Vincente Minnelli directed two of the best movies ever made on the subject of Hollywood filmmaking—“The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Two Weeks in Another Town.” But he made a third, “Goodbye Charlie,” from 1964...which is, in a way, the most daring and original of them all.

The film has a steady, hypnotic momentum; the director, Masaki Kobayashi, wrings as much drama out of facial twitches as he does out of sword fights. He’s helped immensely by Nakadai’s molten performance and Toru Takemitsu’s spare, disquieting music.

Hitchcock scraping bottom.

Siegel’s terse, seething, and stylish direction glows with the blank radiance of sheet metal in sunlight; the movie’s bright primary colors and glossy luxuries are imbued with menace, and its luminous delights convey a terrifyingly cold world view.

Exciting, handsomely staged, and campy.

The movie is haunted by death and loss, focussing on men who live in stifled grief and reconcile themselves to solitude—a personal desolation that is doubled by Japan’s collective mourning for those who were lost to the country’s catastrophic war.

Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination.

The hero is so blandly uninteresting that there's nothing to hold the movie together.

A debonair macabre thriller--romantic, scary, satisfying.

Tony Richardson whizzes through the Henry Fielding novel, but he pauses long enough for a great lewd eating scene.

An elegantly sinister scare movie, literate and expensive, with those two fine actresses Claire Bloom and Julie Harris.

It's a deluxe glorification of creative crisis, visually arresting (the dark and light contrasts are extraordinary, magical) but in some essential way conventional-minded.

Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is put together of the stuff of legend that the director experienced as personal reality, and he filmed the story as if he had been there. The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances.

Some of the special effects are amusing, and a few are perverse and frightening, but the effects take over in this Hitchcock scare picture, and he fails to make the plot situations convincing. The script is weak, and the acting is so awkward that often one doesn't know how to take the characters.

How the West Was Lost would be a more appropriate title for this dud epic, since, as conceived by the writer, James R. Webb, the pioneers seem to dimwitted bunglers who can't do anything right.

The movie is part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.

It may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood. (As quoted by Roger Ebert)

Seen now, the picture is ludicrous, pointless, and stirring all at once.

Throughout, the writer-director, Agnes Varda, sustains an unsentimental yet subjective tone that is almost unique in the history of movies.

Truffaut's The Wild Child is a more beautifully conceived picture on the same theme, but even with its imperfections and staginess this early Penn film is extraordinary.

We don't get enough understanding of Stroud to become involved in how he is transformed over the years.

Morton DaCosta, who had also directed the stage version, isn't comfortable with the camera, and the material seems too literal, too practical, too set. But the star, Robert Preston, has a few minutes of fast patter--conmanship set to music, that constitute one of the high points in the history of American musicals.

Wild, marvelously enjoyable comedy, adapted from Nabokov's novel.

Perhaps the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns.

Elliptical, full of wit and radiance, this is the best movie ever made about what most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period (though the film begins much earlier).

The reputation of this John Ford Western is undeservedly high: it's a heavy-spirited piece of nostalgia. John Wayne is in his flamboyant element, but James Stewart is too old for the role of an idealistic young Eastern lawyer who is robbed on the way West, goes to work in the town of Shinbone as a dishwasher, and learns about Western life.

With Experiment in Terror, Edwards, working in the familiar genre of criminal depravity, does something that may well be, for Hollywood, unprecedented: he makes a virtual piece of film criticism in movie form.

With one foot in the French New Wave and the other in the Ballets Russes, Cocteau fits a raging confession into a serene, sensuous neoclassical vessel.

Hysterical twaddle.

Broadly played, in the 50s telegraphing-every-thought comic style.

Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.

Ozu makes silence his very subject. In warm and humorous scenes, it emerges as the abyss of the generation gap; but here, Ozu stands his own ironic inversions on their head.

Too self-conscious, though; the cinematography, by Franz Planer, may sometimes evoke Balthus, but the atmosphere is heavy and lugubrious.

Gavin Lambert summed it up: An all-star concentration-camp drama, with special guest-victim appearances.

The gags are almost all on this level, and the little sops to sentiment are even worse.

