William Friedkin directs the adaptation of Matt Crowley's off-Broadway play about a group of gay men in Manhattan speaking increasingly frankly as a birthday party wears on. Sufficiently effective that you wonder what Friedkin was thinking with Cruising. [09 Nov 2008, p.N16]

When you become a megastar like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you must expect your past to jump up and bite you - especially if you've made a stinker like this one. A great rental for frat parties, this Manhattan melodrama features Zeus sending Arnold, as Hercules, to present-day New York. [06 Dec 1991, p.62]

Hollywood political thrillers have absorbed this movie's you-are-there filmmaking grammar. Rarely have they re-created its fire.

Franco Zeffirelli's reputation as a popularizer of Shakespeare stems from this gusty swirl of a 1968 production built around - and aimed at - teens. The uncomprehending looks on the faces of Leonard Whiting's Romeo and Olivia Hussey's Juliet only increase the film's demographic pull, as poetry is replaced with prettiness. [18 Jan 1991, p.32p]

The one aspect of the original Producers that still stuns is the roaring, over-the-top, in-your-face thereness of its two lead performances.

Gorgeously stoic art film.

The Graduate is not subtle in its writing off of the parental generation as hopelessly corrupt. [Review of re-release]

Overlooked on its initial release in 1967, Huston's adaptation of Carson McCullers's novel still feels unsettling and cutting-edge nearly 40 years later. [28 Sep 2006, p.26]

Remains worth seeing as an achingly nostalgic farewell to youthful idealism, tinged with a kind of loving contempt.

To see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't.

In a crisply restored print, it's as joyous as ever. We loved them - yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can love them all over again.

The phone scene, in which he's on the hot line to his Russian counterpart, is a classic of prevarication, a masterpiece of nothingspeak in the face of disaster. [28 Oct 1994, p.48]

There is not only artistry in the development of the story - there is beauty, sympathy and emotional appeal in almost every scene.

Cleo from 5 to 7, a sort of combination between realism and avant-garde imagination, is the kind of film that young people, learning to appreciate foreign-made pictures, will find stimulating. [15 Feb 1963, p.8]

The film's look makes a divine accessory for its music, which Miles Davis composed. There's not even 20 minutes of it in the film, yet it still defines the atmosphere, transforming a crime yarn into a bebop noir.

Freshly viewed, the movie's melancholy seems to fit uncannily well in the moment we find ourselves now. In the film there are mentions of nuclear annihilation and worries that heedless lust and wanton partying could bring Rome a second fall.

Breathless is not an antique or a classic. It is still a new film, because it makes you feel cinema is still new. [18 Nov 2007, p.N9]

Spartacus stands up handsomely. At times it's even stirring, as in Woody Strode's performance as the African gladiator who, in sparing Spartacus' life, opens his eyes. Spartacus is one of Hollywood's great comic strips. [3 May 1991, p.45]

Certainly none of Olivier's other contemporary film characters matches Archie's resonances. We're lucky to still have The Entertainer. [04 Aug 1989, p.41]

Laugh if you want at Imitation of Life or any of Sirk’s primal cinematic operas. Although if you can laugh at the film’s end, when Mahalia Jackson herself sings “Trouble of the World,” I can’t help you. Just understand that when you laugh, you’re really laughing at yourself, and you’re laughing to keep from crying.

The most fascinatingly self-revelatory Hitchcock film of all...Vertigo is so dreamy, so druggy, that when it does actually introduce a dream scene, it seems excessive, jarring. And if Hitchcock was able to pick up on Stewart's capacity for relentlessness, he also exploited that side of Stewart's persona that told America it was watching a decent, homespun, plain-spoken guy. Stewart's character gets away with telling Novak who and what to be because he is able to convince us he is, at bottom, an innocent himself - and a victim. [25 Oct 1996, p.C10]

The greatest B-movie ever made. [Director's Cut; 18 Sept 1998, p.D5]

Moves like hot mercury, and it draws a viewer so thoroughly into its world that real life can seem thick and dull when the lights come up.

Laurence Olivier gives the textbook course on Shakespearean villainy as crown-stealing schemer Richard. Considered by many to be Olivier's best take on the Bard. [22 Feb 2004]

Beneath its relentlessly decorous surface, "There's Always Tomorrow" is an Eisenhower-era horror story, starring America as a void with sharp teeth. [25 May 1990, p.50p]

Endearing, if not an A-list classic. [25 Sep 2005]

Marty is one of those films that appear every few years or so -- a picture so sensitively acted, so tenderly written, so human in its appeal, that it has the utmost distinction, no matter what kind of audience is in the theatre. [04 Aug 1955, p.21]

The chance to watch a four-star classic the way it was meant to be seen -- fresh print, big screen -- is so rare as to be worth the trip.

