A funny screen version of a very funny (if not very significant) Broadway comedy. It does well as an evening's entertainment.

Sellers works. He develops a character and plays it, for better or worse, for the whole movie.

Planet of the Apes is much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don't get in the way. If you only condescend to see an adventure thriller on rare occasions, condescend this time. You have nothing to lower but your brow.

Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape...Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

This is one of the funniest movies ever made. To see it now is to understand that. To see it for the first time in 1968, when I did, was to witness audacity so liberating that not even "There's Something About Mary" rivals it.

The plot is completely confused, and kids, who are much better at these things than adults, will enjoy its twists and turns. Ustinov is fine as the rum swilling, yo-ho-hoing Blackbeard, and there are several good scenes as he invisibly meddles with the big track meet. Jones and Miss Pleshette are amusing without being insufferably sweet.

The tension we need to draw us into the story isn't there; things move at too leisurely a pace, and the movie, like the Jimmy Stewart hero, has to be dragged into the excitement against its will.

The funniest American comedy of the year.

What we have here is a dirty soap opera. It is dirty because it intends to be, but it is a soap opera only by default.

In films of this sort, too often the camera records the fun instead of joining in it. However, that is certainly not the case in this magnificently photographed, intelligent, very funny film.

Samurai Rebellion can be seen as a statement against the conformity that remained central in Japanese life long after this period. It is the story of three people who learn to become individuals.

Nobody laughed. One or two people cried, and a lady behind me dropped a bag of M&Ms which rolled under the seats, and a guy on the center aisle sneezed at 43 minutes past the hour. But that was about all the action.

Luke is the first Newman character to understand himself well enough to tell us to shove off. He's through risking his neck to make us happy. With this film, Newman completes a cycle of five films over six years, and together they have something to say about the current status of heroism. But Cool Hand Luke does draw together threads from the earlier movies, especially Hombre, and it is a tough, honest film with backbone.

The memory of the Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster performances in "Gunfight" haunts the sequel like a ghost, but Hour of the Gun pretty much manages to stand on its own.

Miss Hepburn is perhaps too simple and trusting, and Alan Arkin (as a sadistic killer) is not particularly convincing in an exaggerated performance. But there are some nice, juicy passages of terror, and after a slow start the plot does seduce you.

Camelot, then, is exactly what we were promised: ornate, visually beautiful, romantic and staged as the most lavish production in the history of the Hollywood musical. If that's what you like, you'll like it. I'll just crouch in the corner here and gnaw my haunch of beef and send the wench to fetch more ale.

The leading men are successful. Alan Bates, in a change of pace, is the loyal shepherd. Terence Stamp is a suitably vile Sgt. Troy, and Peter Finch makes Boldwood strong and honorable in his love for Bathsheba. Miss Christie, however, is too sweet and superficial, and so is the film.

Reflections is a better film than we had any right to expect. It follows the McCullers story faithfully and without compromise. The performances are superb.

As suspense thrillers go Point Blank is pretty good.

Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.

There are some nice, amusing scenes, especially when one of the dozen (Donald Sutherland) pretends to be a general and inspects some troops. In fact, right up to the last scene the movie is amusing, well paced, intelligent.

Connery labors mightily. There is still the same Bond grin, still the cool humor under fire, still the slight element of satire. But when he puts on his cute little helmet and is strapped into his helicopter, somehow the whole illusion falls apart and what we're left with is a million-dollar playpen in which everything works but nothing does anything.

El Dorado is a tightly directed, humorous, altogether successful Western, turned out almost effortlessly, it would seem, by three old pros: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and director Howard Hawks.

The plot has holes big enough to drive a Harley-Davidson through. But the film is better than it might have been, and better than it had to be. Take it on its own terms and you might find it interesting.

The War Wagon is that comparative rarity, a Western filmed with quiet good humor.

If The Way West does not wholly succeed as drama, it is at least a well-made and wholly professional Hollywood Western. Western fans, myself included, might enjoy it for that alone. Widmark and Mitchum are excellent in roles unusual for them and Douglas, as always, is a seasoned old hand.

The movie is like a low-rent version of the rock concert documentaries that would follow.

