High and Low is more than a crime melodrama; it's a philosophical drama as well. [23 Nov 1988, p.D06]

Sidney Poitier and Lilia Skala make a fine odd couple in this whimsical drama of a wandering handyman who is persuaded to help a tiny community of German nuns build a convent in the American desert. [25 Dec 1992, p.AE05]

It's the usual Fellini magic: a long, challenging movie overflowing with creativity and verve. [16 Dec 2001]

This is still the one to see ...for Mifune's inimitable performance and Kurosawa's gorgeous black-and-white photography. [05 Jan 2001]

Malle, only 25 when the film was released, bounces confidently among several threads -- classic French policier, juvenile delinquent film, doomy tale of tragic love, clock-ticking thriller.

Films don't get more essential than this.

Directed, written by and starring Allen Baron, it's a totally absorbing picture: dark, curt, rancid and lean in the best noir style. [28 Apr 1998, p.C01]

The glory of "Breathless" lies less with its narrative, though, than with its style, a self-conscious blend of drawn-out conversational scenes and rapid-fire cuts of action. [14 Dec 2001]

Before Frank Abagnale there was Ferdinand Demara, who also impersonated a doctor, among other roles -- not for financial gain but from a compulsion to have other lives. [03 Jan 2003]

Director Tony Richardson and Burton -- and Mary Ure, Claire Bloom and Edith Evans -- show what excitement could be created on paltry budgets in England in the late '50s and early '60s. [30 Sep 2001]

It's a delicate and ingenious film that skewers modern life without ever baring its nails or turning sour. [17 Dec 2010]

If there is a drive-in classic, this is it. [04 Jun 1999]

The most famous and (naturally) least engaging film on the subject, John Sturges' melodrama about the friendship between Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Holliday (Kirk Douglas) is handsomely mounted and as dull as a dish. [02 Jan 1994, p.D06]

A campy premise taken to unthinkable heights. There are the requisite battles with spiders and housecats, but mostly the increasingly diminutive hero is introspective, turning his predicament into a treatise on the human condition. [07 Nov 2003]

Henry Fonda's perplexity is palpable. [26 Jan 2001]

Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall are the nominal stars, but the show is stolen by Robert Stack and Oscar-winning Dorothy Malone as a pair of seriously dysfunctional siblings, heirs to a Texas oil fortune. The tale of betrayal, misguided affection and sexual anxiety plays out in shiny Technicolor against an all-too-symbolic backdrop of oil derricks. [13 Jul 2001]

Sleek Deco-inspired props and color scheme, startling special effects, eerie theremin-driven score, the drolly interactive mechanical man (Robby the Robot!), wide-screen CinemaScope presentation, Anne Francis' scanty outfits: to audiences in the '50s it all must've been future shock. Today, it remains a brilliant cinematic realization. [07 Nov 2003]

Fonda's classic performance in a role he owned onstage and on film is a pleasure to watch. [22 Sep 2006, p.46]

Howard Hawks admitted that he and co-scenarist William Faulkner never got the hang of how ancient Egyptians probably talked, but he produced a spectacular epic. [05 Oct 2001]

Rosemary Clooney (that's Danny Ocean's aunt) steals the show as one half of a sister act accompanying the boys on their yuletide misadventures. The real highlight, of course, is the Irving Berlin score. [24 Dec 2004, p.39]

Sirk freighted this material with surprisingly delicate art: gorgeous photography and staging, a fluency of camera work rarely seen even in A-level movies, and an earnest tone evident in the music, dialogue and acting. [17 Oct 1999]

A masterful treasure trove of hilarious gags and inventive moments. It's so good that a single viewing it might awaken you to the charm of snails, frogs legs and -- heaven help us -- Jerry Lewis. [14 Jul 1995, p.E01]

This is one of the Duke's better Westerns. [14 Oct 2005, p.47]

Even without the eyeglasses that gave viewers a headache, this film is a classic because it is one of the earliest and best of the wailing-music-in-the-desert-after-the-UFO-has-landed genre. This movie is a cut above some of the truly awful, tacky aliens-behind-the-cactus space operas of that era, possibly because the script was adapted from a story by Ray Bradbury. [29 Nov 1987, p.11]

Ladd's career had been declining and kept declining after Shane, but his minimalist, passive style was perfect for this character, a violent man who has grown thoughtful too late in life. This is his best work. [28 Apr 2000]

Set entirely in a police station, the play shows both the drama and routine of police work. Kingsley made them all eloquent in a snappy-patter way. Kirk Douglas gives a powerhouse performance as the detective who is wound too tight for his own good. [26 Sep 1997, p.34]

