The movie's acts of violence and betrayal may be familiar, but the filmmakers' obvious contempt for people given over to fanaticism is enormously welcome -- a call for the most elementary kind of sanity.

Not revolutionary or even evolutionary but enormously .... methodical. Working from an Elmore Leonard novel, Tarantino has created a gangster fiction that is never larger than life and sometimes smaller.

Barry Levinson’s political and media satire Wag the Dog goes as fast as the wind, and that’s a relief because the idea behind the movie is thin. Very thin -- and at times offensively glib.

Gorgeously shot and utterly respectful of the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, but it’s dramatically inert.

If more can't be found in Bond than this, I wouldn't object, in principle, to that tuxedo's being hung up in the closet for good.

The best movie ever made about a man of God -- which is to say, the most honest and morally the most ambiguous.

The movie tries to turn boringness into a virtue. Every time Rob Reiner builds a little suspense, he goes off into a civics lesson, but he has nothing interesting to say.

Reiner attempts to combine whimsy, satire, and Capra-esque corniness here in a way that is nearly impossible to sit through, and if that weren’t enough, it has Bruce Willis as the Easter bunny that is worse than anything in Hudson Hawk.

Much Ado About Nothing is one of the few movies of recent years that could leave its audiences weeping with joy. [May 10, 1993, p.62]

Spielberg does deliver; he delivers thrills with all his genius for the mechanics of movement and the psychology of fear.

Despite much fervent talk of the beauty of the mountains and the closeness of God, Alive peters out. [25 Jan 1993, p.55]

Scott keeps things moving so fast that all you really take in is the whirring speed, not what’s happening.

It understands the exchange of aggression and guilt, and it’s witty about the awkward way that whites who have been taught to respect Blacks will speak and act when confronted with an actual Black man.

It offers a Life-magazine view of the home front, with adultery added--but the adultery is so unimpassioned that it might have come from Life, too. [30 Apr 1984, p.87]

This movie, one of the most bizarrely ambitious works directed by an American in recent years, is certainly a mess, but it's a joyful mess, with far more invention and life than many a more conventional well-made film. [16 Aug 1982, p.42]

This so-called “children’s film” selects a variety of phobias and stitches them into a patchwork of shimmering terrorscapes and half-baked ideas about secret societies, the occult, and, of course, dirt-bike-racing in rural England. In other words, it’s perfect.

Marvelous atmosphere and individual scenes, but not quite a movie. [31 Dec 1979, p.12]

Apart from Wahl, the acting in the Wanderers is either embarrassingly flat or hysterically emotional, and the movie is an exhausting mishmash of styles. [23 July 1979, p.62]

[Pakula] has made the dreary mistake of reducing a half-dead genre to its basic elements, stripping away color, detail, humor--everything that makes it possible to regard a Western as a pleasure rather than an ordeal. [13 Nov 1978, p.128]

Among the greatest, most ravishing of films.

No other concert film has ever expressed so fervently the erotic root of rock. Seeing it is the opposite of taking a trip down memory lane; it's more like a plunge into the belly of the beast.

Rabbit Test’s failure is understandable: It’s pretty much a terrible movie. Directed more like a sitcom than a film and full of dud jokes that feel like they’re waiting for a laugh track to kick in, it’s a good example of how the comedian’s ten-wisecracks-a-second humor didn’t necessarily translate to a narrative medium.

This is far and away Richard Brooks's best film. It is harrowing, powerful, appalling. [31 Oct 1977, p.116]

Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a “future” cast to them: Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like that, in downtown Los Angeles today. Certainly the mentality and values of the movie can be duplicated in third-rate non-science of any place or period.

Billy Wilder's remake of The Front Page is a refreshing refurbishment for our time. [23 Dec 1974, p.71]

While his actors carry the drama to glittering heights of intensity in outbursts of violence, explosions of temper, gushes of tears, Scorsese is unfortunately putting on a camera show of his own, the handheld pursuit of the image lending an exhausting freneticism to what is melodrama enough on its own. [27 Jan 1975, p.64]

Tailored to a point rather than to comprehensive biography, its triumph is its touch upon the public nerve of our most private inhibition. [30 Dec 1974, p.86]

The Gambler is a perceptive and remarkably paced drama, with director Karel Reisz in full command of his medium. [07 Oct 1974, p.93]

What lingers after the film’s bittersweet conclusion are the melancholy details of people leading lonely lives of compulsion and loss, looking for sympathetic companions in order to feel less sick.

