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]