The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.

Way too flabby at 168 minutes, but once this 1963 feature gets going it's good, solid stuff, directed with an unusual lack of rhetoric by John Sturges.

The artificial plotting is all Christie’s, but the film eventually becomes Wilder’s—thanks to a trick ending that dovetails nicely with a characteristic revelation of compassion behind cruelty. His theatrical mise-en-scene—his proscenium framing—serves the material well, as does Charles Laughton’s bombastic portrayal of the defense attorney.

On the whole, enjoyable nonsense.

This delightful 1989 pop-fantasy musical about Valley girls and extraterrestrials gives the talented English director Julien Temple an opportunity to show his stuff in an all-American context. The results are less ambitious and dazzling than his Absolute Beginners, but loads of fun nevertheless: his satirical yet affectionate view of southern California glitz is full of grace and energy.

Harris’s refusal to treat her heroine strictly as role model or bad example makes her portrait a lot livelier and less predictable—as well as more confusing—than the standard genre exercises most reviewers seem to prefer. What’s exciting about this movie is a lot of loose details: frank girl talk about AIDS and birth control, glancing observations about welfare lines and the advantages of a boy with a car over one with subway tokens.

Full of delirious color symbolism and macho cruelties, but not without its humor as well. The story is pure dime-store allegory, but the director/star knows his western cliches and uses them like a master.

Unaccountably, it works.

With Hurd Hatfield memorably playing the title part, the 1945 film also includes juicy performances by George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Donna Reed. Deeper and creepier (that is to say, better) than anything turned out by Merchant-Ivory, this is both very Hollywood and very serious in a manner calculated to confound the “Hey, it’s only a movie!” crowd.

Sanitized it may well be, but agonizing nonetheless—it's a domestic squabble that somehow touches history.

What comes across is a fascinating fetishist delirium, where memories of remote war movies get recycled into something that's alternately creepy and beautiful.

One of the better Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn comedies—not so much for the screenplay by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, which lacks the bite and sophistication of Adam's Rib, as for the relaxed and graceful interplay of the stars.

Gory, imaginative, wildly melodramatic—good fun.

One emerges from this film not only with a new vocabulary and a fresh way of viewing the straight world but with a bracing object lesson in understanding what society “role models” are all about.

Sidney Kingsley's Broadway hit, modeled a little too clearly on Greek tragedy, becomes a solid film d'art under William Wyler's supple, impersonal direction.

Rossellini left this project before it was finished, and it was edited and released a few years later without his approval—but it still comes across as a remarkably suggestive fable.

The prototype for every saga of the slammer to come, starring Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, and Robert Montgomery. Beery is particularly good in his toughest tough-guy role.

Hitchcock was still marking out his territory at this point, and the film is heavy and vague around the edges. But it remains a crucial insight into the development of one of the cinema’s greatest artists, and so, essential viewing.

The animation seeks to dazzle, but with a self-consciousness that's relatively new to the Disney studio. The results are fun and fast moving, but far from sublime.

George Cukor carefully avoids the obvious effects in telling this story of a husband (Charles Boyer) attempting to drive his wife (Ingrid Bergman) insane; instead, this 1944 film is one of the few psychological thrillers that is genuinely psychological, depending on subtle clues—a gesture, an intonation—to thought and character.

Shot in and around the town of Bradford in long, loping takes, this sprightly comedy, adapted by Andrea Dunbar from her own play, has some of the energy that one associates with the better exploitation films that used to be produced by Roger Corman.

A melancholy character study of romantic delirium and Napoleonic ambition with a nice sense of nuance, this is much more coherent than the general run of blockbusters.

Kitano has his problems; for instance, he hasn't quite figured out how to create fully dimensional, interesting women. But at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, his pictures carry a charge of originality.

Siegel avoids the cliches of the butterflies-and-brotherhood school (cf All Quiet on the Western Front), opting instead for a study of the brutalizing power of sanctioned violence.

Robert Aldrich dissects the underlying ideas with just enough craft and thoughtfulness to make the implications of this gritty 1966 war drama unsettling in not entirely constructive ways.

Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it.

The sexual tensions build slowly and subtly, and when they explode into violence, it seems to be the desired result.

Jules Dassin wasn't a bad director before he went to Europe and caught a bad case of Art (He Who Must Die), and this 1947 prison picture, done in the gritty late-40s documentary style, is one of his best efforts.