At 70, Hitchcock seems suddenly to have forgotten his own recipe. Topaz contains no chills, no fever—and most disappointing, no entertainment.

It relies almost exclusively on the celebrated eyes, ears, nose and throat of Streisand. Her musicianship remains irreproachable. But her mannerisms are so arch and calculated that one half expects to find a key implanted in her back.

It may be the first film in history that starts at the top, goes steadily downhill, and still stays interesting along the way.

Every character, every scene, is marred by the film's double view, which oscillates between sympathy and farce.

Like most criminals, however, the creators expend all their energies on the heist and not nearly enough building their characters.

So strongly does it challenge the usual commercial film techniques and themes that Hollywood, ever wary both of stylistic innovation and contemporary politics, may never recover. Socially and cinematically, Medium Cool is dynamite.

The film has refurbished the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer.

The Wild Bunch contains faults and mistakes, but its accomplishments are more than sufficient to confirm that Peckinpah, along with Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn, belongs with the best of the newer generation of American film makers.

It is a mark of Voight's intelligence that he works against his role's melodramatic tendencies and toward a central human truth. In the process, he and Hoffman bring to life one of the least likely and most melancholy love stories in the history of the American film.

The outcome of all this is about as predictable as the benumbing succession of autopomorphic gags. Connoisseurs of camp may enjoy watching Tomlinson ranting at the Volkswagen, but The Love Bug is surely the first film in which the actors (Jones, Michele Lee, Buddy Hackett) are so meticulously insipid that a car can handily steal the show.

If the result seems less a coherent story than a two-hour pot high, Submarine is still a breakthrough combination of the feature film and art's intimacy with the unconscious.

Comic-strip buffs, science-fiction fans and admirers of the human mammae will get a run for their money in Barbarella and will probably provide Barbarella with enough money for a run. Other moviegoers need take no notice.

This extended Streisand Special has done absolutely nothing to correct the flaws in the Broadway original.

It is in the transcendent strength of Joanne Woodward that the film achieves a classic stature. There is no gesture too minor for her to master.

These minor lapses, though, do not seriously affect the bewitching qualities of the film—which, in addition to being superb suspense, is a wicked argument against planned parenthood.

Playwright Neil Simon occasionally takes off his clowns' masks to show the humans beneath. In doing so, he has made his Odd Couple real people, with enough substance to cast shadows alongside the jokes.

Like Space Odyssey itself, the ambiguous ending is at once appropriate and wrong. It guarantees that the film will arouse controversy, but it leaves doubt that the film makers themselves knew precisely what they were flying at. Still, no film to date has come remotely near Odyssey's depiction of the limitless beauty and terror of outer space. In this 2-hr. 40-min. movie, only 47 minutes are taken up with dialogue. The rest of the time is occupied with demanding, brilliant material for the eye and brain. Thus, though it may fail as drama, the movie succeeds as visual art and becomes another irritating, dazzling achievement of Stanley Kubrick, one of the most erratic and original talents in U.S. cinema.

The screenplay, which begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama.

Rosenberg's treatment of evil, personified by the brutal prison guards, descends too often from portrayal to caricature. Still, there is enough left in the old theme to make Luke a prisoner of grace, and a picture of chilling dramatic power.

Unfortunately, there is nothing royal about Camelot's carious screen version. It has been brought crunchingly down to earth by the churlish touch of Director Joshua Logan.

Screenwriter Frederic Raphael has managed to preserve the book's broad vision while clarifying its bucolic speech. His most valuable ally is Director John Schlesinger (Darling), who displays the best sense of Victorian time and place since David Lean in Great Expectations, alternating his stars with a brilliant cast of minor players who serve as a Greek chorus in tragicomic peasant roles.

Like Disney's other adaptations of children's classics, The Jungle Book is based on the Kipling original in the same way that a fox hunt is based on foxes. Nonetheless, the result is thoroughly delightful.

