Pauline Kael

An almost perfect visual equivalent of the Dashiell Hammett thriller...It is (and this is rare in American films) a work of entertainment that is yet so skillfully constructed that after many years and many viewings it has the same brittle explosiveness - and even some of the same surprise - that it had in its first run.

It's intensely enjoyable--in some ways the best of Hitchcock's American films.

This lyrical tragicomedy is perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film.

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

It's genuinely funny, yet it's also scary, especially for young women: it plays on their paranoid vulnerabilities... Mia Farrow is enchanting in her fragility: she's just about perfect for her role.

The Orson Welles film is generally considered the greatest American film of the sound period, and it may be more fun than any other great movie.

One of the greatest of all movies...Falconetti's Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film.

One of the strongest of all American movies...The picture is emotionally memorable, though - it has a powerful cumulative effect; when it's over you know you've seen something.

D.W. Griffith's epic celebration of the potentialities of the film medium--perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history.

An inspired piece of casting brought Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn together. This is a comedy, a love story, and a tale of adventure, and it is one of the most charming and entertaining movies ever made.

Ersatz art of a very high grade, and one of the most enjoyable movies ever made.

The best scary-funny movie since "Jaws" - a teasing, terrifying, lyrical shocker, directed by Brian De Palma, who has the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies. Pale, gravel-voiced Sissy Spacek gives a classic chameleon performance as a repressed high-school senior.

A magically powerful film.

Elliptical, full of wit and radiance, this is the best movie ever made about what most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period (though the film begins much earlier).

There is so much displacement of the usual movie conventions that we don't have the time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically. One of the rare Japanese films that is both great and funny to American audiences.

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

A frivolous masterpiece. Like Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, and of high artifice and pratfalls.

Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since “The Manchurian Candidate.” The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.

This suave, amusing spy melodrama is directed with so sure a touch that the suspense is charged with wit; it's one of the three or four best things Hitchcock ever did.

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

Elia Kazan’s direction is often stagy, and the sets and the arrangement of actors are frequently too transparently “worked out,” but who cares when you’re looking at two of the greatest performances ever put on film and listening to some of the finest dialogue ever written by an American?

Close to perfection--one of the most beautifully acted and paced romantic comedies ever made in this country.

The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film. Visually, Part II is far more completely beautiful than the fist, just as it's thematically richer, more shadowed, fuller.

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.

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the charac­ters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emo­tional range that is dizzyingly sensual.

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

A wonderful movie...It isn't remarkable visually, but features some of the best young actors in the country.

Extraordinarily sweet and graceful comedy.