Pauline Kael

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.

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

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

John Cusack and Mahoney have to carry the unconvincing melodramatic portion of the plot, but they carry it stunningly. [15 May 1989]

This is one of Preston Sturges's surreal-slapstick-satire-conniption-fit comedies, and part of our great crude heritage.

This movie is both a satirical epic and a square celebration, yet the satire backfires.

The attraction of the movie is its friendly, light tone, its affectlessness, and its total lack of humanity. [6 Aug 1984, p.72]

Huston's power as Lilly is astounding... She bites right through the film-noir pulp; the [climactic] scene is paralyzing, and it won't go away.

The film is distinguished by the fine performances of Nicholson and Quaid, and by remarkably well-orchestrated profane dialogue. It's often very funny. It's programmed to wrench your heart, though-it's about the blasted lives of people who discover their humanity too late.

One of the fastest, most exciting melodramas ever made.

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.

Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman's not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. There is, however, great intensity in many of the images.

This is a polished light comedy in the "continental" style -- a sophisticated romantic trifle, with Dietrich more chic and modern than in her von Sternberg pictures.

Hitchcock thought that he erred in this one, and that that explained why the picture wasn't a hit. But he was wrong; this adaptation of Conrad's The Secret Agent may be just about the best of his English thrillers, and if the public didn't respond it wasn't his fault.

Even though the movie retreats into its narrow story line, you come out with a sense of epic horror and the perception that this white master race is retarded.

The movie succeeds by the smooth efficiency of Fred Zinnemann's lean, intelligent direction, and by the superlative casting.

A thin but well-shot suspense melodrama, kept from collapsing by the suggestiveness and intensity that the director, Jacques Tourneur, pours on.

John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, parodying themselves while looking exhausted. When the movie starts, you have the sense of having come in on a late episode of a TV series.

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

One of John Ford's most popular films--but fearfully Irish and green and hearty.

Not bad, but not quite top-grade Bond. A little too much under-water war-ballet.

While other B-budget horror producers were still using gorillas, haunted houses, and disembodied arms, Lewton and the director, Jacques Tourneur, employed suggestion, creepy sound effects, and inventive camera angles, leaving everything to the viewers' fear-filled imagination.

A movie in which 80s glamour is being defined...The three stars seem perfect at what they're doing.

Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.

A competent (often overrated) thriller by John Huston about a group of crooks who plan a jewel robbery and how their characters determine the results.

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

An existential thriller--the most original and shocking French melodrama of the 50s.

The emotion got to many viewers, even though the manipulated suspense and the sentimental softening prevent the film from doing anything like justice to its subject.