Pauline Kael

A B-picture classic. This plain and inexpensive piece of science fiction employs few of the resources of the cinema (to put it mildly), but it has an idea that confirms everyone's suspicions.

The film holds you, in a suffocating way. Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It's all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don't care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination.

A celebrated, craftsmanlike tearjerker, and incredibly neat.

A lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel.

Is it a great movie? I don't think so. But it's a triumphant piece of filmmaking -- journalism presented with the brio of drama. [24 Sept 1990]

Centering on a racetrack robbery, it has fast, incisive cutting; a nervous, edgy style; and furtive little touches of characterization.

Probably the most famous of all horror films, and one of the best.

An inspired piece of casting brought Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn together. This is a comedy, a love story, and a tale of adventure, and it is one of the most charming and entertaining movies ever made.

It's a wonderfully full and satisfying movie, with superb performances by Connery and Caine.

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.

One of John Ford's most memorable films, and not at all the tedious bummer that the title might suggest. Henry Fonda, in one of his best early performances, is funny and poignant as the drawling, awkward young hero.

This sinister black comedy of murder accelerates until it becomes a grotesque fantasy of murder. The actors seem to be having a boisterous good time getting themselves knocked off.

The movie has the happy, enthusiastic spirit of a fanfare, and it's astonishingly entertaining considering how divided it is in spirit...Whatever one's reservations, the film is great fun to watch.

There's no denying that for many people sequences such as Bambi's birth have an enduring primal power.

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.

The film has a strong style that is very different from Lean's earlier work. He seems to have finally to have let go--to have pulled out all the stops. The film is emotional, exciting, full of action.

The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film. Visually, Part II is far more completely beautiful than the fist, just as it's thematically richer, more shadowed, fuller.

The picture is swollen with windy thoughts and murky notions of perversions, and as Eddie's manager the magnetic young George C. Scott seems to be a Satan figure, but it has strength and conviction, and Newman gives a fine, emotional performance. You can see all the picture's faults and still love it.

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.

Slickly professional, thoroughly enjoyable.

A major film by one of the great film artists.

The film's rhythm is startling -- you can feel the director's temperament. And there's an element of relentlessness in the way he sets out to demonstrate the hopeless cruelty of the "system."

Overall, it's a terrific movie, even though the pacing doesn't always seem quite right.

It's about Scorcese and DeNiro's trying to top what they've done and what everybody else has done. Scorcese puts his unmediated obsessions on the screen, trying to turn raw, pulp power into art by removing it from the particulars of observation and narrative.

Extraordinarily sweet and graceful comedy.

Clarke's script, Charles Crichton's direction, and Georges Auric's music contribute to what is probably the most nearly perfect fubsy comedy of all time. It's a minor classic, a charmer.

A romantic adolescent boy’s view of friendship.

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.