Here is a gloriously greasy, sweaty, hairy, bloody and violent Western. It is delicious.

At one time or another, Casino Royale undoubtedly had a shooting schedule, a script and a plot. If any one of the three ever turns up, it might be the making of a good movie.

A Hollywood-style romance between beautiful people, and an honest story about recognizable human beings.

You wouldn't think Hope and Jonathan Winters, those masters of timing, could possibly make a dull and sloppy comedy, but they did, and their method is instructive.

Ritt directs with a steady hand, and the dialog by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Flank bears listening to. It's intelligent, and has a certain grace as well.

A masterpiece.

Persona is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries.

Whether there was a murder isn't the point. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion.

Coppola has fun directing, and his film is filled with sight jokes, high-spirited performances and a lively sound track by the Lovin' Spoonful.

Pleasence, in a role that requires him to run sideways most of the time with his head at a crooked angle, is hilarious and frightening as a man going mad, and the film has an eerie appeal.

Godard works with a bright style and a sense of humor and his pictures leave a cumulative impression. (Review of Original Release)

Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does.

Shunning the tons of equipment ordinarily taken along on location, Brown used only what he could carry. The beautiful photography he brought home almost makes you wonder if Hollywood hasn't been trying too hard.

The film itself remains pure fantasy. Sure, it's nice to think you could outrun half a dozen hand-picked African warriors simply because you'd been to college and read Thoreau, but the truth is they'd nail you before you got across the river and into the trees.

So, yes, it's soppy and manipulative and mushy. But that train looks real enough to ride.

What attracts audiences is not sex and not really violence, either, but a Pop Art fantasy image of powerful women, filmed with high energy and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal play more or less the same characters. Without the bras, of course.

Of all the Bonds, Goldfinger is the best, and can stand as a surrogate for the others. If it is not a great film, it is a great entertainment, and contains all the elements of the Bond formula that would work again and again.

What distinguishes My Fair Lady above all is that it actually says something. It says it in a film of pointed words, unforgettable music and glorious images, but it says it.

No movie has had a greater impact on the way people looked. The music of course is immortal.

Harakiri is a film reflecting situational ethics, in which the better you know a man the more deeply you understand his motives.

Ozu is one of the greatest artists to ever make a film. This was his last one.

Seen after 30 years, Dr. Strangelove seems remarkably fresh and undated - a clear-eyed, irreverant, dangerous satire. And its willingness to follow the situation to its logical conclusion - nuclear annihilation - has a purity that today's lily-livered happy-ending technicians would probably find a way around.

The best film ever made about filmmaking.

To Kill a Mockingbird, set in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1932, uses the realities of its time only as a backdrop for the portrait of a brave white liberal.

Here is a movie that was made more than 25 years ago, and it feels as if it were made yesterday. Not a moment of The Manchurian Candidate lacks edge and tension and a cynical spin. [Re-release]

Released in 1962, it seems as innovative and influential as any New Wave film.

Jules and Jim is one of those rare films that knows how fast audiences can think, and how emotions contain their own explanations

In a few characters and a gripping story, Ford dramatizes the debate about guns that still continues in many Western states. That he does this by mixing in history, humorous supporting characters and a poignant romance is typical; his films were complete and self-contained in a way that approaches perfection. Without ever seeming to hurry, he doesn't include a single gratuitous shot.

You can freeze almost any frame of this film and be looking at a striking still photograph. Nothing is done casually.

El Cid storms past its failings by the sheer force of its visual mastery. [27 Aug 1993, p.41]

West Side Story remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno's fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there's no telling what might have resulted.

The Hustler is one of those films where scenes have such psychic weight that they grow in our memories. That's true of the matches between Eddie and Fats.

[Kurosawa] was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from John Ford's gallery of supporting actors.

These 1950s French noirs abandon the formality of traditional crime films, the almost ritualistic obedience to formula, and show crazy stuff happening to people who seem to be making up their lives as they go along.

The movie is made with boundless energy. Fellini stood here at the dividing point between the neorealism of his earlier films (like "La Strada") and the carnival visuals of his extravagant later ones ("Juliet of the Spirits," "Amarcord'').

