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]