[THE FRENCH CONNECTION] It's not what I want not because it fails (it doesn't fail) but because of what it is. It is, I think, what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks. (1971)

[Candice Bergen] delivers her lines, pell-mell, as if vastly pleased that she remembered them...It is the worst starring performance I have ever seen. (1971)

LADY IN THE LAKE (1946) A Raymond Chandler murder mystery with the camera functioning as the Private Eye—that is, as the eyes of Philip Marlowe, the narrator-protagonist (Robert Montgomery), who is seen in his entirety only when his reflection is caught in mirrors.

Haven't we suffered enough with Joanne Woodward? Proficient, intensely likable actress though she is, ever since RACHEL, RACHEL she's been turning into the educated people's Lana Turner. (1973)

Malle resembles Fitzgerald, but a Fitzgerald with a vision formed from the inside, and with the intelligence for perspective. His is a deeply realistic comic view — free of Fitzgerald's romantic ruined dreams. (1971)

[FELLINI'S ROMA] The film is like a funeral ode to an imaginary city under purplish, poisoned skies. The usual critical encomium "No one but Fellini could have made this movie" is certainly appropriate. Who else could have raised the money? (1972)

What counts in sci-fi movies (and what makes a sci-fi movie a classic) is the gimmicky, eerie metaphor—the disguised form of the thing you fear, or are set off by. (1973)

If Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING is about anything that you can be sure of, it's tracking: Kubrick loves the ultra-smooth travelling shots made possible by the Steadicam. (1980)

[HOT TOMORROWS] It's a typical young-filmmaker's film, in the sense that it's movie-obsessed, but Brest's obsession takes a baroquely original form: to him, old movies—Hollywood musicals, in particular—are memento mori. (1979)

ENTER THE DRAGON (1973) A good-natured example of the pleasures of schlock art...But it's not all schlock: the slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.

[THE WARRIORS] The physical action is so stylized that it has a wild cartoon kick to it, like YOJIMBO and the best kung-fu movies. The fighting is exhilaratingly visceral, and so contrapuntal...that you have no thought of pain or gore. (1979)

[THE INNOCENT] Like Ophuls, Visconti shows a richly ambiguous joy in evoking the past and in demonstrating that love can be a form of damnation which cancels out good sense even among the sophisticated. (1979)

[HARDCORE] The possibility also comes to mind that the porno world is Schrader's metaphor for show business, and that, in some corner of his mind, he is the runaway who became a prostitute. (1979)

Redford carries his sunny aura from picture to picture; when he first shows up, you look for his baseball bat. (1985)

There's a candy-man quality to Rob Lowe himself. He has no weight, no density. It's not that he's a bad actor—it's that he doesn't suggest a real person. (1986)

When it's the tired comic spectacle of rich old men degrading themselves for more money and fame and power, does it much matter if it's done poorly or with chic? In some ways the chic is more offensive. (1967)

LITTLE WOMEN (1933) There are small flaws—a few naïve and cloying scenes, some obvious dramatic contrivances—but it's a lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel.

It's doubtful whether a movie could have as intense an impact as it had in its own time. Probably by definition, works that are not truly great cannot be as compelling out of their time. (1967)

Students in college film departments sometimes say they can learn more from bad movies than from good ones, because they can examine what the director did wrong: to them THE WAY WEST should serve as a textbook. (1967)

We are beginning to spawn teen-age filmmakers who at twenty-five may have a brilliant technique but are as empty-headed as a Hollywood hack, and they will become the next generation of hacks, because they don't know anything except moviemaking. (1969)

Even those who love movies may feel that they can't always handle the emotions that a film heats up. They need to talk to friends, to read critics, in order to understand why they're reacting as they are, and whether it's an aberration or others feel the same way. (1976)

If there's one immutable law about movies, it's that middle-class people get hot and bothered whenever there's a movie that the underclass really responds to. (1979)

Most of what's out isn't worth seeing. And having to write about this stuff, you feel degraded. It's occupying your head and it has no right to be there. (1988)

Though it staggers under this heavy load, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? is a very striking movie, with vestiges of the hard sarcasm of thirties lower-depths humor—those acrid sick jokes that make one wince and laugh simultaneously. (1969)

THE BIG SLEEP (1946) Howard Hawks directed—and so well that you may even enjoy the fact that, as he says, "Neither the author, the writer, nor myself knew who had killed whom."

