Pauline Kael

The drab script is by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald; the film is visually impressive only.

An elegantly sinister scare movie, literate and expensive, with those two fine actresses Claire Bloom and Julie Harris.

The movie doesn't suggest that adolescents have a right to sexual experimentation -- it just attacks the corrupted grown-ups for their failure to value love above all else. It's the old corn, fermented in a new way.

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

Terrible, but bearable; there's a fascination to its clunkiness.

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.

Glorious...touching in sophisticated ways that you don't expect from an American director.

Scorsese designs his own form of alienation in this mistimed, empty movie, which seems to teeter between jokiness and hate.

Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn are wittily matched, and their dark-brown eyes are full of life, but the pictures's revisionist approach to legends results in a series of trivializing attitudes and whimsical poses.

The gags are almost all on this level, and the little sops to sentiment are even worse.

Lighthearted and charming story of a black and white team of con artists in the Old South. Very enjoyable.

Hitchcock scraping bottom.

Close to being a silly ghoulie classic - the bloodier it gets, the funnier it is. It's like pop Buñuel; the jokes hit you in a subterranean comic zone that the surrealists' pranks sometimes reached, but without the surrealists' self-consciousness (and art-consciousness).

There ins't a gleam of good sense anywhere in this picture.

Low-budget sci-fi, from an often amusing suspense script by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith, directed by Paul Bartel in his ingratiatingly tacky, sophomoric manner. Bartel seems to have an instinctive kinky comic-book style; the picture rips along, and there's a flip craziness about it - it's an ideal drive-in movie.

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

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.

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]

The farce situations are pushed too broadly, and have a sanctimonious patriotic veneer, but this first American film directed by Billy Wilder was a box-office hit.

Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance as Sarah Woodruff, the romantic mystery woman of John Fowles' novel, but she isn't mysterious. We're not fascinated by Sarah; she's so distanced from us that all we can do is observe how meticulous Streep -- and everything else about the movie -- is.

It's all meant to be airy and bubbly, but it's obvious, overextended (2 hours plus), and overproduced.

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.

A dog of a movie about a horse.

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

The self-conscious good taste of it all creaks, but Noel Coward knows plenty of tricks, and the performers know how to get the most out of his lines.

Bogdanovich takes the plot and the externals of the characters but loses the logic. His picture goes every which way; he restages gags from Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy and W.C. Fields, plus a lot of cornball devices.

It holds the viewer's interest, but it does so by setting up the bodybuilding champions for you to react to in a certain way, and then congratulating you for seeing them in that psychologically facile way.

The film is honest and watchable. But, unlike Orton, it takes no real delight in misbehaving.

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.

Tasteful and moderately enjoyable.

The picture strains for seriousness now and then, but even when it makes a fool of itself it's still funny.

It's a strange, elating movie with the Iceman at its emotional center; his mystical fervor takes hold. The director, Fred Schepisi, is working with a weak script, yet he and his two longtime collaborators, the composer Bruce Smeaton and the cinematographer Ian Baker, achieve that special and overwhelming fusion of the arts which great visual moviemaking can give us.

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]

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

The whole thing is amorphous and rather silly, but it's clearly a trial run for some of the effects that Altman brings off in Nashville.

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

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.

The scenes involving Gould and Cannon are small miracles of timing; Cannon (who looks a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits) is also remarkably funny in her scenes with an analyst (played by the analyst Donald F. Muhich). You can feel something new in the comic spirit of this film - in the way Mazursky gets laughs by the rhythm of cliches, defenses, and little verbal aggressions.

Perhaps the farthest out of the Bob Hope--Bing Crosby road pictures. Some of the patter is pure, relaxed craziness, but the topical jokes and the awful quips keep pulling it down.

It’s far from a dull movie, but it’s certainly a very strange one; it’s an enshrinement of the mixed-up kid. Here and in Rebel Without a Cause, Dean seems to go just about as far as anybody can in acting misunderstood.

The picture--which is almost surreally entertaining--is also famous for its madcap choreography; chorus girls dancing on the wings of planes, to the title song.

Peppy and pleasurable, this is one of the most sheerly beautiful comedies ever shot. Mazursky isn't afraid of uproarious silliness: there are some dizzying slapstick routines that reach their peak when a small black-and-white Border collie takes over.

Yes, it's a collection of barbs and sick jokes, but it's not fun, and it lacks a punch line...The young, inexperience director, Michael Lehmann, doesn't find the right mood for the gags. [17 Apr 1989]

It isn't terrible, just disappointing.

It's a miserable piece of moviemaking -- poorly paced and tearjerking.

Classic, compulsively watchable rags-to-riches-and-heartbreak weeper, from a novel by Fannie Hurst.

A first-rate, cunning, shapely thriller, directed by Joseph Ruben (Dreamscape), from a nifty screenplay by the crime novelist Donald E. Westlake.

The director, Sydney Pollack, isn't particularly inventive, but he has tight control of the actors. They work well for him, and he keeps the grisly central situation going with energy and drive.

The director, Herbert Ross, and the writer, Dean Pitchford, exhaust one bad idea after another, and build up to a letdown: you don't get the climactic dance you expect.

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.

