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.