Pauline Kael

Cheesy low farce, with Danny DeVito as a thieving millionaire who wants to kill his heiress wife (Bette Miler) and is overjoyed when she's kidnapped.

Bergman is literally ravishing in what is probably her sexiest performance. Great trash, great fun.

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.

Robert Wise, who made this expensive version of the Michael Crichton novel, having chosen a fanatically realistic documentary style, has failed to solve the dramatic problems in the original story. The suspense is strong, but not pleasurable.

It's a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky, but it's genuinely sparkling.

It's a candied Mean Streets, evenly and impersonally directed by Stuart Rosenberg. It has no temperament -- it doesn't even have any get-up-and-go. But Patrick supplies colorful "ethnic" dialogue, and the actors run with it.

It's a graceful picture, but it dawdles, and Stephens doesn't seem to have the star presence that Holmes requires.

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.

It would be fun to be able to dismiss this as undoubtedly the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh, but it also happens to be one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made.

The movie is slight and vapid, with the consistency of watery jello...It isn't about teenagers – it's actually closer to being a pre-teen's idea of what it will be like to be a teenager. [7 Apr 1996, p.91]

A rich-meets-rich picture, and worse than one imagines. Al Pacino gives a torpid performance as a spiritually depleted Grand Prix racing-car driver who falls in love with a well-heeled free spirit (Marthe Keller), a metaphysical kook.

The Marx Brothers in their greatest movie.

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.

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

Though not as cleverly original as "Strangers on a Train", or as cleverly sexy as "Notorious", this is one of Hitchcock's most entertaining American thrillers.

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

One of the dreariest films in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy series; it has a metallic flavor.

The re-creations of the Castles' dances are painstakingly authentic, and most of them are fun to watch, but the movie is cursed with the dullness of big bios--especially those produced when some of the key figures are alive.

Standard gory imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt.

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

A huge, mawkish, trite circus movie directed by Cecil B. De Mille in a neo-Biblical style.

But the movie is in a stupor; everything is internalized. Duvall is locked in, and De Niro is in his chameleon trance - he seems flaccid, preoccupied...You have to put up a struggle to get anything out of this picture.

Morton DaCosta, who had also directed the stage version, isn't comfortable with the camera, and the material seems too literal, too practical, too set. But the star, Robert Preston, has a few minutes of fast patter--conmanship set to music, that constitute one of the high points in the history of American musicals.

Hardly even a shadow; Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Asta go through their paces for the fourth time, but the jauntiness is gone.

Directed by James Fargo, this third in the series doesn't have the savvy to be as sadistic as its predecessors; it's just limp.

The subject - the romantic life of an American Communist - may be daring, but the moviemaking is extremely traditional, with Beatty playing a man who dies for an ideal. It's rather a sad movie, because it isn't really very good.

The reputation of this John Ford Western is undeservedly high: it's a heavy-spirited piece of nostalgia. John Wayne is in his flamboyant element, but James Stewart is too old for the role of an idealistic young Eastern lawyer who is robbed on the way West, goes to work in the town of Shinbone as a dishwasher, and learns about Western life.

The movie is a form of hysterical, rabble-rousing pulp, yet it isn't involving; it doesn't have the propulsion of good pulp storytelling.