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.