Breathless remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years.

It's an uneven film, with moments of inspiration in a fairly conventional tale of kidnapping and rescue. This is not one of the great Disney classics - it's not in the same league with Snow White or Pinocchio - but it's passable fun, and will entertain its target family audiences.

The most entertaining performance in the movie, consistently funny, is by Ustinov, who upstages everybody when he is onscreen (he won an Oscar).

What makes Psycho immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers.

The wonder of the experience is helped by the corny evocation of the whole misty Irish countryside, in which the blarney and the blather seem believable. [08 Aug 1993, p.5]

The underlying seriousness of MacLaine's performance helps anchor the picture--it raises the stakes, and steers it away from any tendency to become musical beds.

This put-on-a-happy-face plotline is not nearly as annoying as it sounds. In fact, Swift wisely heads off audience rebellion by having his characters make fun of "Pollyanna" before the viewer can. [24 May 2002, p.13]

To watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water.

Wilder's 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft, a movie that's about nothing but sex and yet pretends it's about crime and greed.

Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.

The directness of The Seventh Seal is its strength: This is an uncompromising film, regarding good and evil with the same simplicity and faith as its hero.

The real star is cinematographer James Wong Howe, who distracts us from the character's lulling conversations with himself -- and Tracy's grim voiceovers -- with his magisterial seascapes and sunsets. [18 Feb 1999, p.31]

A searing portrait of the human condition. [12 Oct 2007, p.B6]

Vertigo, which is one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art.

The film has always been a favorite of those who enjoy visual and dramatic flamboyance.

The inspirational speech that Pa (Fess Parker) gives his son (Tommy Kirk) may seem sentimental because of its aw-shucks delivery, but there's nothing phony about its lesson: "Now and then, for no good reason a man can figure out, life will just haul off and knock him flat. … But it's not all like that. A lot of it's mighty fine." This is the type of straight talk that is missing from movies aimed at kids today. [24 May 2002, p.13]

Paths of Glory was the film by which Stanley Kubrick entered the ranks of great directors, never to leave them.

The story in the jungle moves ahead neatly, economically, powerfully.

Beast and Scorpion -- with its wicked giant arachnids that pluck human victims from a wrecked train like diners selecting shrimp from a buffet -- are fan favorites. [16 Jan 2004, p.11]

The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood.

In countless ways visible and invisible, Sirk's sly subversion skewed American popular culture, and helped launch a new age of irony.

Though the original is superior, this glossy entertainment is far more popular with audiences. [25 Dec 1998, p.13]

The Searchers contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances.

Over the years I have seen "Ikiru" every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think.

A milestone in the creation of new idea about young people.

All that beauty, Hitchcock's panache and a certain amount of cleverly suggestive, double entendre-filled banter between Grant and Kelly may be enough to keep To Catch a Thief entertaining for modern viewers, but it clearly falls short of the director's best work.

One of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many "great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career.

Rear Window lovingly invests in suspense all through the film, banking it in our memory, so that when the final payoff arrives, the whole film has been the thriller equivalent of foreplay.

The acting and the best dialogue passages have an impact that has not dimmed; it is still possible to feel the power of the film and of Brando and Kazan, who changed American movie acting forever.

It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature–so odd, so valuable, so particular.

Singin' in the Rain is a comedy, but The Band Wagon has a note of melancholy along with its smiles, a sadness always present among Broadway veterans, who have seen more failure than success, who know the show always closes and that the backstage family breaks up and returns to the limbo of auditions and out-of-town tryouts.

Artfully directed by Charles Walters, this moving drama affirms that true love is where reality and magic merge into one. [14 Feb 1999, p.6]

Shane wears a white hat and Palance wears a black hat, but the buried psychology of this movie is a mottled, uneasy, fascinating gray.

Although it was not quite his last film, there can be little doubt that Limelight was Charlie Chaplin’s farewell. It is also probably his most personal, revealing film.

There's plenty of good travelogue in moving among Africa, Spain and the French Riviera. But director Henry King plods again. [18 Feb 1999, p.31]