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]