Pauline Kael

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.