That's Entertainment! is just that--and let the purists attribute to this amusement the pretentiousness it so charmingly lacks. [27 May 1974, p.90]

Parallax View is Pakula's best to date; its intrigue is honest, its logic unassailable, and its performances first rate. [24 June 1974, p.58]

Even George Segal gone bananas, courtesy of an out-of-whack computer in his head, chopping a lady and her waterbed into slow-motion streams of diluted blood that makes pretty patterns on white tiles, doesn't alleviate the excruciating boredom and intermittent nausea produced by The Terminal Man. [24 Jun 1974, p.59]

Under Coppola's direction it succeeds on a variety of levels; as sheer thriller, as psychological study, as social analysis, and as political comment. [08 Apr 1974, p.78]

It is, perhaps, the most demanding of his recent films--but as always, the demands are justified and rewarding. [11 Feb 1974, p.74]

Pittman's director, producer, and star have their hearts in movies, but they've made a TV film to be long remembered. [28 Jan 1974, p.58]

Don't let the pre-title violence throw you; The Laughing Policeman stands as a solid, rewarding detective story. [24 Dec 1973, p.69]

In his fourth movie, Allen comes into his own as a filmmaker, providing us with the comedy of the year.

It's a "road" story in the best disciplined sense. Quaid is nothing short of remarkable as the boy who blunders into relationships and finally comes to intimations of himself as individual and as person.

Pacino's performance is bolstered by a screenplay and direction that respects the city-dweller's intelligence, that tells of an eleven-year experience with sophistication and temperance and resists endless opportunities for a wallow. [10 Dec 1973, p.93]

If you can have another movie myth shattered in high style, with love as well as wit, The Long Goodbye is for you. [29 Oct 1973, p.80]

Walking Tall grabs you where trash and violence invariably do, with excellent performers, shrewd plotting and pacing. [18 Feb 1974, p.74]

It doesn’t quite work, but Lee’s fight choreography is so riveting it doesn’t matter.

The film’s appeal rests almost entirely on his fight scene with his student, Chuck Norris — arguably the best one ever captured on celluloid.

There is a consistency of character, time and place that properly compliments the plotting and is admirable enough to almost - but not quite - make us forgive the loose ends and missing links. [29 May 1972, p.71]

As Catch-22 limps along from vignette to vignette, one sees that what it lacks is cohesion, style and essential mood. [29 June 1970, p.54]

The story of the "accidental" death of a peacenik politician (Yves Montand) and the investigator (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who unravels a right-wing conspiracy remains as fresh as a head wound.

There is all too little here to interest an adult, let alone any veteran of the nutty-girl vs. stodgy-boy chiche. [27 Oct 1969, p.68]

There's a wild enthusiasm to the heroine's activities and a deadpan stupidity to the dialogue that provide a redeeming entertainment value for non-up-tight adults. [26 May 1969, p.55]

Witness as the African-American protagonist (who has kept the panicked survivors alive) meets a fate that has more to do with prejudice than carnivorous appetites. Sometimes reality can be as brutal as any nightmare alternative in celluloid.

Every decade or so, Godard’s film is revered all over again for everything it got right about the future. But for all its influence, Alphaville still looks and feels like no other movie. More than a prophecy, it is poetry.

It’s no lost masterpiece but it is funny and showcases a side of Brando we didn’t get to see often: slapstick funnyman.

The Naked Kiss is a gut punch with the rhythm of a dream.

Paths of Glory is all about that greatest of all movie subjects: power.

Mitchum’s tough-guy demeanor serves him well here, giving an odd energy to the love story.

It Happened on Fifth Avenue earns its warmth honestly, tethering a tale of fresh starts and changed hearts to the real difficulties faced by those reaching for the American dream in a postwar era that was supposed to bring prosperity for all.

Watching Woman of the Year today, it’s hard not to see it as a the model for almost every romantic comedy.