The plot is sometimes too odd, the style too strained, but the movie holds you just the same. Jack Nicholson plays skillfully and honestly against the sure-fire pathos of the alienated loner, the fallen angel in life’s game of musical chairs.

Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist’s optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in.

Because Simon is dealing with a place — and a commonplace — rather than people, it is only too easy to see the jokes coming long before they arrive. We feel the boredom of anticipation rather than the shock of recognition, and sometimes the jokes themselves ring false.

The method of this film, however, in both its cutting and mise-en-scene ultimately denies any social relevance by creating a limbo surrounding the fantastic characters so that the film loses all sense of reality in both its characters and settings. [16 Jul 1970, p.50]

One of the funniest social comedies of its period.

Let It Be is a very lovely spectacle--a film to make you smile, and with its .16mm tawny colors and pastels, one that invites repeated viewings. [11 Jun 1970, p.55]

Honest but stupid. [19 Mar 1970, p.54]

Mart Crowley's brilliantly bitchy lines are worth standing on line for, and the original off-Broadway cast stands up well on the screen. [28 May 1970, p.53]

George C. Scott's full-bodied performance and Franklin Schaffner's chillingly stylized direction will satisfy neither the doves nor the hawks, but it does reverberate with paradoxical impressions. [28 May 1970, p.60]

For Southern to be funny at all, jokes must be carried too far and decorum exploded at every turn. Even if McGrath were inclined to handle the material this way, mush of it has dated, and the screenplay by Southern, McGrath, and Peter Sellers does not so much update it as displace it. [26 Feb 1970, p.60]

Shallower than the level of vermouth in a Claude Rains Martini, FMBD nonetheless has a wonderful breadth of characterization, delightful thrills, and philosophical speculations to boot. [30 Apr 1970, p.60]

Despite its horror or rather partly because of it, The Honeymoon Killers is memorable more as a deliriously freakish love story than as a grand guignol.

A slight, sentimental movie that is clearly to be enjoyed rather than respected. [29 Jan 1970, p.54]

With On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Peter Hunt has directed what to my mind is the most engaging and exciting James Bond film.

Reasonably effective entertainment. [11 Dec 1969, p.55]

The film is intelligently realistic about all the interlocking hypocrisies of the amateur code, and there is nothing fakey-humanistic about the sexual encounters with a ski-manufacturer's secretary (Camilla Sparv) and the unbilled but unforgettable girl back home always ready, willing, and able to hope in the back seat for auld lang syne.

Terence Rattigan has jazzed up the screenplay with a laborious melodrama but unfortunately he has not distorted it beyond recognition. That there remain strains of the understated wit of the original dialogue is a dubious blessing--like patches of lace in a sweatsuit. [06 Nov 1969, p.52]

It is depressing to see $20 million poured down the drain in praise of a stiff upper lip which keeps mankind on the rack from Lagos to Mai Ly. [18 Dec 1969, p.63]

The movie has its moments, namely in two expert performances. [13 Nov 1969, p.60]

The vocabulary of film, with its subliminal grammar is even more susceptible to corruption than mere words. And Coppola, one of the most technically proficient of the new directors, proves himself, once again, a master of the visual cliche. [25 Sep 1969, p.55]

Easy Rider displays an assortment of excellences that lifts it above the run and ruck of its genre. [03 Jul 1969, p.45]

Petroni’s direction is crude but effective.

At once strongly metaphoric and shamelessly visceral, Peckinpah’s saga of outlaws on the lam is arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s—a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.

True Grit is well worth seeing, but it is hardly a monument either to Wayne or to the western. [21 Aug 1969, p.37]

There doesn't seem to be enough plot for a minute commercial, much less 100 minutes plus of madcap farce. [12 Jun 1969, p.53]

The performances and presences of Voight and Hoffman are so extraordinarily affecting that their scenes together generate more emotional power than the dramatic wiring of their relationship deserves. [29 May 1969, p.47]

The film doesn't succeed even on its own dubious terms, the phony soliloquies of the salesmen while driving ostensibly alone being particularly disconcerting and unconvincing and ultimately unrevealing. [01 May 1969, p.48]

Unfortunately, Support Your Local Sheriff is basically serial material that in straining to be something more ends up being something less. [08 May 1969, p.47]

Grave is the fourth entry in Hammer’s Dracula rotation but doesn’t possess a whiff of being a retread, given its innovative formal choices and series-best direction. [24 Jul 2018]

Formally spartan, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966) is dense with cool fury.