Director Arthur Penn have elected to tell their tale of bullets and blood in a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque. Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film rides off'in all directions and ends up full of holes...The real fault with Bonnie and Clyde is its sheer, tasteless aimlessness.

No deep solutions are suggested in this subtle and meticulously observed study. Yet Director Norman Jewison has used his camera to extract a certain rough-cut beauty from each protagonist. He has shown, furthermore, that men can join hands out of fear and hatred and shape from base emotions something identifiable as a kind of love. In this he is immeasurably helped by performances from Steiger and Poitier that break brilliantly with black-white stereotype.

Director Robert Aldrich gets convincingly raw, tough performances in even the smallest roles.

Even the weak moments are saved by Poitier, who invests his role with a subtle warmth.

Even Connery seems uncomfortable and fatigued, as if he meant it when he said that this would be his last Bond film. It may just be an off year for 007; it may be that he has received too much ribbing from Casino Royale (TIME, May 12). But it could also be that the monumental Bond issue is at long last beginning to deflate.

Barefoot in the Park is one of the few plays to be reincarnated on-screen while playing on the Broadway stage. Happily, it loses little in transition.

It is propaganda, or was once, but it is so well done that it is chiefly propaganda for the human race.

With so many egos—including five directors—competing for attention, the picture soon degenerates into an incoherent and vulgar vaudeville.

Persona (the ancient Latin word for mask) is too deliberately difficult to rank with Bergman's best. But in an era when the director who dares to repeat himself is rare indeed—when the cinematic world is full of one-shot wonders, Bergman's consistency is itself refreshing.

Actor Eastwood, the sometime star of television's Rawhide, is certainly not paid by the word. In Fistful he hardly talks at all. Doesn't shave, either. Just drawls orders. Sometimes the bad guys drawl back. Just as tersely. Trouble is, after they stop talking, their lips keep moving. That's because the picture is dubbed. Like the villains, it was shot in Spain. Pity it wasn't buried there.

Seconds has moments, and that's too bad, in a way. But for its soft and flabby midsection, it might have been one of the trimmest shockers of the year.

By combining flamboyant suspense with a sunbaked slice of life and lots of good mean fun, Director Smight makes every clue a pleasure to follow.

Without insulting modern Africa, Naked Prey writes the wild poetry of its past in raw colors.

[Lean's] sentimental Zhivago is perhaps warm and rewarding entertainment rather than great art; yet it reaches that level of taste, perception and emotional fullness where a movie becomes a motion-picture event.

Though From Russia with Love remains the liveliest Bond opera to date, Thunderball is by all odds the most spectacular. Its script hasn't a morsel of genuine wit, but Bond fans, who are preconditioned to roll in the aisles when their hero merely asks a waiter to bring some beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon '55, will probably never notice.

By the time all the bets are in, Cincinnati Kid appears to hold a losing hand.

Though Director Robert Wise (West Side Story) has made capital of the show's virtues, he can do little to disguise its faults. In dialogue, song and story, Music still contains too much sugar, too little spice.

A bit much? Yes, but it's meant to be. Like Doctor No and From Russia with Love, the two previous Bond bombshells, this picture is a thriller exuberantly travestied. No doubt Goldfinger's formula for box-office gold contains entirely too much brass, but who cares? In scene after scene Director Guy Hamilton has contrived some hilariously horrible sight gags.

In this literal, beautiful, bountiful version of the most gilt-edged attraction in theater history, Jack Warner has miraculously managed to turn gold into gold.

Though overlong and sometimes over-cute, Mary Poppins is the drollest Disney film in decades, a feat of prestidigitation with many more lifts than lapses.

When an unknown director turns out a suspense melodrama as dreary and unconvincing as this, moviegoers revel in the thought of what it might have been if Hitchcock had done it. It is disconcerting to come away from Mamie feeling precisely the same way.

Perhaps the sole justification for turning a fine old movie into a just passable new one can be summed up as Angie Dickinson.

