Sinatra’s vocal swagger is as exhilarating as ever, on a stage that gives him room to strut. And the overall effect is to heighten the effect and the presence of Frank Loesser’s brash yet subtle and bluff yet intricate songs. It’s not filmed theatre, but the cinematic transfiguration of the theatrical experience.

Frank Sinatra’s performance is pure gold, but the director, Otto Preminger, goes for sensationalism; the film is effective, but in a garish, hyperbolic, and dated way.

Bunuel's daring is fully apparent.

[A] generation-gap soap opera of the 50s, which had more emotional resonance for the teenagers of the time than many much better movies.

The film's mixture of parody, cynicism, and song and dance is perhaps a little sour; though the numbers are exhilarating and the movie is really much more fun that the wildly overrated On the Town, it doesn't sell exuberance in that big, toothy way, and it was a box office failure.

There are few thrills in this romantic comedy-thriller--it's no more than a pleasant minor diversion, but it does have a zingy air of sophistication.

It's a miserable piece of moviemaking -- poorly paced and tearjerking.

Despite its peculiar overtones of humor, this is one of the most frightening movies ever made.

Michael Curtiz directed this oppressive, misbegotten venture.

You have to have considerable tolerance to make it through Chayefsky's repetitive dialogue, his insistence on the humanity of "little" people, and his attempt to create poetry out of humble, drab conversations.

It’s far from a dull movie, but it’s certainly a very strange one; it’s an enshrinement of the mixed-up kid. Here and in Rebel Without a Cause, Dean seems to go just about as far as anybody can in acting misunderstood.

Once again, a "daring" Hollywood movie exposes social tensions--touches a nerve--and then pours on the sweet nothings. But along the melodramatic way, there are some startling episodes (and one first-rate bit of racial interchange), and recordings by Bix Beiderbecke, Stan Kenton, Bill Holman, and others set quite a pace.

This movie is terribly uneven -- best when it's gaudy and electric, worst in its more realistically staged melodramatic moments, especially toward the end. Overall, it's an entertaining show.

Grandiose, emotionally charged musical version of the 1937 tear-jerker. This updated version is a terrible, fascinating orgy of self-pity and cynicism and mythmaking.

The movie is so ornate and so garrulous about telling the dirty truth that it's a camp classic: a Cinderella story in which the prince turns out to be impotent.

Probably the material was too precious and fake-lyrical to have worked in natural surroundings, either, but the way it has been done it's hopelessly stagey.

Every step depends on stifled emotions and closely guarded secrets, resulting in a buildup of operatic passion that endows everyday gestures and inflections with grandeur and nobility.

It's marred by a holiday family-picture heartiness--the M-G-M back-lot Americana gets rather thick.

A pedagogical tone, reminiscent of the 30s, is maintained throughout much of the movie: these strikers are always teaching each other little constructive lessons, and their dialogue is blown up to the rank of folk wisdom.

Low-grade horror.

This clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.

Doris Day is at her friendliest and most likable as the tomboy heroine of this big, bouncy Western musical about Jane's romance with Wild Bill Hickok.

Gable certainly doesn't have the animal magnetism he had in the earlier version, but when Gardner and Kelly bitch at each other, doing battle for him, they're vastly entertaining anyway.

The movie offers, amid its hectic and rowdy melodrama, a constant and underlying vision of the crucial power of government to serve the public good—and the ease with which that power can, almost invisibly, be shifted to the unfair advantage of the rich and the connected.

The movie succeeds by the smooth efficiency of Fred Zinnemann's lean, intelligent direction, and by the superlative casting.

The Comden-Green script isn't as consistently fresh as the one they did for Singin' in the Rain, but there have been few screen musicals as good as this one, starring those two great song-and-dance men Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan.

Mel Ferrer smiles his narcissistic, masochistic smiles as the crippled puppeteer who can speak his love to the 16-year-old orphan girl Lili (Leslie Caron) only through his marionettes. Canon is much too good for him, but the movie doesn't know it.

The gallows humor is entertaining, despite some rather braod roughhouse effects.

This George Stevens film is over-planned and uninspired: Westerns are better when they're not so self-importantly self-conscious.

The premise of this Hitchcock thriller is promising, but the movie, set in Quebec and partly shot there, is so reticent it's mostly dull.

No one could say this wasn't a rousing movie. It's also romantic, big, commercial, and slick, in the M-G-M grand manner.

This isn't a good movie but it's compellingly tawdry and nasty -- the only movie that explored the mean, unsavory potential of Marilyn Monroe's cuddly, infantile perversity.

The director, Vincente Minnelli, has given the material an hysterical sytlishness; the black-and-white cinematography (by Robert Surtees) is more than dramatic--it has termperament.

Very bad...Davis throws her weight around but comes through in only a few scenes.

The picture's only claim on one's attention is in the two sequences staged by Busby Berkeley.