Though there's considerable footage of hippie activity (crafting kites, sleeping) and moments of prelapsarian frisson (a cop warns that "there's talk of the Hell's Angels coming down"), the film is resolutely performance-driven.

Up until 1968, horror had been escapist. But Night of the Living Dead made horror serious business.

However familiar, it delivers like a shorted slot machine.

All told, and in giant widescreen, it's only blood-red adolescent fun, but it blooms like Douglas Sirk with a Gatling gun compared to the teenage demographic's current fare. Matrix, schmatrix: This is the season's supreme party movie.

Point Blank never makes too much sense. But the forward momentum of Lee Marvin's mysterious vendetta against the skyscraper underworld manages to overcome Boorman's laborious exposition. [19 Oct 1967, p.31]

The War Wagon is good for a few laughs and some spectacle while John Wayne and Kirk Douglas are taking Bruce Cabot and an outlandishly armored wagon apart. [14 Sep 1967, p.31]

Gene Saks directs his first film so clumsily that he even muffs Mike Nichol’s exploitation of the climbing the stairs gag that kept Neil Simon’s feeble farce running for 79 years on Broadway.

Things pick up a little bit when Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen stumble into the scene, but the total experience remains boringly incoherent.

Welles displays here a sensibility from the '30s and '40s when choices, however anguished, still seemed morally meaningful. [30 Mar 1967, p.35]

Ronald Neame's civilized anemia is appropriate enough for the direction of material that is going in no direction in particular. [23 Feb 1967, p.23]

A prize ‘60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni’s what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate—if not ponder.

Directed by anyone else, Masculine Feminine--one of three movies that Godard made in his peak year, 1966--would be a masterpiece. For the young JLG it's business as usual.

To cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heart-breaking and magnificent Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- the story of a donkey's life and death in rural France -- is the supreme masterpiece by one of the greatest of 20th-century filmmakers.

Nichols has actually committed all the classic errors of the sophisticated stage director let loose on the unsophisticated movies. For starters, he has underestimated the power of the spoken word in his search for visual pyrotechnics.

Just when you think you’ve pinned down what precisely Shakespeare Wallah is, it becomes something else before your eyes.

Along with Raoul Coutard's radiant cinematography, what makes the film extraordinary is Karina, the pure curves of her face a contradiction to the marionette angularity of her body.

Juliet is never less than eye-catching, but is rarely more.

A pleasure to watch from beginning to end. [21 Oct 1965, p.21]

Help does not indicate that Lester has depleted his bag of tricks, but rather that he is too addicted to fragmentation for its own sake. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]

The Ipcress File was reasonably entertaining while I was watching it, but after it was over I felt I'd been had... Among the tiresome directorial tricks in The Ipcress File is the repetitively off-angle anti-climax with the heavies feeding parking meters, hibernating in libraries, and plotting at band concerts. Nothing happens most of the time, and this is supposed to be funny and ironic.

Pleasantly inoffensive. [29 Jul 1965, p.8]

The spectacle of people in Hollywood trying to do something different in a western at this late date is curiously reassuring. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]

A pretentious parable that manages to shrivel into drivel.

Pulse-pounding thriller.

Garner plays the scales of cynicism so gracefully in this anti-war gem, he makes them sound like a symphony.

No previous rocksploitation film had ever done so splendid a job of selling its performers.

Considerably weaker than The Nutty Professor. [10 Sep 1964, p.17]

Mixing techniques as surely as it mixes class (graceful dolly shots are placed side by side with the handheld photography), the picture's clever formalist juxtapositions evoke the hysterical confusion of a culture in upheaval.

A triumph of bounce over banality. [19 Mar 1964, p.12]

The hard-charging originality of the screenplay—the equivalent of turning "The Hot Zone" into a Farrelly comedy—suggests a deficient legacy of credit to Terry Southern's corner.

The director's deepest instincts are less epic than dramatic, with the result that he gets sidetracked more often than his errant hero. The picturesque is gained too often at the expense of the picaresque, and the contour of a legend is obscured time and again by the pointless intimacy of a close-up. [09 Jan 1964, p.12]

Despite the rough edges, you feel you’re in the hands of someone who enjoys telling a story, and knows how to do it — even when the story’s a disposable one such as this.