It operates on darlingness and the kitsch of innocence. The almost pornographic dislocation, which is the source of the film's possible appeal as a novelty, is never acknowledged, but the camera lingers on a gangster's pudgy, infantile fingers or a femme fatale's soft little belly pushing out of her tight stain dress, and it roves over the pubescent figures in the chorus line.

The film is hair-raising because of what Elvis turns into.

There are some good ideas tucked away inside scrambled unpleasantness.

The play was built on topical jokes and a series of vaudeville turns, and in this version the jokes are flat and the turns seemed forced and not very funny.

A junk-food mixture of poetry, black anger, bathroom humor, and routines that have come through the sit-com mill.

Directed by Alan Parker, the movie takes itself inordinately seriously as a moral fable expressing eternal truths. It feels morose and unrelieved, despite the efforts of the two actors.

Its exuberant love of New York seems forced, and most of the numbers are hearty and uninspired.

The first time you see this film, you're likely to find it silly, autoerotic, static, absurd, and you may feel cheated after having heard so much about it. But though it may seem to have no depth, you're not likely to forget it -- it has a suggestiveness unlike any other film.

This attempt at screwball charm was directed by Susan Seidelman, who wipes out her actors. All their responsiveness is cut off -- there's nothing going on in them. This flatness can make your jaw fall open, but it seems to be accepted by the audience as New Wave postmodernism.

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.

A mild farce - benign but not really very funny.

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.

William Shatner's Kirk is less stoic here than in III--he's pleasantly daffy. The others in the crew also have an easy, parodistic tone. But the picture doesn't have much beyond the interplay among them and the jokey scenes in San Francisco.

This romantic comedy-fantasy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New Yorker (tom Hanks) has a friendly, tantalizing magic.

You're supposed to need a strong stomach to sit through this one, but it's so stupefyingly obvious and repetitive that you begin to laugh with relief that you're not being emotionally affected; it's just a gross-out.

This first American version, directed by Tod Browning, was adapted from a play based on the Bram Stoker novel, rather than from the novel itself, and it becomes too stagey.

The director, Irving Rapper, is just barely competent, and the action plods along, yet this picture is all of a piece, and if it were better it might not work at all. This way, it's a schlock classic.

A low-budget winner--a romantic fable about a Philadelphia palooka who gains his manhood, written by and starring muscle-bound Sylvester Stallone, who is repulsive one moment, noble the next. He's amazing to watch.

This isn't a good movie but it's compellingly tawdry and nasty -- the only movie that explored the mean, unsavory potential of Marilyn Monroe's cuddly, infantile perversity.

1900 is a romantic moviegoer's vision of the class struggle -- a love poem for the movies as well as for the life of those who live communally on the land.

There are startling effects and good revue touches here and there, but the picture goes on and on, as if it were determined to impress us. It goes on so long that it cancels itself out, even out of people's memories; it was long awaited and then forgotten almost instantly.

An absorbing and impressive piece of work.

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.

The film is packed with symbolic gestures, though they're not quite as effective as the ghostly fiesta scene behind the opening titles, with senoritas dancing to music that's different from the music we hear, and castanets silently clicking.

Moore, a big shambling joker who's the director, producer, writer, and star, deadpans his way through interviews with an assortment of unlikely people, who are used as stooges. And he does something that is humanly very offensive: Roger & Me uses its leftism as a superior attitude.

The screenwriters retain much of Mamet's dialogue, but they piece it out, and the director punches up the breaks between scenes with rock music. It's like being pounded on the back every two minutes when your back is already sore (because the dialogue has been whacking you so hard).

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

The film errs in many ways, and at times the editing seems glaringly poor, but Olivier's performance gives it venomous excitement.

Schroder inadvertently exposes Bukowski's messianic windbag sensibility at its most self-satisfied. You wouldn't guess at Bukowski's talent from this movie.

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

A good-natured and engaging minor novel by Steinbeck, turned into a good-natured and engaging (though corny and quaint and picturesque) film at M-G-M.

The movie is so ornate and so garrulous about telling the dirty truth that it's a camp classic: a Cinderella story in which the prince turns out to be impotent.

It's a Velveeta comedy, processed like a Neil Simon picture, with banter and gags and an unctuous score. All its smart talk is low-key and listless. It stays on the surface, yet it's dissatisfied with the surface; it's a deeply indecisive movie.

The facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his apparent intention -- to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old corn.

Expensive pop disaster epic, manufactured for the market that made Airport a hit. Ronald Neame directed, with dull efficiency.

Consistently entertaining and eerily beautiful.

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

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

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

One of Edna Ferber's heartfelt, numbskull treks through the hardships and glories of the American heritage.

The film isn't just about the widow -- it's about family, community, America, and Christian love. But Benton's gentle, nostalgic presentation muffles this. His craftsmanship is like an armor built up around his refusal to outrage or offend anyone; it's an encrusted gentility.

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

Most of the movie lacks zest.

The one element Zeffirelli removes that the other bowdlerizers also removed is Shakespeare's language. Only about half the play is left, and what's there doesn't build up the rhythm of a poetic drama. Heard in isolated fragments, the lines just seem a funny way of talking that is hard to understand.

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

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.

This spoofy black comedy is thin-textured and it's sedated; it doesn't have enough going on in it -- not even enough to look at. The nothingness of the movie is supposed to be its droll point, but viewers may experience sensory deprivation.

Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes (hectic criminal ventures and blunders toward justice) on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.