Delightfully original. [04 Jul 1982, p.220]

Like "Rocky Horror Picture Show," Heavy Metal makes most sense as a midnight weekend feature, when many of its viewers are likely to be herbally and chemically addled. Without the help of intoxicants, Heavy Metal comes across as what it is - a wildly sophomoric and stupid cartoon celebrating gore, rape and bad music.

This is the bluest film you'll ever see. The haunting color resounds throughout Empire like a sustained, melancholy chord...Empire is essential viewing for lovers of science fiction. [Special Edition]

A great film of the urban, North American night. His voyeuristic camera roams the streets that come alive with sexual promenades after sunset, and it lingers in noisy, jam-packed bars, watching men search for the man of their fantasies.

This is a giddy parody of gang pictures, West Side Story without the music and set in the Bronx of the '60s. The music is solid early '60s rock 'n' roll ( My Boyfriend's Back, The Wanderer ) and the acting is broad and often silly.

Sure, it's the same trite teenage fantasy it was 20 years ago when it was first released, but somehow now the energy seems infectiously giddier, the songs zingier, the camp higher.

A marvelous child of Star Wars technology, the advanced sound design makes a celebratory re-viewing of George Lucas' legendary, 20-year-old space opera a thrilling experience. [Special Edition]

Shivers exhibits the major characteristics of Cronenberg's canon, his use of architecture as reinforcement of the film's creepy tone and the deliberate reduction of men and women to a single, compulsively sexual aspect of their identities.

Shampoo refuses to be coy. There's a deep, soulful confusion here that isn't careless with frivolity.

For all its lazy beauty, the movie is rooted in the personalities of its lead characters and they, unfortunately, are bloodless, affectless, emotionless dopes who turn their considerable lack of scruples on the business of senseless killing, for which they seemingly have no remorse. [13 Feb. 1998]

If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Buñuel.

A handbook on cinematic lucidity. All events are described clearly. Motives of all the characters are set right there on the table next to the pasta for our consideration.

Timeless, and as fine a depiction of human folly as you're likely to see at the movies.

Rivetingly realistic, edited in a gripping and exciting style unseen up to that time, and marvelously scripted.

Yellow Submarine takes a magical mystery tour through the history of art and spends a splendiferous good time splashing in the pop art of it all.

The screenplay - co-written by novelist Terry Southern - is intentionally ludicrous, but the fashions rule.

Dead is a movie you want to dismiss as another, gross supernatural B-movie: campy fun. But, shot and edited by Romero himself, the film is an astounding technical knockout, often so expressionist that the daylight seems afraid of the dark. The horror is so unalloyed that dead look decidedly, frighteningly human.

Easily one of the best documentaries on any subject ever made. It is also one of the most cinematically influential.

Surely there's a middle ground between a Bolshevik-style elevation of history over individual emotion and a Hollywood-style idolization of emotion over impersonal history. Surely it's possible to avoid either deifying or demonizing history, but rather to seek an understanding of it - as a force that shapes private lives even as they shape it. For all its grandeur and beauty, Dr. Zhivago denies the complexity of that exchange.

Delightful but not serious suspense; audience hysteria -- and flame throwers guaranteed to scare the wits out of anyone who ever had a hot foot. [17 Jun 1954, p.37]

Sunset Boulevard is noteworthy because of its fine sensitivity of things cinema. [24 Aug 1950, p.25]

Past, an inestimable collaboration by Tourneur and Mitchum, is not just one fine noir film among many. It has been a guage for the genre, even a template, over the last 50 years.

It is by far Bogart's most successfully playful role.

Citizen Kane...has the best of everything: a great director and star, innovative cinematography, dreamlike - even nightmarish - art direction, a sonorous musical score, a skillful screenplay in which comic passages intensify the movie's tragic qualities by means of their grotesque juxtaposition (how lifelike!), a psychological / narrative form that predates our contemporary "psycho-histories" by at least 40 years, and best of all, a memorial word that, when spoken, recalls the film out of thin air.

The sexual tension and humorous byplay between Leigh and co-star Clark Gable, in the role of gentleman rogue Rhett Butler, was riveting. And so was Leigh's portrayal of a viper trying to consume the good-hearted Ashley Wilkes, embodied by the fine-boned Hungarian-turned-British actor, Leslie Howard.