SHERLOCK JR. (1924) Directed by Buster Keaton, it's a wonderfully imaginative film, full of extraordinary tricks so immaculately executed that they look simple. It's a piece of native American surrealism.

It wouldn't be fair to John Huston to call ROY BEAN a Huston picture; it's his only in the sense that he consented to direct it, and lent it a few touches. (1973)

[DEATH ON THE NILE] Angela Lansbury does a superlative caricature of a wreck of a vamp...She's whooping it up one moment and sagging from booze the next...You feel she needs a derrick to lift her lids. (1978)

[COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN] This movie is a genuine oddity—like THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA performed by a company of seraphim. The rake's machine for converting stones into bread is, of course, a devil's trick—a fraud. Altman's magic is the real thing. (1982)

[TOP GUN] The best part of the movie comes when he's suffering: he speaks in a little-boy voice and looks such a Nautilized, dinky thing. Trying to instill courage in him, she says throatily, "When I first met you, you were larger than life." (1986)

[TAXI DRIVER] No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it's horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying. (1976)

I've seen Duvall only once when I thought he was really bad—in his screaming and yelling in NETWORK. His rip-roaring madness in APOCALYPSE NOW was almost too good: there was no higher pitch of madness for the picture to attain. (1981)

THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS (1972) The picture, which has some conceptual resemblances to the later films of Robert Bresson...is an art thing, all right, but perhaps not a work of art. And most important of all, it isn't likable.

As a director, [Joe Dante] seems a mixture—in just about equal parts—of talent, amateurishness, style, and flake. Not a bad mixture, but it doesn't give him much control over what he gets. (1981)

[DEAD POETS SOCIETY] The young actors are presentable—even admirable—but they're all so camera-angled and director-controlled that they don't have a zit they can call their own. (1989)

Michael Keaton I think is misguided. He's very talented, but he's playing leading men who aren't funny enough. Still, for his work in BEETLEJUICE, I will be his fan forever. (1994)

The only quality common to the films of Louis Malle is the restless intelligence one senses in them, and it must be this very quality that has led Malle to try such different subjects and styles. (1971)

[ALTERED STATES] Ken Russell doesn't seem to have the ability to create believable representations of human behavior; he's such an eccentric filmmaker that he has invented his own kind of film—a hectic, stilted sort of picture in which he clomps from one scene to the next. (1981)

FLASH GORDON is simply out to give you a good time. It has some of the knowing, pleasurable giddiness of the fast-moving Bonds, and the same sort of saving-the-world plot, though with less emphasis on it. (1981)

THE PARADINE CASE (1948) There are few thrills in this big misconceived courtroom thriller, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and ornately produced by David O. Selznick. Talky and stiff, the film never finds the passionate tone that it needs.

[SOME LIKE IT HOT] It's hilariously innocent, though always on the brink of really disastrous double entendre. (1959)

[THE ARRANGEMENT] If one did not know that Kazan is a major figure in films, one would find nothing in the way this movie has been made to suggest it. The direction is tight and almost cruelly coercive of the actors. (1969)

[COMING HOME] Except for a sex scene or two, COMING HOME is the sort of film a Protestant church group might put on—blandly humanitarian. (1978)

Cassavetes isn't a bad actor, and he has become handsomer with the years...But he's one of the most alienating of actors. Even when he's smiling there's something unreachable underneath—and ominous. (1982)

An actor takes on a ludicrous burden when he attempts to play a genius. How is he to demonstrate his intellectual powers? By canny expressions and sudden heartfelt speeches? By eyes narrowed as if by thought? (1982)

[MEAN STREETS] The picture is stylized without seeming in any way artificial; it is the only movie I’ve ever seen that achieves the effects of Expressionism without the use of distortion. (1973)

THE SET-UP (1949) This intelligently modest, low-budget film about a shabby, aging prizefighter is generally considered a classic. It's not a great movie, or even a very good one (it's rather mechanical), but it touches one's experience in a way that makes it hard to forget.

