overcomposed.

When Attenborough starts crosscutting from the escape to Woods' flashback memories (with bursts of choral music), the movie is dumbfounding. It looks as if Attenborough staged scenes and then didn't know what to do with them, so he stuck them in by having the escaping Woods think back. An every time Biko appears in a flashback our interest quickens; this man with fire in his eyes commands the screen -- Denzel Washington is the star by right of talent.

The film often looks third class, and the director, Jim Abrahams, doesn't have the knack of making the details click into place. You're aware of an awful lot of mistaken-identity plot and aware of how imprecise most of it is. Yet the picture moves along, spattering the air with throwaway gags, and a minute after something misfires you're laughing out loud.

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.

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the charac­ters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emo­tional range that is dizzyingly sensual.

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

Nichols must have a cummerbund around his head: the directing is constricted – there's no visual inventiveness or spontaneity. And in his hands the script has no conviction. [9 Jan 1989]

Probably nobody involved was very happy about the results; Dylan doesn't come off at all.

Fairly consistently funny.

Turgidly predictable.

Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.

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

At almost every point where we might expect a little ping of surprise or mystery, Donner lets us down. It's a limp and dreary movie.

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

Tracy and Hepburn, but not a comedy, and not good, either.

The film is beautifully acted and directed around the edges, but it also suffers from a tragic tone that has a blurring, antiquing effect. You watch all these losers losing, and you don't know why they're losing or why you're watching them.

It's more languidly paced than his mid 30s work, and the dialogue is spoken in stage rhythms, but there are inventive moments.

Val Lewton produced, but except for a few touches, it's a mess.

Some of the special effects are amusing, and a few are perverse and frightening, but the effects take over in this Hitchcock scare picture, and he fails to make the plot situations convincing. The script is weak, and the acting is so awkward that often one doesn't know how to take the characters.

A smashing kitsch entertainment.

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

There's no electricity in it, no smart talk, no flair. Written and directed by George Seaton, it's bland entertainment of the old school: every stereotyped action is followed by a stereotyped reaction -- cliches commenting on cliches.

The film (especially the first half) seems padded, formal, discreet. It's like watching a faded French classic.

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

Whatever oddball charm and silliness the first Rocky had is long gone. Rocky III starts with the hyped climax of II and then just keeps going on that level; it's packaged hysteria. This picture is primitive, but it's also shrewd and empty and inept.

It's reprehensible and enjoyable, the kind of movie that makes you feel brain dead in two minutes--after which point you're ready to laugh at its mixture of trashiness, violence, and startlingly silly crude humor.

Perhaps just because it is so concerned with fidelity to the facts it's less exciting than one might hope; something seems to be missing (a unifying dramatic idea, perhaps), but it's far from a disgrace, and the performers are never an embarrassment.

Lemmon is demoniacally funny - he really gives in to women's clothes, and begins to think of himself as a sexy girl. Monroe gives perhaps her most characteristic performance, which means that she's both charming and embarrassing.

When talkies were new, this was the musical that everyone went to see.

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

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

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.

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.

The movie is childishly naïve... like a New Age social-studies lesson. It isn't really revisionist; it's the old stuff toned down and sensitized. [17 Dec 1990]

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.

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]

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'd think that if anybody could film Sam Shepard's 1983 play and keep it metaphorical and rowdy and sexually charged it would be the intuitive Robert Altman, but the material seems to congeal on the screen, and congealed rambunctiousness is not a pretty sight.

Everything in this movie is fudged ever so humanistically, in a perfuctory, low-pressure way. And the picture has its effectiveness: people are crying at it. Of course they're crying at it - it's a piece of wet kitsch. [6 Feb 1989]

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

It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects—though straight from the drawing board—are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed. There’s a little more that’s good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn’t take himself too seriously. [Harper's]

The director, Michael Curtiz, seems to be totally out of his element in this careful, deadly version of the celebrated, long-running Broadway comedy.

Tight, clever thriller.

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]

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

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

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.

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

The movie is wonderfully free of bellyaching; it's a large-scale comic vision, with 90-foot barrage balloons as part of the party atmosphere.

The director, Roland Joffe, and his co-screenwriter, Bruce Robinson, took this inherently dramatic subject and got lost in it; the script is a shambles.

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.

