Richard Schickel

Kubrick’s remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest, funniest movie of the post-war era.

It is a perfect little masterpiece of high camp, not untouched by pity, terror and the desire to satirize boy-girl romances.

One of the most wholly original American movies ever made.

The filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious.

It is hard to think of another film more tightly autobiographical than this one. It's even harder to think of other films that build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and disparate incidents.

Caught in the movie's grip, you are simply hypnotized by the damned thing.

A movie of shadows and half lights, the best approximation of the old black-and-white noir look anyone has yet managed on color stock.

There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They will, if they have any sense, simply cherish it.

Along with the high comedy, this determined insistence on the gory stupidity of ancient but still potent fancy is what holds the film together. Grail is as funny as a movie can get, but it is also a tough-minded picture — as outraged about the human propensity for violence as it is outrageous in its attack on that propensity.

A solemn, subtly structured, beautifully acted and ultimately hypnotic movie.

If the movie does not have that almighty precious thing, at least it had the wit to look for it in the right place. Moviegoers seeking a grand yet edifying entertainment, right-stuffed with what Kaufman calls "seriousness of subject matter and a wild humor that comes out of left field," now know where to look too.

A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.

There is something arresting about it too. The damned thing keeps gnawing at your mind -- if only for its almost perfect lack of conventional sentiment. Or movieness.

This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations — not fully realized — to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him.

Prepare to be riveted: No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson's first film, is without question the most important movie you are likely to see this year.

This year's miracle is called Tootsie. It is not just the best comedy of the year; it is popular art on the way to becoming cultural artifact.

You'll have to seek it out in its limited release, but no current movie is more worth the effort.

Pixar's improved computer animation is up to all the demands of this excellent adventure.

Reimagined instead of recycled, an adaptation of a '60s old TV show emerges as a first-rate thriller.

What we come to care most about in writer-director Joshua Marston's film is how his heroine achieves the state promised by his title, Maria Full of Grace. Our emotional investment in her derives primarily from the astonishing performance of Moreno, 23.

For all its brave beginnings and real achievements--its assault on western mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected locale--Brokeback Mountain finally fails to fully engage our emotions.

An often deft, frequently droll little movie.

Al Pacino gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face.

Carrie's ultimate triumph is spectacular beyond anything one is used to in this antique genre. Brian De Palma's sure and powerfully individual style, blending romance, darkish satirical humor and suspenseful spookiness, transforms what could have been dreary stuff. From its first shot, Carrie catches the mind, energetically shakes it and refuses to let go even after the end credits have rolled.

By giving his movie a very effective realistic look, by helping his actors to shape strongly believable performances, even when they are doing implausible things, Benton lends credence to these inspirational fibs.

It is, like quite a few Lumet pictures, rather small in scale, easy to overlook. But I think it is time to gather around a director who has embraced his octogenarian bleakness and sing his praises. Ultimately, I think you'll laugh a lot at what he has wrought here -- but only well after the movie is over and the full scale of its perversity settles into your bones.

Raiders of the Lost Ark has it all—or, anyway, more than enough to transport moviegoers back to the dazzling, thrill-sated matinee idyls of old. It is surely the best two hours of pure entertainment anyone is going to find in the summer of '81.