Pauline Kael

Martin and Tomlin are both uninhibited physical comics. They tune in to each other's timing the way lovers do in life, only more so.

The film errs in many ways, and at times the editing seems glaringly poor, but Olivier's performance gives it venomous excitement.

It's an idiosyncratic film, it's cuckoo--an old man's film (partly directed from a wheelchair)--but it's very likable.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Frank Sinatra’s performance is pure gold, but the director, Otto Preminger, goes for sensationalism; the film is effective, but in a garish, hyperbolic, and dated way.

One of M-G-M's powerhouse moralizing "family" entertainments, it's beefy and rousing, with almost guaranteed tears and laughter for children.

What the play was supposed to be about -- which was dim enough in the original -- is even more obscure in the script that he and Richard Brooks (then a screenwriter) prepared, but the movie is so confidently and entertainingly directed that nobody is likely to complain.

This adaptation of one of the S.E. Hinton novels that became favorites of high-school kids in the 70s has an amiable, unforced good humor that takes the curse off the film's look and even off its everything-but-the-bloodhounds plot. The earnest naivete of this movie has its own kind of emotional fairy-tale magic.

Like Ford's other large-scale, elegiac Westerns of this period, it's not a plain action movie but a pictorial film with slow spots and great set pieces.

The film is said to be honest and about real people, and it affects some viewers very powerfully.

Hudson and Wyman are hardly an electric combination, but this Ross Hunter production is made with so much symbolism that some people actually see it as allegorical.

The theme is richly comic, and the film is great fun, even though it sacrifices Serpico's story--one of the rare hopeful stories of the time--for a cynical, downbeat finish.

The central conceit of glorifying progress and moral uplift in a musical comedy set in New Mexico in the 1880s is certainly a strange one, but it worked out surprisingly well--though the charm is mostly heavy.

This Freudian gangster picture, directed by Raoul Walsh, is very obvious, and it's so primitive and outrageous in its flamboyance that it seems to have been made much earlier than it was. But this flamboyance is also what makes some of its scenes stay with you.

The whole archaic big musical circus here surrounds a Happening -- Barbra Streisand -- and it's all worth seeing in order to see her.

The best scenes--especially an assassination attempt at Royal Albert Hall--are stunning, but Hitchcock seems sloppily unconcerned about the unconvincing material in between the tricks and jokes.

This muckraking melodrama has considerable power and some strong performances. The script, by W.D. Richter, has offhand dialogue with a warm, funny edge.

Tyson's performance and Korty's tact are more than enough to compensate for the flaws.

There's always something bubbling inside Arthur--the booze just adds to his natural fizz. This was the only film directed by Steve Gordon (who also wrote the script); he was a long way from being able to do with images what he could do with words, but there are some inspired bits and his work has a friendly spirit.

Sturges is more at home in slapstick irony (as in The Lady Eve, earlier in '41) than in the mixed tones of this comedy-melodrama, but it's a memorable film nevertheless.

A funky, buoyant farce. The picture doesn't have the dirt or meanness or malice to make you explode with laughter, but it's consistently enjoyable.

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]

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.

The action is stagey, but there's certainly enough going on.