[Olivier's] greatest Shakespearean movie. [27 Feb 2004]

Conceived as froth with an edge and a smash on both counts. [11 May 2007, p.4D]

Clunkily stagebound but gorgeous to look at in VistaVision and Technicolor. [07 Oct 2005]

A flop in its day despite France's rhapsodic reaction, but a movie I've always loved even before its knockout finale, which even detractors admit redeems a lot. [29 Jun 2007, p.10E]

Consistently fun, and even sporadically powerful. [08 Dec 1989, p.3D]

The movie, a Technicolor remake of Gable's own 1932 smash Red Dust...is among Gable's best, and it also has underrated Gardner's best performance. [23 Jun 2006, p.8E]

With songs Triplets, Dancing in the Dark and Shine on Your Shoes, it's my fave musical. [18 Mar 2005, p.6E]

One of the greatest mixes ever of gritty war drama and roll-on-the-floor hilarity. [29 Mar 2002, p.2A]

A much better version and one of the most popular 3-D movies. [03 May 2005]

It's probably the weakest Alfred Hitchcock of the '50s. But that may be the greatest decade any director ever had, so this isn't the slam it seems. [28 Sep 2004]

It has always been around and easy to take for granted. But its lack of pretension weathers years nicely. [09 Mar 2007, p.12D]

With enough plot to take in a mercy killing and massive train wreck, Cecil B. DeMille's extravaganza is often cited as the worst movie to have taken the Oscar, as if a lot of lackluster picks (from Cimarron to Crash) were half as entertaining. [07 Apr 2008, p.10A]

Bernard Herrmann's great score punches up a brutal urban crime pic suddenly turned tender romance between a tough cop (Robert Ryan) and a blind woman (Ida Lupino). [21 Jul 2006, p.14D]

Filmed during that great early period of his career when he played heels better than anyone ever had, Kirk Douglas is the morally tortured 21st Precinct New York cop who lets unbridled hatred for street scum poison his marriage. [28 Oct 2005]

Dealing tangentially with Las Vegas gambling's formative years (lots of matte work here of mountains in the desert), this crackling melodrama was inspired by Bugsy Siegel's relationship with Virginia Hill. [17 Jul 2005]

Humor, poignancy and social criticism converge for an even better movie than the recent one it brings to mind: Gosford Park. [23 Jan 2004]

A timeless story. [07 Oct 2005, p.8E]

You have to love any movie in which Robert Mitchum sells trains in a toy store and Janet Leigh looks the greatest she ever did on screen this side of Jet Pilot. [19 Dec 2008, p.6E]

Under Capricorn is still stigmatized by its terrible reviews and whopping financial losses, but with one of Ingrid Bergman's best performances, a grabber setting (1831 Sydney) and Technicolor cinematography by the era's greatest color specialist (The Red Shoes' Jack Cardiff), a lot of current movies should be as lacking. [27 Jun 2003]

Pearson's scenes with Garfield are among the most supercharged ever. [28 May 2004, p.6E]

Modest yet pleasing musical pastiches that typified post-war Disney. [05 Jun 1998, p.6E]

The first movie Montgomery Clift made (but second released) was Howard Hawks' all-time Western Red River. In the interim, director Fred Zinnemann stole some thunder by showcasing the actor in this semi-documentary about European children left homeless and without parents after World War II, filmed on location in the then-U.S. Occupied Zone of Germany. [23 Oct 2009, p.3D]

It's only a mild Disney package, despite a dose of Donald Duck dyspepsia. [18 July 1997, p.3D]

Burt Lancaster's second movie also gave Hume Cronyn his most memorable screen role. [31 Jan 1996, p.5D]

David Lean's classic Cliffs Notes telescoping of Charles Dickens took Oscars for Guy Green's black-and-white photography and John Bryan's art direction, and you know right off that this is going to be a visual stunner as you watch fleeing prisoner Magwitch (Finlay Currie) dart across Green's spookily lit marshes. [22 Jan 1999]

Of all the pop-psychiatry movies from the 1940s, Spellbound survives its kitschy elements -- wallows in them, even -- to remain as fascinating as expected from a collaboration that was contentious. [04 Oct 2002]

A Casablanca-influenced love story set against a French Resistance backdrop in Martinique. [07 Nov 2003]

This Preston Sturges classic cast Hutton as a small-town girl who gets pregnant by a soldier whose name she can't remember. No film better channels her comic energy or makes better use of her obvious yearning for acceptance. [19 Jun 2000]