Pauline Kael

The director, Claude Berri, who did the adaptation with Gerard Brach, aimed for fidelity to the novel; he said it was his task to give the material "a cinematic rhythm," but "there was no need for imagination." That's what he thinks.

The third in the series, and without any new ideas except a bad one: still airily casual, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are now the parents of a baby boy.

Few movies give us such memorable, emotion-charged images.

Southern idiom, delicious fish fries, and naive theology are fused with awe and wonder.

A little poky but impressively well done, with witty special effects (by John P. Fulton) and traces of the Whale humor that enlivened his Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein.

The plot is trivial French farce (about mistaken identities), but the dances are among the wittiest and the most lyrical expressions of American romanticism on the screen.

Tony Richardson whizzes through the Henry Fielding novel, but he pauses long enough for a great lewd eating scene.

It isn't terrible, just disappointing.

It's apparent that the decor and color were intended to create moods, but the whole thing seems to be the product of an aberrant, second-rate imagination that confuses decor with art.

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.

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).

The picture, written and directed by James Bridges, tries to be thoughtful and provocative, but it has nothing to say.

Seeing “Raiders” is like being put through a Cuisinart—something has been done to us, but not to our benefit.

Jodorowsky plays with symbols and ideas and enigmas so promiscuously that the confusion may be mistaken for depth.

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.

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

Lightning didn't strike three times; the movie is lumbering... I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation, and it's too amorphous to damage our feelings about the first two. [1 Jan 1991]

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

This George Stevens film is over-planned and uninspired: Westerns are better when they're not so self-importantly self-conscious.

Eustache's method resembles the static randomness of the Warhol-Morrissey pictures, but the randomness here is not a matter of indifference; it's a conscious goal.

The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert.

As suspense craftsmanship, the picture is trim, brutal and exciting; it was directed in the sleekest style by the veteran urban-action director Don Siegel, and Lalo Schifrin's pulsating, jazzy electronic trickery drives the picture forward. It's also a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place - a kind of hardhat The Fountainhead.

The scenes are often unshaped, and so rudderless that the meanings don't emerge. Rowlands externalizes schizophrenic dissolution; she fragments before our eyes. But her prodigious performance is enough for half a dozen tours de force--it's exhausting.

A competent director (Peter Yates), working with competent technicians, gives a fairly dense texture to a vacuous script about cops and gangsters and politicians. The stars are Steve McQueen with his low-key charisma, as the police-officer hero, and the witty, steep streets of San Francisco.

Fanny Brice is herself, though she isn't on screen enough to vitalize this lavish, tedious musical biography; it goes on for a whopping 3 hours.

The picture isn't enough of anything; there isn't a thing in it that you can get excited about or quarrel with.

The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's vision.

Woody Allen is trying to please, but his heart isn't in it, and his talent isn't either. He is so much a man of our time that his comedy seems denatured in this classy, period setting