Pauline Kael

No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra can - but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.

After the almost incredible lack of depth of the first half-hour, the film begins to acquire a fascination because of its total superficiality--it becomes something resembling Minimal art.

Foote can't make poetry out of material as laundered and denatured as what he comes up with here. The movie is intended to by a hymn, but all he and Masterson can do is give some of the characters a limp, anesthetized grace.

Jane Fonda in possibly her finest dramatic performance, as Bree, an intelligent, high-bracket call girl, in Alan J. Pakula's murder-melodrama.

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.

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

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.

James Stewart is charming and even a little bit sexy as the mild-mannered Destry.

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.

Extraordinarily simple, yet deeply, emotionally rich.

This baseball weeper was very clumsily directed by John Hancock; everything stops dead for the dialogue scenes.

If you fed the earlier gangster movies into a machine and made a prototype, you'd come up with this picture.

It has some silly, yet irresistibly wonderful examples of Busby Berkeley's pinwheel choreography.

It's a pity the film, directed by Fred Wilcox, didn't lift some of Shakespeare's dialogue: it's hard to believe you're in the heavens when the diction of the hero (Leslie Nielsen) and his spaceshipmates flattens you down to Kansas.

Williams acts all over the place, yet the movie - 2 hours and 47 minutes of documentary seriousness - is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what's going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends...Things don't begin to come together until you're heading into the third hour.

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.

The title is accurate: this is a crudely powerful prison picture.

A true nightmare.

A good picture, even if the theme music is "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."

So calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness. What makes the movie unusual is the metallic elegance and the singleminded proficiency with which it adheres its sadism-for-the-connoisseur formula.

Bunuel's daring is fully apparent.

Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It's far from a bad movie, but it doesn't quite click together, either. The director doesn't shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.

It's a tenderhearted feminist picture.

Wild, marvelously enjoyable comedy, adapted from Nabokov's novel.

This is one of the most entertaining science-fiction fantasies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Michael Ritchie's direction is highly variable in quality, but he's a whiz at catching details of frazzled behaviour.

The script has first-rate, hardheaded, precise, sometimes funny dialogue, but it errs in bringing this girl too much to the center. Dramatically, the film lacks snap; there isn't enough tension in the way Max destroys his freedom, and so the story drags--it seems to have nowhere to go but down.

Most of the players give impossibly bad performances—they chew up the camera. But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, “stars” were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.