[THE DUELLISTS] Ridley Scott is literally directing from behind the camera, and the imagery has an expressive tone, like the sentences of a writer whose flow of feelings is richer than any explicit statement he can make. (1978)

[Don Siegel] I think that even the best of his crime movies are fundamentally thick-skinned; they're the equivalent of yellow journalism—sensational subjects, tricks that work you up, an appeal to your dumbest impulses. (1973)

[INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS] The pod people make a shrieking, warning cry that suggests an inhuman variant of the rhythmic trilling-screaming sounds of the women in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. In that film, it was a cry for freedom; here it's a cry for conformity. (1978)

[A CLOCKWORK ORANGE] Kubrick, a director with an arctic spirit, is determined to be pornographic, and he has no talent for it. (1972)

Is there anything more despicable than the incompetence of those who want only to sell and haven't enough talent to do even that? (1968)

In watching Lumet work, I was torn between detesting his fundamental tastelessness and opportunism and recognizing the fact that at some level it all works. It obviously, too obviously, wants to be moving, but damn it, it is. (1966)

LILLIAN RUSSELL (1940) Alice Faye, overblown to vacuous perfection, and likable despite it all, wears gigantic hats; the headgear is about the only connection this scrubbed-up bio has with the actual Lillian Russell.

Carole Lombard's talents were not of the highest, but her spirits were, and in her skin-tight satins she incarnates the giddy, absurd glamour of thirties comedy. (1967)

[CITIZEN KANE] Now Welles’ discovery of moviemaking—and the boyishness and excitement of that discovery—is preserved in KANE the way the snow scene is preserved in the glass ball. (1971)

Many groups have been demanding fantasies in their own image, and if this often seems a demand for a debased pop culture, still it comes out of a sense of deprivation. (1975)

[CALIFORNIA SUITE] Michael Caine performs like a professional who is used to doing the dramatist's job for him. (1979)

Bergman may be obsessive, he may be frightfully high-toned, but he's a man of the theatre. In a corner of his mind, Bergman knows there's an audience out there. Herzog has just about everything to be a great film artist but this alchemical element: there's no theatre in his soul. (1975)

[San Francisco] Probably nowhere else have people considered so many systems of thought and been through so many interpersonal wars; San Franciscans often look shell-shocked. (1978)

[TEQUILA SUNRISE] The movie badly needs Russell’s brazenness and his slippery grin; it needs his sly, shiny eyes. Nick locates us in a wisecracking movie tradition, especially when he razzes the high-muck-a-muck from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. (1988)

HOSPITAL doesn't spare our feelings, and — I don't know exactly how or why — it seems to clean away the shame. We've gone through the barriers of middle-class good taste, and it's better on the other side. (1970)

[GHOSTBUSTERS II] Murray has changed since the first GHOSTBUSTERS: he isn't playing the grungy, derisive outsider anymore—he's mellowed. Yet he's just as funny. (1989)

[THE DEER HUNTER] is enraging, because, despite its ambitiousness and scale, it has no more moral intelligence than the Eastwood action pictures. Yet it's an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity. (1978)

[LE BOUCHER] Everything seems on the same level of interest to Chabrol...Nothing in the movie is very exciting, just as nothing is boring. (1972)

FRANKENSTEIN (1931) Probably the most famous of all horror films, and one of the best. (A few of the original prints were tinted an eerie green—"the color of fear.")

CAT PEOPLE (1942) Among the films produced as B thrillers, there are occasional ingenious works; one of the most famous of these is Val Lewton's ironic horror film, produced in 1942—the first of a series of eleven Lewton productions.

THE INNOCENTS (1961) One of the most elegantly beautiful ghost stories ever made. It features a scary, intense performance by Deborah Kerr, as the governess who sees demonic spectres and forces two of her charges to confront them.

Every horror film seems to become absurd with the passage of time, and many before—yet the horror remains. (1967)

Even the madness of EXORCIST II is of a special sort: the picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang's loony METROPOLIS). Some of the telepathic sequences are golden-toned and lyrical, and the film has a swirling, hallucinogenic, apocalyptic quality, (1978)

[HEAVEN CAN WAIT] The film has no desire but to please, and that's it's only compulsiveness; it's so timid and pleated and smooth that it's sliding right off the screen. (1978)

[MIDNIGHT EXPRESS] John Hurt, however...is a truly great interpreter of eccentricities; he has such inner force that he can play the most passive of roles, as he does here (he barely moves a muscle), and still transfix the audience. (1978)