NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941)
W.C. Fields in his prime...The film has also its horror: an erstwhile ingenue named Gloria Jean. You can't just shut your eyes because she sings.
The trouble with a "magnetic" actor like Richard Boone is that when he's bad you can't take your eyes off him—he's magnetically bad. (1970)
Violence that makes you feel afraid has replaced sex as what's offensive, exploitative, dirty; since the end of the war, particularly, this kind of violence has become pornographic—it's as if we thought we could shove muggers and urban guerrillas under the counter. (1978)
It's as if David Lynch were saying, "It's a frightening world out there, and"—tapping his head—"in here." (1984)
We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves. (1989)
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN isn't infuriating; it doesn't have enough power for that. It's just ostentatious, about its own supposed intelligence. It's pedantic. (1981)
[MOMMIE DEAREST] Has any movie queen ever gone this far before? Alone and self-mesmerized, Dunaway plays the entire film on emotion. Her performance is extravagant—it's operatic and full of primal anger; she's grabbing the world by the short hairs. (1981)
THE FRONT is slightly archaic, not because it's set in the early fifties but because of its problem-play dramaturgy—craftsmanlike, careful, skimpy. (1976)
THE RAIN PEOPLE (1968)
There's a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola's unusual, little-seen film, but it's a ponderously self-conscious effort...The result is academic, and never believable.
[THE INNOCENTS] And it's a tribute to Miss Kerr's beauty and dramatic powers that, after twenty years in the movies—years of constant overexposure—she is more exciting than ever. Perhaps she is a demon. (1961)
Hitchcock is a master of a very small domain: even his amusing perversities are only two- or three-dimensional. Truffaut has it in him not to create small artificial worlds around gimmicky plots, but to open up the big world, and to be loose and generous and free and easy. (1966)
[Welles] might have become the greatest all-around American director of that era; and in his inability to realize all his artistic potentialities he is the greatest symbolic figure in American film history since Griffith. (1971)
Nonviolent resistance can be very appealing to movie audiences—nonviolent rebels pose no threat to us. (1982)
[Christopher Walken] He's amazing. He has the most extraordinary presence. His dance sequence from PENNIES FROM HEAVEN is one of the joys of our time. (2001)
[FORT APACHE, THE BRONX] Newman plays the over-the-hill Murphy gleefully, licking his chops. He has fun with who he is in a scene; he dances, he shuffles. There's a beautiful hamminess about his work: he's scratching an itch and getting a huge kick out of it. (1981)
REBECCA (1940)
Magnificent romantic-gothic corn, full of Hitchcock's humor and inventiveness. It features one of Laurence Olivier's rare poor performances; he seems pinched and too calculated—but even when he's uncomfortable in his role he's more fascinating than most actors.
Polanski's Macbeth is not a man made diffferent from other men by his crime, not a man corrupted, but a corrupt man—perhaps one could go as far as to say corrupt because he is a man. This dark vision has nowhere to go but further into gore, and that's where it goes. (1972)
[M*A*S*H] When the dialogue overlaps, you hear just what you should, but it doesn't seem all worked out and set; the sound seems to bounce off things so that the words just catch your ear. (1970)
[EXORCIST II] But, along with flying demons and theology inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, it had Richard Burton, with his precise diction, helplessly and inevitably turning his lines into camp, just as the cultivated, stage-trained actors in early-thirties horror films did.
If a movie doesn't "pulse"—if the director isn't talented, and if he doesn't become fervently obsessed with the possibilities that the subject offers him to explore moviemaking itself—it's dead and it deadens you. Your heart goes cold. The world is a dishrag. (1978)
Even the action sequences in BARRY LYNDON aren't meant to be exciting; they're meant only to be visually exciting. (1975)
Gene Hackman does the kind of comedic acting that rings true on every note, yet he's never predictable. He has bags under his eyes, and his face has caved in a bit; maybe that's why when he lights up, it really means something. (1981)
RICH AND FAMOUS features those two great underpopulated bodies Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen. They can't dip into themselves and bring out characters; they're simply art objects rattling off lines, and they rattle incessantly in this remake. (1981)
RICHARD III (1955)
But none of this matters very much when you can watch Laurence Olivier's lewd courtship of Claire Bloom and hear the inflections he gives lines like "I am not in the giving vein today."
The meaning of SEVEN BEAUTIES is deeply reactionary and misogynous. It gets an audience response by confirming what people, in their most superstitious recesses, already believe: that "human nature" stinks and nothing can be done about it. (1976)
COMING HOME started out to be about how the Vietnam War changed Americans, and turned into a movie about a woman married to a hawk who has her first orgasm when she goes to bed with a paraplegic. (1978)
REDS represents an enormous amount of dedication and intelligence. It's absorbing, and you feel good will toward it. But it's a rather sad movie, because it isn't really very good. (1981)
Many stars make their fortunes on what they are or seem to be as camera subjects rather than on their acting. (1968)
[CABARET] Liza Minnelli makes you believe in the cabaret as "life" because she comes fully to life only when she sings. The features that seemed too large for her face suddenly fit. (1972)
Dom DeLuise has always been funny in a distinctive, angelic, slightly hallucinated way. (1981)