It is not even bad enough to be perversely amusing. Liz's first entrance is grotesque enough to prepare us for that high point of self-parody when she asks Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) if he smells anything burning as the library of Alexandria goes up in smpke, but there are not enough of these pungent moments to relieve the soul-destroying tedium of little people lost on big sets in the most expensive session of hide-and-seek ever to masquerade as a movie. [20 June 1963, p.13]

By any interpretation, Donovan's Reef is a beautiful example of cinematic art, and the atavistic desire to let the movie sweep over the spectator without disruptive analysis is at least understandable. [01 Aug 1963, p.13]

Jaws before the world was ready, Hitch’s much misappreciated follow-up to Psycho is arguably the greatest of all disaster films—a triumph of special effects, as well as the fountainhead of what has become known as gross-out horror.

A film that storms where most biopics respectfully tiptoe.

Kubrick goes through the motions with a hula hoop and the munching of potato chips, but there is nothing intuitive or abandoned about the man-nymphet relationship. The Director's heart is apparently elsewhere. [05 Jul 1962, p.11]

Jules and Jim is that rarity of rarities, a genuinely romantic film. [03 May 1962, p.11]

Kurosawa's imagery is alway exciting. [25 Oct 1962, p.16]

No thrill, no suspense, no direction, bad in every way. [31 Aug 1961, p.8]

It's precisely Malle's omnivorous appetite that makes his first feature, adapted from a policier, so delectable, one stuffed with many sumptuous sights and sounds.

In one movie, at least, the ethical baseline (heisted, you could argue, from "Sweet Smell of Success") gave Fellini's roaming, cluttered mise-en-scène a chilling gravity he could never genuinely locate again.

Breathless is pure, it is moral, it is true. It doesn't impose anything on man and it doesn't distort man: it studies man, humbly without pretensions. [13 Jul 1961, p.13]

Few other directors can get so much violent power from their landscapes and their people. No image is boring. [01 Feb 1962, p.11]

The boredom of British film realism is indescribable. I was yawning, and turning around, and fidgeting--what an experience! [08 Dec 1960, p.11]

Psycho should be seen at least three times by any discerning film-goer, the first time for the sheer terror of the experience, and on this occasion I fully agree with Hitchcock that only a congenital spoilsport would reveal the plot; the second time for the macabre comedy inherent in the conception of the film; and the third for all the hidden meanings and symbols lurking beneath the surface of the first American movie since “Touch of Evil” to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films. [This was Mr. Sarris's first appearance in the Voice.]

Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.

Fifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country.

A comedy that is subtle, biting, observing, and above all, personal. [12 Nov 1958, p.6]

Max von Sydow gives a performance of a high order as the knight who returns from the Crusades to find his country at the mercy of plague and witch hunts.

The 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not a good adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play of the same name. But as a portrayal of the depths of loneliness we create for ourselves, and an example of the power of star performance, it’s a great film.

Gigi has more imaginative use of cinema than all our recent pseudo-realist movies put together.

The great merits and great defects of the age-old Anglo-American jury system are examined with conscientiousness and considerable drama. [22 May 1957, p.6]

Basically, this is slick magazine stuff, pretty trashy, but so entertainingly and professionally done that you can't help having one hell of a good time. [20 Feb 1957, p.6]

Key to Giant‘s enduring appeal is the meshing of outsize stars with Ferber’s characters: Closeted sex symbol Hudson’s towering Bick fills the big boots of his ranching family while struggling with the demands of traditional masculine authority. The taboo-breaking Taylor is the seductive, whip-smart Leslie, an assured reformer who views the injustices visited upon the ranch’s Mexican workers with maternal concern...And then there’s Dean’s most mannered, complex performance: Jett is at once transparent and enigmatic, hardening with age while the other characters mature. The actor’s death — a year before release — adds a keen poignancy to the character’s lost potential.

Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars.

The bold and vivid colors of the paintings themselves and the sets and landscapes contribute heavily to the film's dramatic impact. [10 Jul 1957, p.8]

So you have here a film version of a chilling novel and interestingly repellent stage play that defeats its own purpose with a static recording of the stage business and some of the most elaborate eye-popping and facial mugging since the last effort by the Three Stooges. [12 Dec 1956, p.5]