Pauline Kael

The director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, has his own primitivism: he doesn't seem to have discovered crosscutting yet. What's fun in the movie is the makeup, and the way that the faces of the three warriors are simian and yet attractive; the 60s have made the ape look seem hip.

George Cukor directed--beautifully. It's as close to perfect as you'd want it to be.

The picture draws out the obvious and turns itself into a classic. [26 June 1989]

Screenwriter Oliver Stone and the director, Alan Parker, have subjected their Billy (Brad Davis) to the most photogenic sadomasochistic brutalization that they could dream up. The film is like a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin. It rushes from torment to torment, treating Billy's ordeals hyponotically in soft colors -- muted squalor -- with a disco beat in the background.

Good-natured, full of verbal-visual jokes, and surprisingly entertaining, though the love is less impressive than the music.

Rapturous fun.

There are agreeable overtones of Mark Twain tall tales in this good-humored, though uneven, version of the paradoxical life of Judge Roy Bean, with Walter Brennan in the part.

What happened to the Kubrick who used to slip in sly, subtle jokes and little editing tricks? This may be his worst movie. He probably believes he's numbing us by the power of his vision, but he's actually numbing us by its emptiness. [13 July 1987, p.75]

Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.

The movie doesn't have Dahl's narrative confidence and it goes in for a little sweetening, but it has major compensations.

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

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

A very pleasurable surprise. Lighted by Freddie Francis, this film is perhaps the most beautiful example of black-and-white cinematography in about 15 years.

The aviation footage is still something to see, with great shots of zeppelin warfare...But the First World War story, involving two brothers...is plain awful.

The movie is ungainly – you can almost see the chalk marks it's not hitting. But it has a loose, likable shabbiness. [19 Oct 1987, p.110]

The picture is a pile of poetic mush set in some doom-laden, vaguely universal city of the past and/or the future.

It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it's like a well-cared for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good, until the last half hour or so.

Yet, with all the obvious ingredients for success, Spellbound is a disaster.

The picture is a piece of technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment; basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races.

A methodical, pointlessly grueling movie.