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.