Perhaps the most likable of all Westerns, and a Grand Hotel-on-wheels movie that has just about everything--adventure, romance, chivalry--and all of it very simple and traditional.

It is directed with such skill and velocity that it has come to represent the quintessence of screen suspense.

A dazzling romantic melodrama.

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

The film is pretty fair Hitchcock, though not as sexy or as witty as the 39 Steps.

The characters of the husband and wife are too simplified and their comic turns too forced, but the general giddiness and Barrymore keep the picture going.

William Wellman's direction is more leisurely than usual; he has such good material here that he takes his time.

Irene Dunne's way with a quip is to smile brightly and wring it dry, but she's at her best here.

One of M-G-M's powerhouse moralizing "family" entertainments, it's beefy and rousing, with almost guaranteed tears and laughter for children.

Though it has few dimensions it has pace and "entertainment value."

The film is peculiarly masochistic and self-congratulatory.

The film has the tawdry simplicities of many of the 30s movies that were built out of headline stories, but it also has more impact than most of the melodramas played out in more elevated surroundings.

Hitchcock thought that he erred in this one, and that that explained why the picture wasn't a hit. But he was wrong; this adaptation of Conrad's The Secret Agent may be just about the best of his English thrillers, and if the public didn't respond it wasn't his fault.

It isn't particularly entertaining; it's just busy.

The movie starts out with a promising satiric idea and winds up in box-office romance, but it's likable and well-paced even at its silliest.

Southern idiom, delicious fish fries, and naive theology are fused with awe and wonder.

This classic musical-melodrama with the Jerome Kern songs and the novelistic Edna Ferber plot, full of heartbreaks and miscegenation and coincidences, is hard to resist in any of its versions.

Fanny Brice is herself, though she isn't on screen enough to vitalize this lavish, tedious musical biography; it goes on for a whopping 3 hours.

This is a polished light comedy in the "continental" style -- a sophisticated romantic trifle, with Dietrich more chic and modern than in her von Sternberg pictures.

The 25-year-old Errol Flynn has the smile and dash to shout "All right my hearties, follow me!" as he leaps from his pirate ship to an enemy vessel.

It's a creditable though unadventurous film, handsomely staged in the M-G-M backlot style for classics.

A stirring 18-centry sea adventure...For the kind of big budget, studio controlled romantic adventure that this is, it's very well done.

This suave, amusing spy melodrama is directed with so sure a touch that the suspense is charged with wit; it's one of the three or four best things Hitchcock ever did.

Naive yet powerful.

A macabre comedy classic.

The best scenes--especially an assassination attempt at Royal Albert Hall--are stunning, but Hitchcock seems sloppily unconcerned about the unconvincing material in between the tricks and jokes.

Classic, compulsively watchable rags-to-riches-and-heartbreak weeper, from a novel by Fannie Hurst.

The plot is trivial French farce (about mistaken identities), but the dances are among the wittiest and the most lyrical expressions of American romanticism on the screen.

People hadn't seen anything like it; that doesn't mean they needed to.

It started a new cycle in screen entertainment by demonstrating that a murder mystery could also be a sophisticated screwball comedy.

No one has ever fully explained what gives this basically slight romantic comedy its particular - and enormous - charm.

The picture--which is almost surreally entertaining--is also famous for its madcap choreography; chorus girls dancing on the wings of planes, to the title song.

The film was lavishly produced, with great care given to the sets and costumes and makeup, but the spirit is missing.

A lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel.

The Marx Brothers in their greatest movie.

A little poky but impressively well done, with witty special effects (by John P. Fulton) and traces of the Whale humor that enlivened his Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein.

The first time you see this film, you're likely to find it silly, autoerotic, static, absurd, and you may feel cheated after having heard so much about it. But though it may seem to have no depth, you're not likely to forget it -- it has a suggestiveness unlike any other film.

It has some silly, yet irresistibly wonderful examples of Busby Berkeley's pinwheel choreography.

Great fun in the uninhibited early-30s style, made at M-G-M before fear of church pressure groups turned the studio respectable and pompous.

The self-conscious good taste of it all creaks, but Noel Coward knows plenty of tricks, and the performers know how to get the most out of his lines.

The backstage story is pleasantly tawdry and corny.

Harlow is intensely liable, delivering her zingy wisecracks with a wonderful dirty good humor, and Gable is at that early peak in his career when he is so sizzlingly sexual that it seems both funny and natural for the two women to be fighting over him.

Most of the players give impossibly bad performances—they chew up the camera. But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, “stars” were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.

The Marx Brothers in one of their niftiest corny-surreal comedies; it isn't in the class of their Duck Soup but then what else is?

Overall, it's a terrific movie, even though the pacing doesn't always seem quite right.

A true nightmare.

Irresistibly enjoyable.

The director, Rouben Mamoulian, rather overdoes the pseudo-science at the beginning, but at some levels this story seems to work in every version, and this one, set in a starched mid-Victorian environment, suggests the lust that has to come out--and the attraction of the gutter.

Probably the most famous of all horror films, and one of the best.

Heavenly, corny nonsense.

A good picture, even if the theme music is "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."

This first American version, directed by Tod Browning, was adapted from a play based on the Bram Stoker novel, rather than from the novel itself, and it becomes too stagey.

One of Edna Ferber's heartfelt, numbskull treks through the hardships and glories of the American heritage.

It's more languidly paced than his mid 30s work, and the dialogue is spoken in stage rhythms, but there are inventive moments.

The aviation footage is still something to see, with great shots of zeppelin warfare...But the First World War story, involving two brothers...is plain awful.

It was a Broadway musical comedy, slightly adapted, and filmed in Astoria--and it looks stagey. But the film is too joyous for cavilling.

The point of the film gets to you, and though you may wince at the lines Maxwell Anderson wrote (every time he opens his heart, he sticks his poetic foot in it), you know what he means.

A London-set Hitchcock silent thriller that was in part reshot and in part dubbed to make it a sound film--and an unusually imaginative and innovative one.

The material hasn't been paced for the screen; there are dead spots (without even background music), but there are also a lot of funny verbal routines and a musical burlesque of Carmen, and Harpo, as a fiendish pickpocket, is much faster (and less aesthetic and self-conscious and innocent) than in the Brothers' later comedies.

When talkies were new, this was the musical that everyone went to see.

One of the greatest of all movies...Falconetti's Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film.

A near masterpiece...The story is told in a flowing, lyrical German manner that is extraordinarily sensual, yet is perhaps too self-conscious, too fable-like for American audiences.

Great as it undoubtedly is, it's not really a likable film; it's amazing, though--it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message.

The plunging and roving camera provides visceral thrills; ecstatic special effects capture the sacred (the Crucifixion) and the profane (combat in the Great War); a metaphysical framing device (starring Lillian Gish) raises human conflict to universal import; and Griffith’s trademark closeups lend a quivering lip or a trembling hand the tragic grandeur of historical cataclysm.

The director, Vincente Minnelli, stages an impressive romantic ball, but the whole movie is hopelessly overscaled.