[FOUR FRIENDS] When Arthur Penn goes wrong, he goes laboriously, painfully wrong, and the moments of talent that stick out are so jarring that they seem to make things even worse. (1982)

[Disney films] They’re the only films I know that really scares the bejesus out of children. They prey on the basic trauma of childhood, like being separated from your parents. I have a niece who had nightmares for a year after seeing BAMBI. (1982)

I don’t understand people who say, There’s no point in reading newspapers because they all lie. Teenagers say that or: There’s no point in watching the news—they don’t tell you the whole truth. That seems to assume that you can’t piece anything together or learn anything. (1992)

How many different kinds of consciousness can a movie diddle with? JEREMIAH JOHNSON seems to have been written by vultures. (1972)

Pop culture takes some nourishment from the "high" arts, but it feeds mainly on itself. (1973)

[LA FEMME INFIDÈLE] One enjoys not what it is so much as how well made it is. This is not a great pleasure but a minor one, and yet the pleasures of craftsmanship and fine detail are uncommon in movies, and to be savored. (1969)

MOONRAKER (1979) Roger Moore is dutiful and passive as Bond; his clothes are neatly pressed and he shows up for work, like an office manager who is turning into dead wood but hanging on to collect his pension.

Maybe the reason some people have difficulty getting into Altman's wavelength is that he's just about incapable of overdramatizing. He's not a pusher...He doesn't heat angst the way it was heated in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? (1973)

[ARTHUR] Considering that Arthur—a top-hatted lush who's forever making whoopee—is a very thin comic construct, Moore does an amazing amount with the role. (1981)

What does it then mean if you're swept up by it? It doesn't necessarily mean that the picture that does it is art; it could just mean you've been softened. (1972)

Most of the American film-school kids have a hard time projecting a strong enough vision to make their movies cohere. Then there are the very young kids who only seem to know hand-me-downs from Tarantino. (1999)

There's so much intellectual sloppiness out there that sometimes you have to be ruthless to keep a sane basis for writing about pop culture. And sometimes a cruel remark—even if it's an overstatement—is the best way to get a point across. (1994)

RED-HEADED WOMAN (1932) Jean Harlow (with tinted hair) as a girl who exploits her charms and makes the climb from the wrong side of the tracks to a rich marriage and then up higher and higher...It caused a scandal in the movie industry, because she didn't suffer for her sins.

The Long Goodbye isn’t a fast read, like Hammett, but when I finished it I had no idea whether I’d read it before. Essentially, we’ve all read it before. (1973)

If you look at Robin Williams, you see the rubber face that he has developed for the quick transitions and contortions of standup comedy; he's almost too flexible for the camera—his twinkling facial moves are so quick and easy they don't have much meaning. (1982)

Slowed down and seen in stop-motion, the dancing during the titles of DIRTY DANCING turns into writhing and groping. It’s so sexual it’s funny, and it’s a promise of giddy good times ahead. (1987)

[NADINE] Nadine, a manicurist in a beauty parlor in Austin, Texas, in 1954, is played by Kim Basinger, a lusciously pretty woman with a stunning figure (especially when it’s in motion), who’s peculiarly muted as an actress. (1987)

There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of if-you-know-so-much-about-the-art-of-film-why-don't-you-make-movies. You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good. (1963)

DOCTORS' WIVES gets into the pornography of surgery—blood used to give color and juice to pale-blue soap opera. (1971)

A ROYAL SCANDAL (1945) Tallulah Bankhead gave this sex farce about Catherine the Great a sort of low glitter, but it's not much of a vehicle. (Unhappily, poor as it is it's one of the few halfway decent screen roles she ever got.)

Peckinpah made a deeply cynical movie, yet, confusingly, it's a great one. I'm not sure what THE WILD BUNCH says to us, except that filmmaking can be a glorious high. (1978)

Peckinpah made a deeply cynical movie, yet, confusingly, it's a great one. I'm not sure what THE WILD BUNCH says to us, except that filmmaking can be a glorious high. (1999)

[BODY DOUBLE] The big, showy scenes recall VERTIGO and REAR WINDOW so obviously that the movie is like an assault on the people who have put De Palma down for being derivative. (1984)

Part of what has deranged American life in this past decade is the change in book publishing and in magazines and newspapers and in the movies as they have passed out of the control of those whose lives were bound up in them and into the control of conglomerates. (1980)

The worst thing that's happening in magazines and newspapers is that people get trained to write on assignment, and they cook up fake stories about whatever the editors have heard a little buzz about. (1994)

[CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON] It is a movie of the highest gloss. It is not, however, a movie of deep insight—or generosity of spirit, either. It is, rather, a movie of poetic complacency, a movie for mild chuckles. (1972)

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932) An amusing classic suspense melodrama...Leslie Banks (with his schizoid face—one half suave Englishman, the other half twisted and with suggestions of exotic evil) is the mad hunter who stalks human prey, and Joel McCrea is is target.

[THE BLUE LAGOON] When the boy is puzzled about why the girl had the baby, he's got good reason to be: there's nothing resembling penetration in their lovemaking—the way they rub limbs, all they'd do is produce friction. (1980)