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.

Hoppers is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same.

A much better movie about the South during the Civil War than “Gone with the Wind”--visionary, erotic, and tragic where the older movie is flossy, merely ambitious and self-important. [22 & 29 December 2003, p. 166]

This is a movie of great spirit and considerable charm. It’s about the giddiness of promise--the awakening of young talent, after years of the Depression, to a moment when anything seems possible.

Eastwood has become tauntingly tough-minded: “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he seems to be saying. And, with the remorselessness of age, he follows Chris Kyle’s rehabilitation and redemption back home, all the way to their heartbreaking and inexplicable end.

Nichols must have a cummerbund around his head: the directing is constricted – there's no visual inventiveness or spontaneity. And in his hands the script has no conviction. [9 Jan 1989]

Whatever sense of obsession drives Robert’s art and whatever emotional freedom inspires Miles’s, neither is found in the cinematic aesthetic of “Funny Pages”; the movie is merely a conventional vessel for Kline’s ardent ideas, which pass through the cinema without leaving a trace.

A superb martial discipline has ended in a commercial movie genre--not the worst fate in the world, but the comic irony of it is of little interest to a director bent on glorification. [9 Sept. 2013, p.90]

The movie was not written for Eastwood, but it still seems to be all about him--his past characters, his myth, his old role as a dispenser of raw justice.

Despite the shafts of black comedy, and a sudden ruckus of violence, The Killer is oddly calculated and cooked up; it’s easier to be excited and amused by the proceedings than to be stirred or convinced.

The farce situations are pushed too broadly, and have a sanctimonious patriotic veneer, but this first American film directed by Billy Wilder was a box-office hit.

Covino’s technique, for all its finesse, has a mechanistic quality that soon turns deadening. The movie is less a screwball comedy than a screwball contraption—a madcap farce that the screenwriters have reduced to a math problem.

He stages the clashes of idiosyncratic characters that give the enterprise its life while observing the infinitesimal details of which that life is made—how to make new friends, how to hook up cable TV—as well as the ethereally intimate connections that result.

If Cars is something of a letdown, that is not because of the moral messages that it delivers but because of the heavy hand with which it cranks them out.

Almodóvar - whose penchant for narrative complexity grows ever deeper - latches on to the idea of personal history as a puzzle that refuses to be solved.

In disclosing the secret of engineering, Mann also offers a passionate and personal word on the secret of the cinema itself.

The latest showpiece for computer animation, with all the contoured, suspiciously gleaming perfection that this entails.

The best reason to see The Square is the remarkable Terry Notary, last seen in “War for the Planet of the Apes.” Here he plays a performance artist named Oleg, who brings simian havoc, way beyond his brief, to a glamorous event, roaring and thumping among the tuxedos and the gowns. If only he had done the same at Cannes.

The pugnacity of Walsh’s comic direction infuses turbulently free enterprise with tragedy.

I can't help wishing that Chabrol would, just once, cast off his own good narrative manners--do away with the irritations of a film like A Girl Cut in Two, which is never more than semi-plausible, and arrange his passions, as the elderly Buñuel did in "That Obscure Object of Desire," into shameless, surreal anagrams of wit and lust.

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

The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy.

A fascinating, inspiring view of a filmmaker whose methods are as boldly original as his movie.

The showdown in Houston, for instance, comes across as tacky rather than triumphant, its sexual politics smothered in salesmanship, and redeemed only by the ferocity of Stone’s demeanor as she puts away yet another smash.

The movie is sheer hurtling mechanism - the entire world in motion - and it's great silly fun.

If you doubt that any movie could pay more exhaustive attention to its heroine than Spencer does, try Hive.

Vibrantly intelligent and tough-minded bio-pic.

No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra can - but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.