An intentional heehaw at whodunits, an uproarious parody that may become a classic of caricature...Sophisticated? Well, not really. But fast, smart, shrewdly directed and capably performed. And though the film will scarcely eradicate the sex and violence that encumber contemporary movies, it may at least persuade producers that sick subjects may be profitably proffered with a healthy laugh.

Transplanted from stage to screen, Enid Bagnold's witty, pitiless and elliptical high comedy yields only a withered bouquet of hearts and flowers. Made by Producer Ross Hunter, who customarily trafficks in Doris Daysies, the movie is all thumbs, none of them green.

Kubrick’s remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest, funniest movie of the post-war era.

What's going on is sort of confused. Director Stanley Donen (Indiscreet) apparently started out with a sensible idea: with Grant and Hepburn on the payroll and Paris for a setting, why not tell a love story? But somewhere along the production line, he decided to make a thriller instead. Then he turned the thriller into a sophisticated comedy of murders.

The film is a way-out, walleyed, wonderful exercise in cinema. It is also a social satire written in blood with a broadaxe.

In this movie version, directed by Robert Wise, the specter is slightly censored—what's left is just the usual commercial spirit. Whenever it appears, the violins on the sound track start to didder, doors open and shut by themselves, people stare about in terror and squeak: The house, it's alive! The picture, it's dead.

With accurate casting, a swift screenplay, and authentic German settings, Producer-Director John Sturges has created classic cinema of action. There is no sermonizing, no soul probing, no sex. The Great Escape is simply great escapism.

As drama and as cinema, Cleopatra is raddled with flaws. It lacks style both in image and in action. Never for an instant does it whirl along on wings of epic elan; generally it just bumps from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition.

The film is on the level, and the four principal actors—Newman, Neal, Douglas, and de Wilde—are so good that they might well form the nucleus of a cinematic repertory company. The point of the picture is as dry and nihilistic as a Panhandle dust storm.

Director Alfred Hitchcock goes nattering on with an hour of some silly plot-boiling about a flirtatious society girl (Tippi Hedren), a lovelorn schoolmarm (Suzanne Pleshette), an Oedipus wreck (Rod Taylor) and a pair of lovebirds. Hitchcock addicts will just be getting jittery for their first fix of gore when it suddenly becomes clear that the birds is coming: man's feathered friends set themselves to wipe out an entire village on the California coast. Why did the birds go to war? Hitchcock does not tell, and the movie flaps to a plotless end.

One of the year's most fetching and affecting pictures.

The performances are daring and assured, especially Lansbury's holy terror of Momism and Harvey's snide, pathetic pawn, brainwashed by both KGB AND CIA. [21 March 1988, p.84]

Cleo from 5 to 7, acclaimed in France as "the most beautiful film ever made about Paris," is a curiously, spuriously brilliant attempt to contemporize the legend of Death and the Maiden.

At every point, moreover, the actors are supported by Bergman's impressive cinematic skill. His script is a marvel of elision, speaking most eloquently in what it does not say. His photography is both poetic and worshipful. In every frame of the film the still light of subarctic summer silently instills an aspect of eternity, a sense of the presence of God.

Victim has a neat plot, deft direction by Basil Dearden, and the sort of grum good manners one expects of the British in these trying situations. It also has a careful performance by Bogarde, and it pursues with eloquence and conviction the case against an antiquated statute.

On the whole, Director Kramer has almost arrogantly exceeded his judicial warrant. He has also crudely mismanaged both actors and camera, and has carelessly permitted several reels of fat to accumulate around the movie's middle.

Unhappily, the film shares a serious flaw in the essential conception of the show; both are founded on a phony literary analogy and on some potentially vicious pseudo-sociology... Nevertheless, by sheer theatrical intensity, the film transcends its specious materials.

Director Martin Ritt (The Long, Hot Summer) has obviously sought for artistic truth in this film, but the only general truth that Blues propounds is one that might have prevented this production: expatriates are a pretty dull bunch.

The fun in this moody, pounding, overlong, rewarding bring-down of a film is seeing Eddie’s curled lip of contempt, which he flashes at all the suckers, freeze into a rictus when he gets his.

The filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious.

Surprisingly, the film is delightful—mostly because of 15-year-old Hayley Mills, the blonde button nose who played the endearing delinquent in Tiger Bay. The important thing about a children's picture is that children like it. If they are old enough to enjoy some mild mush and young enough to know childhood's most prized secret—that all adults are boobs—they should like this one.

Flubber provides fuel for a very funny piece of hyperbolic humor in the grand American tradition of Paul Bunyan, and Director Robert (Kidnapped) Stevenson and Scriptwriter Bill (The Shaggy Dog) Walsh get plenty of bounce out of every ounce.

It is the wittiest, most charming, least pretentious cartoon feature Walt Disney has ever made.

It's a great show for what the Disney organization has called "the under-twelve sector," and even though it runs long enough (2 hrs. 6 min.) to make the over-twelve sector squirm.

An expert, sensitive study of the fateful tie that inevitably binds the strong to the weak, this film may well be the best western of 1960.

Much as it owes to Kubrick, Spartacus owes even more to its script, which Scenarist Trumbo has adorned with humor, eloquence, sophistication and a corrosive irony. Above all, despite his personal predilection for the 20th century's most crushing political orthodoxy, Trumbo has imparted to Spartacus a passion for freedom and the men who live and die for it —a passion that transcends all politics and persons in the fearful, final image of the dying gladiator, the revolutionary on the cross.

What is offered instead is merely gruesome. The trail leads to a sagging, swamp-view motel and to one of the messiest, most nau seating murders ever filmed. At close range, the camera watches every twitch, gurgle, convulsion and hemorrhage in the process by which a living human becomes a corpse...The nightmare that follows is expertly gothic, but the nausea never disappears.

Director Wilder handles his players superbly. He holds an amazingly tight rein on Actress MacLaine, which gives her performance a solidity she seldom achieves. Yet it is Actor Lemmon, surely the most sensitive and tasteful young comedian now at work in Hollywood, who really cuts the mustard and carries the show.

What matters most and comes off best in the picture is the great scenes of spectacle, particularly the chariot race, a superbly handled crescendo of violence that ranks as one of the finest action sequences ever shot. All by itself it would be worth the price of admission.

Caught in the ecstasy of collective creation, a handful of earnest amateurs have almost accidentally produced a flawed but significant piece of folk art.

Smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining, North by Northwest wears its implausibilities lightly, bobs swiftly past colored picture postcard backgrounds from Madison Avenue to South Dakota's Mount Rushmore, the U.N. Secretariat to George Washington's wattles.

At 160 minutes, Anatomy is longer than the subject warrants, but the pace seldom slackens—thanks to the competence of Director Otto Preminger.

Lipsticked, mascaraed and tilting at a precarious angle ("How do they walk in these things?"), Actor Lemmon digs out most of the laughs in the script. As for Marilyn, she's been trimmer, slimmer and sexier in earlier pictures.

Unhappily, Producer Walt Disney tells his shaggy-dog story so doggedly that he soon runs it into the pound.

The drawing in Sleeping Beauty is crude: a compromise between sentimental, crayon-book childishness and the sort of cute, commercial cubism that tries to seem daring but is really just square. The hero and heroine are sugar sculpture, and the witch looks like a clumsy tracing from a Charles Addams cartoon. The plot often seems to owe less to the tradition of the fairy tale than to the formula of the monster movie.

In his four earlier films, Williams seemed to need a warmup of two backward steps before he could take one step forward, but at least the movement was visible and real. This time, Adapter-Director Richard Brooks has been able to put very little motion in his motion picture. His Cat is a formaldehyded tabby that sits static while layer after layer of its skin is peeled off, life after life of its nine lives unsentimentally destroyed. But in Williams, Brooks has a rare playwright who can make his static electric, and a blinkered grope toward the past as suspenseful as a headlong crash into the future.

Gigi is dressed to kill, but if all the French finery impresses the customers, it also smothers the story.

