The dramatic fusion of physical and administrative power captures nothing less than the bloody forging of modernity.

The story worms further into the guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly modern: its surrealism. [29 Nov 1993, p.148]

The story, about the friendship between two lonely, vagrant ranch hands--the small, bedraggled, intelligent George and the simpleminded giant Lennie--is gimmicky and highly susceptible to parody, but it is emotionally effective just the same.

Eustache's method resembles the static randomness of the Warhol-Morrissey pictures, but the randomness here is not a matter of indifference; it's a conscious goal.

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

Finely framed by the cinematographer Kate McCullough, The Quiet Girl is an idyll, yet its placid surface is puckered by anxiety.

The project lacks the variety of sensuous pleasures that a great movie has to provide.

The scenes are often unshaped, and so rudderless that the meanings don't emerge. Rowlands externalizes schizophrenic dissolution; she fragments before our eyes. But her prodigious performance is enough for half a dozen tours de force--it's exhausting.

Seldom, it is fair to say, does Kaufman just want to have fun, but as he lifts the spell of his gloom a surprising beauty breaks through.

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.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

It's a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky, but it's genuinely sparkling.

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.

Barnard's film, as if nervous of being felled by the straightforward, sinewy thump of Dunbar's writing, ducks and weaves in a series of sly approaches. [2 May 2011, p. 89]

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.

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

A magically powerful film.

Moving and impressive in a big-Hollywood-picture-way.

Azor is Fontana’s first feature, and what’s impressive is how coolly he avoids the temptation to put on a big show, preferring more delicate tactics.

Most fruitful of all is the husbandry of the gags, some of which are planted early in the film and must wait for more than an hour before they bloom.

Disney-style kitsch. It's technologically sophisticated, but with just about all the simpering old Disney values in place.

A Serious Man, like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through.

Small-scaled and limited, Capote is nevertheless the most intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film ever made about a writer's working method and character--in this case, a mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice, and mendacity.

Every gag is girded with fear. The humor is so black that it might have been pumped out of the ground.

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

About Dry Grasses may be unhurried, with languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but it is also nimble, alert, and alive in ways that seem to have taken Ceylan himself by surprise.

Let no one, in their understandable eagerness to praise Leigh as an anatomist of the human condition, downplay just how entertaining Hard Truths is. Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force.

Not since "Fargo" (1996) has [McDormand] found a character of such fibre. She doesn't pitch it to us, still less try to make it palatable; she seems to state Mildred, presenting her as a given fact, like someone unrolling a map.