Pauline Kael

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.