Chaplin's sentimental and high-minded view of theatre and himself.

One of John Ford's most popular films--but fearfully Irish and green and hearty.

Marilyn Monroe as a psychotic babysitter. She wasn't yet a box-office star, but her unformed--almost blobby--quality is very creepy, and she dominated this melodrama. In other respects, it's standard, though the New York hotel setting helps, and also the young Anne Bancroft, as a singer who works in the hotel.

Not as stirring a piece of mythology as the Errol Flynn version (The Adventures of Robin Hood), but a robust, handsome production; made in England, it's a Disney film that doesn't look or sound like one. (That is a compliment.)

George Cukor directed--beautifully. It's as close to perfect as you'd want it to be.

It's apparent that the decor and color were intended to create moods, but the whole thing seems to be the product of an aberrant, second-rate imagination that confuses decor with art.

A huge, mawkish, trite circus movie directed by Cecil B. De Mille in a neo-Biblical style.

This exuberant satire of Hollywood in the late 20s, at the time of the transition from silents to talkies, is probably the most enjoyable of all American movie musicals.

An inspired piece of casting brought Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn together. This is a comedy, a love story, and a tale of adventure, and it is one of the most charming and entertaining movies ever made.

The introductory and closing scenes are tedious; the woman's whimpering is almost enough to drive one to the nearest exit. Yet the film transcends these discomforts; it has its own perfection.

The failure of innocence here is touchingly absurd; the film is stylized poetry, and it is like nothing else that De Sica ever did.

The action is stagey, but there's certainly enough going on.

Clarke's script, Charles Crichton's direction, and Georges Auric's music contribute to what is probably the most nearly perfect fubsy comedy of all time. It's a minor classic, a charmer.

Elia Kazan’s direction is often stagy, and the sets and the arrangement of actors are frequently too transparently “worked out,” but who cares when you’re looking at two of the greatest performances ever put on film and listening to some of the finest dialogue ever written by an American?

Whatever one's reservations about this famous film, it is impressive, and in the love scene between Taylor and Clift, physical desire seems palpable.

The director Anthony Mann fleshes out the intricate story with vigorous and subtle attention to its disparate elements—political, psychological, and brutal.

In the person of Alec Guinness, Fagin the Viper, the corrupter of youth, has a sly, depraved charm.

It's intensely enjoyable--in some ways the best of Hitchcock's American films.

A smashing kitsch entertainment.

Ersatz art of a very high grade, and one of the most enjoyable movies ever made.

This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood's leopard-skin past--it's narrated by a corpse-- is almost too clever, yet it's at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequences dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood.

Within its own terms the picture is sensitive and very well done, but it's also tiresomely fraudulent -- an idealization of a safe, shuttered existence, the good life according to M-G-M.

A rigid faced Joan Crawford, in a role that would make sense only if played by a ravishing young beauty. She's twice too old for it, and her acting is grim and masklike.

A competent (often overrated) thriller by John Huston about a group of crooks who plan a jewel robbery and how their characters determine the results.

As deceptions and disguises pile up, the layers of mystery grow thicker, and the lurid symbolism of material objects is thrust to the fore.

Perhaps the most influential of all French films, and one of the most richly entertaining.

In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess.

Its exuberant love of New York seems forced, and most of the numbers are hearty and uninspired.

Cukor's work is too arch, too consciously, commercially clever, but it's also spirited, confident.

Ray's tense choreographic staging and tightly framed compositions give the film a sensuous, nervous feeling of imminent betrayal. Yet this film-noir stylization, elegant in design terms and emotionally powerful, is also very simplistic; the movie suffers from metaphysical liberalism--social injustice treated as cosmic fatalism.

Like Ford's other large-scale, elegiac Westerns of this period, it's not a plain action movie but a pictorial film with slow spots and great set pieces.

A Hitchcock stinker, set in Australia in the early 19th century (though shot in England).

Orson Welles' portrait of the friend, Harry Lime, is a study of corruption - evil, witty, unreachable.

This Freudian gangster picture, directed by Raoul Walsh, is very obvious, and it's so primitive and outrageous in its flamboyance that it seems to have been made much earlier than it was. But this flamboyance is also what makes some of its scenes stay with you.

It's not a great movie, or even a very good one (it's rather mechanical), but it touches one's experience in a way that makes it hard to forget.

This asinine story just about smothers the good-natured hoofing.

Whatever the omissions, the mutilations, the mistakes, this is very likely the most exciting and most alive production of Hamlet you will ever see on the screen.

A magnificent horse opera.

Often seems on the verge of being funny, but the humor is too clumsily forced.

What the play was supposed to be about -- which was dim enough in the original -- is even more obscure in the script that he and Richard Brooks (then a screenwriter) prepared, but the movie is so confidently and entertainingly directed that nobody is likely to complain.

Talky and stiff, the film never finds the passionate tone that it needs.