THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931) William Wellman's gangster classic, with James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, and Mae Clarke as the girl who gets the grapefruit shoved in her kisser. A good picture, even if the theme music is "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."

Despite Peckinpah's artistry, there's something basically grim and crude in STRAW DOGS. It's no news that men are capable of violence, but while most of us want to find ways to control that violence, Sam Peckinpah wants us to know that's all hypocrisy. (1972)

[3 WOMEN] You could feel [Altman's] love of these actresses (and the assurance they drew from it), and he showed his feeling for the comic beauty in pop and trash and kitsch (a feeling he shares with Godard); it was a lovely, fresh sociological comedy. (1978)

[ROBOCOP] This isn't gallows humor—it's just gallows pulp...Even when a scene has some fast, quirky tracking or when it employs a flashy effect, Verhoeven's directing goes clump, clump. (1987)

Bill Murray is like a bomb ticking, and he keeps erupting with smartass remarks. At the same time, he's the supreme practitioner of going with the flow; he is never surprised. (1981)

[Madeline Kahn] Everything that's wrong about her is sexy. You look at her and think, What beautiful translucent skin on such a big jaw; what a statuesque hourglass figure, especially where the sand has slipped. (1974)

Do people really enjoy Stephen Sondheim's sour sentimentality—songs like "Every Day a Little Death"? The punks are cheerful by comparison. (1978)

John Candy is the soul of amiability—it's just an awfully large soul. He's the older brother you always wanted to have. (1984)

[THE KING OF COMEDY] This director, whose specialty (except for RAGING BULL) has always been getting inside his characters' manias and making us know from the inside how they felt, stays on the outside this time. (1983)

I don't speak as a Trekkie, or even as someone who would watch "Star Trek" at home. But I've had it on when I was unpacking or washing my hair in a hotel room and there was nothing else on the box that wasn't a car chase or a preacher. (1982)

[THE ESCAPE ARTIST] Still, just about everything that Raul Julia does is unignorably bad. He seems to act from the outside, like a man training to be a matinée idol. (1982)

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)

PANDORA'S BOX (1928) Louise Brooks, with her straight back and strong shoulders, seems to have her own form of sexuality—preconscious yet intuitively all-knowing. She's like a cool, beautiful, innocently deadly cat that people can't keep their hands off.

And HARD TIMES, though low-key, stays completely within the conventions of pulp. It's unusually effective pulp—perhaps even great pulp, though not quite in the class of JAWS. (1975)

ROMANCING THE STONE, a slapstick adventure comedy in the commercial genre of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, is a simpler, more likable entertainment than RAIDERS; it doesn't leave you feeling exhausted. (1984)

[E.T.] And this scaly, wrinkled little man with huge, wide-apart, soulful eyes and a jack-in-the-box neck has been so fully created that he’s a friend to us, too; when he speaks of his longing to go home the audience becomes as mourn­ful as Elliott. (1982)

Spike Lee himself is endowed with something more than training and imagination: he has what for want of a better term is called "a film sense." It's an instinct for how to make a movie move. (1986)

[THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN] It's a logy, thick-skinned movie that seems to spend most of its time trying to tone down the moral ugliness of its premises. (1973)

There is not a single line in the Joseph E. Levine production HARLOW, starring Carroll Baker, that sounds as if the speaker felt it or thought it, or could possibly have said it. The falseness is total. (1967)

THE REVOLT OF MAMIE STOVER (1956) Richard Egan gives a performance that would be memorably bad if only one could remember it...The director, Raoul Walsh, seems baffled and eager to get home for dinner.

Streisand's inflections are witty and surprising, and, more surprisingly, delicate; she can probably do more for a line than any screen comedienne since Jean Arthur, in the thirties. (1968)