Pauline Kael

The film holds you, in a suffocating way. Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It's all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don't care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination.

Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.

Irresistibly enjoyable.

Despite its peculiar overtones of humor, this is one of the most frightening movies ever made.

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

Irvin Kershner, who directed this one, is a master of visual flow, and, joining his own kinks and obsessions to Lucas's, he gave Empire a splendiferousness that may even have transcended what Lucas had in mind...The characters in this fairy-tale cliff-hanger show more depth of feeling than they had in the first film, and the music - John Williams' variations on the Star Wars theme - seems to saturate and enrich the intensely clear images. Scenes linger in the mind.

Jewison has given it an atmosphere that recalls his crack 1967 comedy-mystery In the Heat of the Night, and he has also given it a beautiful sense of pace, and brought out all the humor he can find.

A romantic adolescent boy’s view of friendship.

There's a basic flaw in Malick's method: he has perceived the movie--he's done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor rising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there's nothing left to respond to. [18 March 1974, p.135]

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.

It takes place in the TV land of predictability -- that plain of dowdy realism where a boy finds his manhood by developing the courage to stick to his principles and stand up to his father.

Eastwood's gun power makes him the hero of a totally nihilistic dream world. Ted Post's direction is mediocre; the script by John Milius and Michael Cimino is cheaply effective.

Naive yet powerful.

The picture doesn't come together and much of it is cluttered, squawky, and eerily unfunny. But there are lovely moments --especially when Olive is loping along or singing, and when she and Popeye are gazing adoringly at the foundling Swee'Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt).

The director, Rouben Mamoulian, rather overdoes the pseudo-science at the beginning, but at some levels this story seems to work in every version, and this one, set in a starched mid-Victorian environment, suggests the lust that has to come out--and the attraction of the gutter.

They should never have allowed the audience so much time to think about what's going on: the short play turns into a ludicrous, lumbering horror movie.

This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood's leopard-skin past--it's narrated by a corpse-- is almost too clever, yet it's at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequences dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood.

Clarke's script, Charles Crichton's direction, and Georges Auric's music contribute to what is probably the most nearly perfect fubsy comedy of all time. It's a minor classic, a charmer.

Unimaginative Bond picture that is often noisy when it means to be exciting.

It's extremely uneven--there are slick and sentimental passages and some are impenetrable. But there are also emotional revelations and there's a superb sequence--almost an epiphany--when the dying man, who has accomplished what he hoped to, sits in a swing in the snow and hums a little song.

The movie could be every errant husband's self-justifying fantasy. (And the way Burstyn overacts, a man would have to be a saint to have stayed with her so long.) Directed by Bud Yorkin, from a script by Colin Welland, the picture is like a sermon on the therapeutic value of adultery, divorce, and remarriage, given by a minister who learned all he knows from watching TV.

Caine brings out the gusto in Naughton's dialogue and despite the obvious weaknesses in the film (the gratuitous "cinematic" barroom brawl, the clumsy witnessing of the christening, the symbolism of the dog), he keeps the viewer absorbed in Alfie, the cold-hearted sexual hotshot, and his self-exculpatory line of reasoning.

The chemistry is great, but the plot and tone are wobbly.

It’s plain and uncondescending in its re-creation of what it means to be a high-school athlete, of what a country dance hall is like, of the necking in cars and movie houses, and of the desolation that follows high-school graduation.

It was a Broadway musical comedy, slightly adapted, and filmed in Astoria--and it looks stagey. But the film is too joyous for cavilling.

This sinister black comedy of murder accelerates until it becomes a grotesque fantasy of murder. The actors seem to be having a boisterous good time getting themselves knocked off.

This is an impersonal and rather junky piece of moviemaking. It's packed with torture scenes, and it bangs away at you. And every time there's a possibility of a dramatic climax - a chance to engage the audience emotionally with something awesome - the director Richard Marquand trashes it.

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