One of the most elegantly beautiful ghost movies ever made.

The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert.

The movie doesn't suggest that adolescents have a right to sexual experimentation -- it just attacks the corrupted grown-ups for their failure to value love above all else. It's the old corn, fermented in a new way.

The picture is swollen with windy thoughts and murky notions of perversions, and as Eddie's manager the magnetic young George C. Scott seems to be a Satan figure, but it has strength and conviction, and Newman gives a fine, emotional performance. You can see all the picture's faults and still love it.

There is so much displacement of the usual movie conventions that we don't have the time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically. One of the rare Japanese films that is both great and funny to American audiences.

Moreau's nocturnal wanderings are made unbearably poignant by an exquisite Miles Davis jazz score that became famous in its own right.

The film is light and playful and off-the-cuff, even a little silly. Yet the giddy, gauche characters who don't give a damn...are not only familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive.

An erratic, sometimes personal in the wrong way, and generally unlucky picture that is often affecting.

Though the story builds slowly (and the first half may seem a little pokey), the characters are more red-blooded and vigorous and eccentric than in most other Zinnemann films.

It's clever and has some really chilling moments.

Daniel Mann's direction is maybe even worse that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes script.

Ragged when it tries for philosophical importance, but it's fun to see so many stars at an early stage in their careers.

This may be the best-paced and most slyly entertaining of all the decadent-ancient-Rome spectacular films. It's a great big cartoon drama, directed by Stanley Kubrick, with Kirk Douglas at his most muscular.

The film errs in many ways, and at times the editing seems glaringly poor, but Olivier's performance gives it venomous excitement.

Psycho, in its dark and sordid extravagance, remains utterly contemporary, in its subject as well as in its production.

The machine itself is a beauty, with a red velvet seat and gadgets made of ivory and rock crystal, and the time-travel effects help to make this film one of the best of its kind. However, it deteriorates into comic-strip grotesqueries when the fat ogreish future race of Morlocks torments the effete, platinum-blond, vacant-eyed race of Eloi.

The case itself had so many dramatic elements that the movie can't help holding our attention, but it's a very crude piece of work, totally lacking in subtlety; what is meant to be a courtroom drama of ideas comes out as a caricature of a drama of ideas, and maddeningly, while watching we can't be sure what is based on historical fact and what is invention.

Vincente Minnelli makes use of the wide screen with graceful, fluid movement, and he helps Martin anchor his usual breeziness with just the right amount of anxiety.

Somewhat silly, but with fine sequences, and Miss Samoilova, a grandniece of Stanislavsky, does him honor.

They should never have allowed the audience so much time to think about what's going on: the short play turns into a ludicrous, lumbering horror movie.

Linus Pauling was quoted as saying, "It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world." The greatest ability of the director, Stanley Kramer, may have been for eliciting fatuous endorsements from eminent people.

It's something of a mess, but this mess--and The Entertainer, also a mess--are possibly the most exciting films to have come out of England in this period.

This Ingmar Bergman film isn't a masterwork, or even a very good movie, but it is clearly a film made by a master.

Though not as cleverly original as "Strangers on a Train", or as cleverly sexy as "Notorious", this is one of Hitchcock's most entertaining American thrillers.

Wood lacked both the dramatic sense to unfold his speculations in action and the technique (as well as the money) to embody, in any plausible way, his spectacular fancies, but their crude approximations vibrate with his stifled exaltation.

Few movies give us such memorable, emotion-charged images.

Michael Pertwee, who wrote such English comedies as Laughter in Paradise and Your Past Is Showing for the director Mario Zampi, had a good idea here, too.

Silly, but with zest; there are some fine action sequences, and the performers seem to be enjoying their roles.

Lemmon is demoniacally funny - he really gives in to women's clothes, and begins to think of himself as a sexy girl. Monroe gives perhaps her most characteristic performance, which means that she's both charming and embarrassing.

Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.

A magically powerful film.

Taylor looks very desirable, and the cast is full of actors whooping it up with Southern Accents.

Tacky low-budget picture about a scientist whose carelessness gets him into a tragic pickle.

Vincente Minnelli directed, in a confident, confectionery styles that carries all--or almost all--before it.

