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.