This was the first major film to depict a benign extraterrestrial visiting Earth since the postwar flying saucer phenomenon began in June 1947. Few alien visitation films have surpassed it for suspense, narrative economy, acting and a just plain good story. [09 Apr 2004]

Director Billy Wilder's 1950 classic, after all, could serve as a capsule history of American movies: a flip book of the many styles and epochs of the medium as well as an anatomy of the vices, jealousies, vanities, egocentrisms and pettinesses that have long characterized our great national popular art and the people who make it. [02 Jun 2000]

John Huston's classic film noir, adapted from W.R. Burnett's novel, is a forerunner of dozens of heist movies, few of which surpass it. [26 Feb 1999]

There's so much to say, but let this suffice: See it; it's a sweet taste of the best of what cinema can do. [16 Mar 2007, p.28]

It's an exciting experience, dazzling and entertaining and thought-provoking. I saw it at Cinema 21 last week and immediately wanted to see it again. I couldn't, so I started researching and read everything I could about it. It's truly great.

A seamy milieu, but we sense the firm moral order outside of which the outlaws suicidally place themselves. [29 Nov 1996, p.23]

Shot on location in New York by director Ted Tetzlaff, it's tense and fresh and, at 73 minutes, remarkably taut. [14 Sep 2012]

Made with brisk energy, shot with Powell's limitless ingenuity, written with fairy-tale echoes and steeped in a love for northern Scottish folkways, it's apt to become a favorite film the first time you see it. [02 Mar 2001]

This one wraps up with a melodramatic finale that doesn't really deal with the issues raised earlier. Nevertheless, until then, it is an intelligently written, well-acted film that deals sensitively with the disorientation of guys who find adapting to peace as difficult in its way as adapting to war had been. [13 Mar 1988, p.06]

Garfield is customarily strong and energetic as a desperate guy on the edge. Famous for her work in tight sweaters and halters, Turner was no thespian. But the combination of Garfield and Garnett, or something, fired a performance from her that is, in its way, perfect. [05 Mar 1999]

The Harvey Girls isn't really anything special, cinematically speaking. This run-of-the-mill Judy Garland musical is notable mostly for its Oscar-winning song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe."[10 May 2002]

The clues keep leading to increasingly darker thickets. [27 Apr 2001]

Here is another legendary case of actors following their characters' lead. [14 Feb 1997, p.36]

It's all done in perfect taste. Sturges' specialty was sophisticated films about largely unsophisticated characters, and his talent shines here. [28 Jul 1991, p.34]

Hitchcock has fun playing with Grant’s suave onscreen image, pulling the rug out from under our expectations, only to keep replacing it and yanking it over and over again.

Rita Hayworth plays her, doing good work as a Gay '90s gal finally revealed as shallow, conceited, greedy and mean. But that glorious hair distracts dentist James Cagney long enough to think he lost a lot when a rival got her. And that glorious hair is seen only in black and white. [13 Jun 1997, p.39]

A crisp, witty comedy on the Enoch Arden theme. [02 Apr 1999]

The play is hilarious, and Hawks enlivened it with his famous staccato direction. He gives no breaks for viewers to laugh without missing the next line. The brilliant dialogue comes so thick and fast that you almost have to tape the film to get it all. So, do. [31 Mar 2000]

The movie was solidly directed by Hollywood vet Lewis Milestone [All Quiet on the Western Front], but it's the performances by the two leads that takes it to another level. [23 Mar 2001]

It's amazing that this deeply evocative tale of courage, nobility and the price of family loyalty is the last serious remake of P.C. Wren's best-known Foreign Legion adventure novel. [27 Aug 1999]

This is padded a bit but still faithful and entertaining. [11 Dec 1992, p.AE15]

Flynn is sexy, valiant, athletic and true: a movie star in every sense of the term. [13 Sep 1996, p.30]

The historical details of costumes and settings are exemplary and the cast superb. Those best of times and worst of times must have looked much like this. [12 Jul 1996, p.39]

Lighting changes subtly from shot to shot within a scene to highlight a chin, a cheek, a profile, a shoulder -- whatever carries Von Sternberg's message. To sully this monochromatic beauty with electric colors would be a crime and a sin. [15 Aug 1990, p.E05]

Don't let its age fool you -- Wings is no rickety antique. Wellman' s aerial battle scenes remain impressive, even in the digital age. Bow is charming and terribly funny, especially when trying to rescue Rogers from a Parisian brothel. The boys are quite good, too, but their efforts pale next to a brief cameo by Gary Cooper, who positively smolders as the existential rookie who makes his own luck.

August Winds is a contemplative, nearly formless depiction of rural life. Mascaro regularly hangs back, adopting an unobtrusive vantage point, letting the moments form so that his characters can live out their lives.