Lovers of science-fiction pictures will certainly go home satisfied. [18 Jun 1954, p.15]

This one is a tensely clammy screw-tightener about an ex-con (Gene Nelson) pressured to become part of a bank heist. No cop ever chewed a toothpick better than Sterling Hayden does here. [07 Jan 1996, p.C31]

So clear-eyed and three-dimensional that it makes the recent ''Pearl Harbor'' look like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Aspects of the film have dated, but in the important things it's more mature than anything proposed lately by modern Hollywood.

The film itself is a classic of romantic wish fulfillment, exactly the sort of beautiful lie that Hollywood specialized in. [Review of re-release]

Shane symbolized America during a time when the country was struggling to evolve from a nation of rugged individualism into a country of community and cooperation. [20 Aug 2000]

Rashomon truly is a warhorse of US art-house cinema, and by any yardstick it's the film that opened the door for Asian filmmaking in this country. [23 Apr 2010, p.12]

What makes A Streetcar Named Desire rewarding to watch today, especially on a big screen, is the same thing that made it so cherishable in the first place - Williams' heartbreaking lyricism, the titanic performances by Vivien Leigh's Blanche and Marlon Brando's Stanley, and Williams' most perfect realization of his ongoing central theme - the extermination of sensitivity and refinement by the brutes and carnivores of the world. [Director's Cut; 18 Feb 1994, p.37]

Smashing drama of the old-fashioned kind, plus elegant perceptive characterization of the modern school, combined to make Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest films of the decade. [22 Sep 1950, p.12]

This tight, tense black-and-white Anthony Mann film revived Westerns and kept Jimmy Stewart's career alive during the actor's Korean War stint. [19 Apr 1991, p.46]

Krasker’s camera reveals a dank, matte, defeated city — so dully vivid as to be a character unto itself — except that this Vienna becomes something altogether different seen at night or underground. In that velvety shadowscape, even rubble and sewage look glamorous.

The Paradine Case is more than just a big and elegant whodunit. It has smart, penetrating, clever characterization and Mr. Hitchcock has used his unexcelled craftsmanship to show the interplay of motive and mood, the power and weakness of love, the courage and cowardice of mankind. [15 May 1948, p.12]

Touching Academy Award winner that remains one of the best films ever made about returning veterans. The sterling cast includes Fredric March, Myrna Loy and Harold Russell. It's touching without being silly, and it has aged very well. [04 Jul 1989, p.23]

What gives the film its tension, apart from Hitchcock's masterly manipulation of suspense as he sends them into a wine cellar used to conceal uranium, is his way of connecting with Bergman's masochism and Grant's stoniness as they circle one another, mutually attracted but holding back. [03 Apr 1992, p.94]

A fascinating, grim, exciting motion picture, based on the current popular interest in psychiatry, and illustrating a new method of crime detection. [25 Jan 1946, p.17]

"Dead" isn't a horror film but a study of human character under pressure, with Karloff's flawed, imperious General Pherides torn between rationalism and a homicidal belief in elder gods. [23 Mar 2014, p.N]

The Phantom of the Opera was never a brilliant movie, but it remains great, ghoulish fun, with Chaney tiptoeing the line between sympathy and shudders.

Hitchcock at his cynical best. [18 Sept 1988, p.87]

It's nearly over the top in the compassion department, but Random Harvest nevertheless has its satisfactions. [16 Oct 1992, p.38]

As a piece of nostalgia, "Mrs. Miniver" will carry you into a world gone by when war movies promoted community and not fragmentation. [16 Oct 1992, p.38]

Walt Disney meets classical music with a film that didn't become famous until it was re-released in the '60s and became the ultimate drug film for folks fond of LSD. It is a wonderful animation trip for adults but children might be a bit bored by the lack of story and long running time. Treat it like MTV - a few bits here and there instead of one sitting. [01 Nov 1991, p.35]

The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun. [23 Feb 2007, p.D10]

The RKO Swiss Family Robinson isn't considered a lost classic — a lost pretty-good-movie is more like it — but the fact that Disney is finally releasing a movie they bought specifically to sit on is unexpected and welcome. [20 Oct 2019, p.N1]

Written by Preston Sturges and directed by the great Mitchell Leisen, it's both sexy and touching. [19 Dec 2007, p.F6]

One of the great newspaper comedies. [24 Nov 1989, p.112p]

A tremendously decorative picture. [13 Apr 1936, p.21]

The Story of Louis Pasteur dates from the golden age of Hollywood biofilm, marked by conviction and craftsmanship. [13 Dec 1991, p.60]

It's loud, abrasive, and as soothing as a slug of battery acid. This crackling 1933 satire directed by Victor Fleming skewers the Hollywood star system with saber-sharp precision. [23 Nov 2006, p.5]

Here's the third classic you'd better know if you're going to know anything about American gangster movies. This one is powered by Paul Muni's thinly disguised and daringly simian take on Al Capone. [01 Nov 1991, p.35]

One of the films in the running as Charlie Chaplin's funniest and most adroitly balanced between comedy and pathos. [7 Sept 1990]