Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

The fact that we experience Travis’s need for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the quality of consummation, makes Taxi Driver one of the few truly modern horror films.

One of the best 'New York' movies ever made.

Peckinpah's poetic, corkscrew vision of the modern world, claustrophobically exciting.

Kubrick suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable. The film says that people are disgusting but things are lovely. And a narrator (Michael Hordern) tells you what's going to happen before you see it.

It's a wonderfully full and satisfying movie, with superb performances by Connery and Caine.

The story and the acting make the film emotionally powerful. And Nicholson, looking punchy, tired, and baffled--and not on top of his character (as he is often is)--lets you see into him, rather than controlling what he lets you see.

Spacious, leisurely, and with elaborate period re-creations of Louisiana in the 30s, this first feature directed by the young screenwriter Walter Hill is unusually effective pulp, perhaps even great pulp.

Sembène depicts a corrupt system that replaced white dictators and profiteers with black ones; the symbolic ending, a glimmer of revolutionary hope, is as gratifying as it is implausible.

Rarely have high spirits and theatrical energy seemed like such a tragic waste; an era and its myths seem to be dying on-screen in real time.

A masterwork of montage, a breathlessly frenzied collage of disparate sources that conjure the unholy tempest of a great man and a great mind at full gallop.

Sydney Pollack doesn't have a knack for action pulp; he gets some tension going in this expensive spy thriller, but there's no real fun in it.

Under the guise of a Socialist parable about the economic determinism of personal behavior (class interests determine sexual choice, etc.) the writer-director, Lina Wertmuller, has actually introduced a new version of the story of Eve, the spoiler.

The funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen.

When the actors begin to talk (which they do incessantly), the flat-footed dialogue and the amateurish acting (especially by the secondary characters) take one back to the low-budget buffoonery of Maria Montez and Turhan Bey.

The tone is too playful, too bright. Is the heiress herself meant to be a treasure? Is she meant to be charmingly klutzy? You can't tell.

Michael Ritchie's direction is highly variable in quality, but he's a whiz at catching details of frazzled behaviour.

A mosaic that never comes together.

Low-budget sci-fi, from an often amusing suspense script by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith, directed by Paul Bartel in his ingratiatingly tacky, sophomoric manner. Bartel seems to have an instinctive kinky comic-book style; the picture rips along, and there's a flip craziness about it - it's an ideal drive-in movie.

Hal Ashby has the deftness to keep us conscious of the whirring pleasures of the carnal-farce structure and yet to give it free play. This was the most virtuoso example of sophisticated, kaleidoscopic face that American moviemakers had yet come up with; frivolous and funny, it carries a sense of heedless activity, of a craze of dissatisfaction.

100% pure-plastic adolescent male fantasy.

Lester's decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don't want joke, joke, joke.

This Anglo-American production doesn't go in for romance or comedy; it sticks to suspense, and it's really good at what it does (except for a rather tacky escape by air).

It's so tastefully tame that there's no supsense.

Script lacks satiric insolence, and the picture grinds on humorlessly. The villain Christopher Lee's fanged smile is the only attraction.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's rowdy dream of newspaper life, first produced on the stage in 1928, seems to be foolproof, and the structure still stands up in this version, directed by Billy Wilder. But something singular and marvelous has been diminished to the sloppy ordinary.

The movie doesn’t stick together in one’s head; this thing is like some junky fairground show—a chamber of horrors with skeletons that jump up.

It isn’t a dialogue comedy; it’s visceral and lower. It’s what used to be called a crazy comedy, and there hasn’t been this kind of craziness on the screen in years. It’s a film to go to when your rhythm is slowed down and you’re too tired to think. You can’t bring anything to it (Brooks’ timing is too obvious for that) ; you have to let it do everything for you, because that’s the only way it works.