This Bond thriller-the sixth, and set mainly in Switzerland-introduces a new Bond, George Lazenby, who's quite a dull fellow, and the script, by Richard Maibaum, isn't much, either, but the movie is exciting, anyway.

The picture hasn’t been thought out in terms of movement or a visual plan. Dylan merely gives his actor friends some clues as to what he’d like them to do and they improvise, without reference to what has gone before or what will follow.

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 first three-quarters of an hour...is junkily entertaining. but when they're on the road in the South, Willie turns into a curmudgeonly guardian angel, the boy starts learning lessons about life, and the picture is contemptible.

A mosaic that never comes together.

Marilyn Monroe as a psychotic babysitter. She wasn't yet a box-office star, but her unformed--almost blobby--quality is very creepy, and she dominated this melodrama. In other respects, it's standard, though the New York hotel setting helps, and also the young Anne Bancroft, as a singer who works in the hotel.

Kasdan has eliminated all the conflicting interests and the psychological impediments to a happy marriage, leaving the physical separation as the only obstacle. There's nothing left for the movie to be about except how the hero and the heroine can conquer space. (And at the end, the pictured fudges even this.)

Paul Newman in a bungled attempt to recapture the Bogart private-eye world of The Big Sleep. Shelley Winters gives the picture artificial respiration for a few minutes, but it soon relapses. A private-eye movie without sophistication and style is ignominious.

It's a slovenly piece of moviemaking and it's full of howlers. Charly may represent the unity of schlock form and schlock content -- true schlock art.

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.

This whole production is a mixture of wizardry and ineptitude; the picture has enjoyable moments but it's as uncertain of itself as the title indicates.

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

This film brings out all the weaknesses of its director, Sidney Lumet, and none of his strengths. The whole production has a stagnant atmosphere, and the big dance numbers are free-form traffic jams.

The director, Hector Babenco, treats William Kennedy's Albany novel, set in 1938, as a joyless classic; the movie has no momentum--the running time (144 minutes) is like a death sentence.

There's no motivating idea visible in this version, produced abroad by Hal B. Wallis, and the leaden script, by John Hale, lacks romantic spirit and dramatic sense.

The movie has a deep-toned flossy and "artistic" clarity and a peculiarly literary tone - the dialogue doesn't sound like living people talking.

There's nothing to look at except Gino and Jerry's mummified skits, which are directed at a deliberate and unvarying pace. Mamet piles on improbabilities in a matter-of-fact style; flatness of performance seems to be part of the point. This minimalist approach--it suggests a knowingness--takes the fun out of hokum. The result is like a Frank Capra--Damon Runyon comic fairy tale of the 30s in slow motion.

The movie is fatally perfunctory about emotion, atmosphere, suspense. But if the overall effect is disappointing, from moment to moment the details are never less than engaging, and are often knobby and funny.

There's too much metaphysical gabbing and a labored boy-gets-girl romance, but audiences loved this chunk of whimsey.

Perhaps the most likable of all Westerns, and a Grand Hotel-on-wheels movie that has just about everything--adventure, romance, chivalry--and all of it very simple and traditional.

The material hasn't been paced for the screen; there are dead spots (without even background music), but there are also a lot of funny verbal routines and a musical burlesque of Carmen, and Harpo, as a fiendish pickpocket, is much faster (and less aesthetic and self-conscious and innocent) than in the Brothers' later comedies.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The movie is part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.

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.

A larger, slower, duller version of the spy thrillers [Hitchcock] made in the 30s.

There are lapses in the continuity, and the picture is pushed toward a ready-made, theatre-of-the-absurd melodrama--the kind of instant fantasy that filled One From the Heart.

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.

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.

This one doesn't look too bad, but it has no snap, no tension. It's an exhausted movie.

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

Great as it undoubtedly is, it's not really a likable film; it's amazing, though--it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message.

The hero is so blandly uninteresting that there's nothing to hold the movie together.

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.

Some exciting scenes in the first half, but the later developments are frenetic, and by the end the film is a loud and discordant mess.

Plenty of shrewd commercial calculation went into concocting the right sugar coating for this story of an 11-year-old girl's painful maturation, but chemistry seems right. Laurice Elehwany's script neatly handles a number of details but on larger matters falls into predictable patterns.

It’s no accident that you feel a sense of loss for each killer of the Bunch: Peckinpah has made them seem heroically, mythically alive on the screen.

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

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