The old master, now a slave to television, has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares.

Another little nugget mined by Walt Disney, one of Hollywood's most successful prospectors. It comes from Disney's thoroughly proved mother lode: movies for the kids that adults will stay to enjoy themselves.

It is a whale (2 hr. 41 min.) of a story, and in the telling of it, British Director David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations) does a whale of a job. He shows a dazzlingly musical sense and control of the many and involving rhythms of a vast composition. He shows a rare sense of humor and a feeling for the poetry of situation; and he shows the even rarer ability to express these things, not in lines but in lives. Most important of all, he understands the real nature of the story he is telling.

I found myself -- all twitchy intellectualism aside -- liking it enormously. There's more to Stevens's exteriors than those great shots of the looming ranch house. He had learned John Ford's trick of keeping the horizon low in the frame, and there are literally dozens of long, wide shots that are more than merely awesome. They suggest an emptiness that stumbling, ill-educated, materialistic people will somehow fill with something -- oil derricks, bragging Texas talk, reactionary politics. [Reprinted in the NY Times: 25 May 2003, p.21]

Director LeRoy has been overly faithful to the play script. Actors march on and off the screen just as if they were making stage entrances and exits.

The strong implication of this picture is that the real delinquency is not juvenile but parental. The point may be obvious and only a part of the problem, but it is well worth propounding. The best thing about the film, in any case, is James Dean, the gifted actor who made his movie start in East of Eden, and was killed last month at 24 in an automobile accident. In this, the second of his three movie roles—Giant will probably be released next year—there is further evidence that Actor Dean was a player of unusual sensibility and charm.

In spite of its age and the fact that its 145-minute mass is sometimes dragging, Oklahoma! hollers itself home as a handsome piece of entertainment.

Walt Disney has for so long parlayed gooey sentiment and stark horror into profitable cartoons that most moviegoers are apt to be more surprised than disappointed to discover that the combination somehow does not work this time. The songs, by Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke, are naggingly reminiscent of other tunes, but none of the cartoon creatures—except, possibly, a whistling beaver playing a bit part—have a fraction of the lovable charm of those in Disney's earlier fables.

More important, however, than the letter of the film is the spirit. It seizes a burning issue, and lets the sparks fall where they may.

A big fat yam of a picture richly candied with VistaVision (Paramount's answer to CinemaScope), Technicolor, tunes by Irving Berlin, massive production numbers, and big stars. Unfortunately, the yam is still a yam.

Gold, in a word, is guaranteed at the boxoffice, and this is never less than glittering entertainment, but somehow a certain measure of lead has found its way into the formula.

There is never an instant, in fact, when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material: script, camera, cutting, props, the handsome set constructed from his ideas, the stars he has Hitched to his vehicle.

Kazan succeeds in producing a shrewd piece of screen journalism, a melodrama in the grand manner of Public Enemy and Little Caesar. But he fails to do anything more serious—largely because he tries too hard. In searching for the general meaning in little lives, Director Kazan has trained his lens down fine on small events; he has too often watched his characters through the magnifying glass of special prejudice—the old sentimental prejudice that ordinary people are wonderful no matter what they do.

Dial M is starred with fine scenes and good performances. Though played as contemporary melodrama, it somehow manages to reflect the gaslight magic of turn-of-the-century London.

Ornamented with some bright and lilting tunes, it is a lively feature-length Technicolor excursion into a world that glows with an exhilarating charm and a gentle joyousness.

Singin’ in the Rain might have been the last musical of the ’50s to convey irrepressible optimism through what Alan Greenspan would call “irrational exuberance.” But what exuberance! Look at it and try to think of a contemporary picture that has half as much vivacity, fun, joy. When your movie-loving grandpa says, “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he is surely thinkin’ of Singin’ in the Rain.

Operating under such handicaps of plot, but with the help of some amusing dialogue, Nightclub Comic Danny Thomas puts remarkable warmth into a portrait of Kahn.