Vertigo is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock’s own way with them.

Billy Wilder's inane yet moderately entertaining version of an Agatha Christie courtroom thriller, with Charles Laughton wiggling his wattles.

What it really has to do with is love of the film medium, and if Welles can't resist the candy of shadows and angels and baroque decor, he turns it into stronger fare than most directors' solemn meat and potatoes. It's terrific entertainment.

[Chahine]'s richly textured, good-humored, visually forceful storytelling portrays the surging, ribald vitality of Egyptian society that squirms beneath the unjust authority of dictators and dogmatists.

With its tangled shadows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white photography evokes the psychological distortions of reckless and rootless outsiders, the disproportion of their seedy circumstances to their doomed heroism.

The film's rhythm is startling -- you can feel the director's temperament. And there's an element of relentlessness in the way he sets out to demonstrate the hopeless cruelty of the "system."

The film is rather misshapen, particularly in the sections featuring William Holden, and the action that detonates the explosive finish isn't quite clear. However, Alec Guinness is compelling as the English Colonel Nicholson.

Richard Thorpe directed this package, shrewdly designed to give satisfaction to the new raunchy rock generation. The story ends happily, and the movie made millions, though Presley never begins to suggest the vitality that he showed in documentary footage.

Shallow, but the gimmick is appealing, and Woodward's showmanship is very likable.

The script and conception are so maudlin and degrading that Cagney's high dedication becomes somewhat oppressive.

The compositions evoke a kind of open-air claustrophobia, whether in overhead shots that pin the characters in the landscape or in tableaux of men, women, and children staving off the chaos of the wide-open spaces with their weary fences and weathered towns.

McCarey plays the shipboard courtship for generous and tender laughs—the wryly staged first kiss is one of the sweetest in all cinema—but the comedy that follows on dry land is mostly inadvertent.

It's all meant to be airy and bubbly, but it's obvious, overextended (2 hours plus), and overproduced.

Some exciting scenes in the first half, but the later developments are frenetic, and by the end the film is a loud and discordant mess.

This ingenious melodrama set in a jury room generates more suspense than most thrillers.

B-budget science-fiction and simple stuff, but with more consistency and logic than usual, and with some rather amusing trick photography.

The picture has an almost Kafkaesque nightmare realism to it, but the story line wanders diffusely instead of tightening, and the developments become tedious (thought the final discovery of the right man is chillingly well done).

Williams doesn't seem sure how to resolve the movie, but it's wonderfully entertaining.

The Director, Douglas Sirk, shows his talent for whipping up sour, stylized soap operas in posh settings.

Perhaps just because it is so concerned with fidelity to the facts it's less exciting than one might hope; something seems to be missing (a unifying dramatic idea, perhaps), but it's far from a disgrace, and the performers are never an embarrassment.

For all his dedication to this ambitious project, the director, John Huston, must not have been able to keep up his energy level; at times, his work seems surprisingly perfunctory.

Centering on a racetrack robbery, it has fast, incisive cutting; a nervous, edgy style; and furtive little touches of characterization.

You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing.

The movie, directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, packs the ambient violence of a sports world and a media scene that are infested with gangsters; it’s an exposé not just of boxing but of the American way of business.

It's a pity the film, directed by Fred Wilcox, didn't lift some of Shakespeare's dialogue: it's hard to believe you're in the heavens when the diction of the hero (Leslie Nielsen) and his spaceshipmates flattens you down to Kansas.

It's extremely uneven--there are slick and sentimental passages and some are impenetrable. But there are also emotional revelations and there's a superb sequence--almost an epiphany--when the dying man, who has accomplished what he hoped to, sits in a swing in the snow and hums a little song.

As director and star, Olivier succeeds with the soliloquies as neither he nor anyone else ever did on film before; they're intimate, yet brazen.

This sinister black comedy of murder accelerates until it becomes a grotesque fantasy of murder. The actors seem to be having a boisterous good time getting themselves knocked off.

A B-picture classic. This plain and inexpensive piece of science fiction employs few of the resources of the cinema (to put it mildly), but it has an idea that confirms everyone's suspicions.