Pauline Kael

This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving.

The film was infused with an elegiac sense of American failure, and it had a psychedelic pull to it.

Altman gracefully kisses off the private-eye form in soft, mellow color and volatile images; the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality). Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance.

Whatever the omissions, the mutilations, the mistakes, this is very likely the most exciting and most alive production of Hamlet you will ever see on the screen.

A glitter sci-fi adventure fantasy that balances the indestructible James Bond with an indestructible cartoon adversary, Jaws (Richard Kiel), who is a great evil windup toy. This is the best of the Bonds starring the self-effacing Roger Moore.

Spacious, leisurely, and with elaborate period re-creations of Louisiana in the 30s, this first feature directed by the young screenwriter Walter Hill is unusually effective pulp, perhaps even great pulp.

Intermittently dazzling, the film has more energy and invention that Boorman seems to know what to do with. He appears to take the title literally; one comes out exhilarated but bewildered.

Although the script is a conventional melodrama, the director, Edward Zwick, has made something more thoughtful than that.

The failure of innocence here is touchingly absurd; the film is stylized poetry, and it is like nothing else that De Sica ever did.

Exciting, handsomely staged, and campy.

The backstage story is pleasantly tawdry and corny.

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.

It has charm and a lot of entertaining kinkiness, too.

Low-budget sci-fi, from an often amusing suspense script by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith, directed by Paul Bartel in his ingratiatingly tacky, sophomoric manner. Bartel seems to have an instinctive kinky comic-book style; the picture rips along, and there's a flip craziness about it - it's an ideal drive-in movie.

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lighting-fast choreography.

Great fun in the uninhibited early-30s style, made at M-G-M before fear of church pressure groups turned the studio respectable and pompous.

A smashing kitsch entertainment.

Lemmon is demoniacally funny - he really gives in to women's clothes, and begins to think of himself as a sexy girl. Monroe gives perhaps her most characteristic performance, which means that she's both charming and embarrassing.

Tight, clever thriller.

Robert Altman finds a sure, soft tone in this movie, from 1974, and he never loses it. His account of Coca-Cola-swigging young lovers in the thirties is the most quietly poetic of his films; it’s sensuous right from the first pearly-green long shot, and it seems to achieve beauty without artifice.

There's something to be said for this kind of professionalism: the moviemakers know how to provide excitement and they work us over.

It's a very simple and, in some ways, tawdry film, but Fellini shows his extraordinary talent for the dejected setting, the shabby performer, the fat old chorine, the singer who will never hit the high note.

Great as it undoubtedly is, it's not really a likable film; it's amazing, though--it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message.

An elegantly sinister scare movie, literate and expensive, with those two fine actresses Claire Bloom and Julie Harris.

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.

Despite its peculiar overtones of humor, this is one of the most frightening movies ever made.

Jewison has given it an atmosphere that recalls his crack 1967 comedy-mystery In the Heat of the Night, and he has also given it a beautiful sense of pace, and brought out all the humor he can find.

It's extremely uneven--there are slick and sentimental passages and some are impenetrable. But there are also emotional revelations and there's a superb sequence--almost an epiphany--when the dying man, who has accomplished what he hoped to, sits in a swing in the snow and hums a little song.