Stanley Kauffmann

The most enchanting point about cinematographer Eduardo Serra work here is that he hasn't put Vermeer's painting into the film; he has put the film into Vermeer.

As directors, Harari and De Pelegri have just the right light-fingered glissando touch. Not a moment sags. Their cast relishes and fulfills the tempo.

I don't think that 8 1/2 "says" very much, but it is breathtaking to watch. One doesn't come away from it as from, say, the best Bergman or Renoir-with a continuing, immanent experience; one has to think back to it and remember the effect. But that is easy, for the experience is unforgettable.

All in the cast are competent, and some of the slaughter scenes make us ache, but the overlaid material does not enrich, it impedes.

The performance that comes closest to capturing the Waugh elixir is Fenella Woolgar's as madcapping Miss Runcible, who ultimately commandeers a racing car.

Caouette has opened up a case history vividly, but he has left us without any conclusions, not even with much enlightening empathy. Something more than truth--dare one say "mere truth"?--is needed.

All the talents involved in The Graduate make it soar brightly above its shortcomings and, for reasons given, make it a milestone in American film history. Milestones do not guarantee that everything after them will be better, still they are ineradicable.

One particular bit of luck for this reissue is the fact that Melville's cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, was on hand to help with the restoration of this thirty-five-year-old film. The result is a paradoxical beauty. Very many of the scenes are in sunlight--Melville avoided such facile stuff as shadows for suspense--yet they are chilly. The seasons vary, but the general effect is of a bright winter day that is freezing.

Unusually for a soap-bubble film, Après Vous runs almost two hours and very nearly sustains its length. Five minutes of condensation toward the end would have benefited it. But Salvadori floats everything, hammers nothing, and gets maximum buoyancy out of Camille Bazbaz's jaunty music.

As with much art of our time--music, painting, sculpture, theater--Caché in a certain way affronts us. Its deliberate contravention of our expectations, and not necessarily stodgy expectations, is part of its intent.

We are left finally with a double response: it is hard to know exactly why the film was made, what its emotional and thematic point is, yet we are glad it happened because of Harris's performance.

The one attraction in the picture is DiCaprio's performance: easy yet strong, confident, humorous.

Mamet's real triumph, however, is in his directing. Like every good director, he has "seen" the picture before he made it; and he saw it as a piece with the intimacy and physicality of a play that nonetheless flowed like cinema.

The result, except for the stock action climax, is sharp, fast, bitter. [19 September 1994, p. 38]

The film might be called a moral travelogue. Instead of showing us mosques and tourist spots in beguiling old Istanbul, it follows a couple of ordinary Turkish men in drab surroundings and affirms that they breathe the same doubt-laden air as much of the rest of the world.

The film's authority rests first and finally on the two actors in the leading roles. They are utterly reassuring. [4 August 1997, p. 26]

If we can watch this picture at all, it is because this universally admired person (Eastwood) is in it.

Formally, Boyz is just one more old-time bad-neighborhood picture. Instead of, say, Manhattan's Lower East Side in Prohibition days, it's an LA lower-middle-class black neighborhood afflicted with drugs. And Singleton's control of his picture's flow is much less firm than was the other directors'. [2 Sept 1991]

A comedy that surfs from beginning to end on a wave of high spirits. The tone is young but not juvenile, sexy but not cynical, optimistic but not stupid. [22 April 1996, p.28]

The picture depends completely on those two performances (Whalberg, Forster), and the two actors come through.

Like an old-fashioned theater program, it tells you early on who and what each of its characters is--and so they prove to be, enjoyably. [10 Apr 1995 Pg.30]

Allen is wretched. It is no kind of pleasure to say so, especially with the memory of the good things he has done; but here he simply plunks front and center the fact that he cannot act and never could.

The flaw that separates Scorsese's film into its components is its lack of a crystallized theme.

It contains little that will be new to any informed viewer; yet it fascinates for all of its 140 minutes.

But conventional though the patterns are, the dialogue, in black and Latino lingo, is topically hot and is heated further by contemporary street naturalism, which in fact is less "natural" than consciously theatrical; so the familiarity of the story is disguised by the crackle of the production. [16 May 1988]

Coppola handles her film with very pleasant economy, with a kind of warm precision. Her father, who was one of this picture's producers, can be as proud of her as we are grateful.

The last minutes of the film are exhilarating, but its real triumph is in everything that precedes the ending--the relatively simple lives of the three women up to that point.

What is outstandingly incredible are the high-flown pronouncements, including literary judgments, given suddenly to Costner. They make him sound like a dummy for Shelton the ventriloquist. [1 Aug 1988]