All About Eve Reviews

Mankiewicz's inside knowledge of show business and its particular personality types gives the film an authenticity and allows for its famously devastating acid wit. [Blu-ray]

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 4/4

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, it's possible that All About Eve is more important than ever. Scratch that. How about it's more entertaining than ever?

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 5/5

All About Eve looks into Broadway's artichoke heart to ring an early death knell for classic Hollywood.

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Along with films such as Luis Buñuel's "Los Olvidados" and Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," Joseph Mankiewicz's "All About Eve" made 1950 one of the most seminal years in cinema history.

Full Review | Comment (1) | Original Score: A+

Classic movie about an ambitious woman.

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 5/5

Sanders...was ideally cast in this role: you can feel in Addison's every word the world-weariness of the actor who would eventually commit suicide at age 65...

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 10/10

It crackles with smart, smarting dialogue.

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Joseph L Mankiewicz's wonderfully literate 1950 classic drama of the theatrical life, All About Eve, is back in the cinema, to be savoured for its language, performances, psychological insights and proof that all the world's a stage.

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The Zanuck production investiture is plush in every department.

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Put simply, one of the greatest movies ever made.

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 5/5

The peerless tale of two rival drama queens, playing as the central attraction in the BFI Southbank's Joseph L Mankiewicz season, and rightly so.

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Here is a real Christmas treat: a restored version of Joseph L Mankiewicz's jet-black 1950 comedy about Margo Channing, elegant leading lady of the theatre, superbly played by Bette Davis.

Full Review | Comment (1) | Original Score: 5/5

A total joy.

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 4/5

One of Hollywood's finest backstage dramas. If nothing else Davis should have been rewarded for services to the tobacco industry.

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 5/5

Apart from the monochrome photography, all that dates the film is the chain-smoking and the fact that these are theatre folk rather than movie stars (frequent in-jokes about the low art of Hollywood pepper the script).

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 5/5

For old-school Hollywood movie-making at its most polished, literate and sophisticated there is really nothing to match it.

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 5/5

Impeccable.

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 5/5

There is so much to admire in All About Eve, even for those too young to be drenched in nostalgia for the spectacle of Bette Davis unleashing her sharp tongue.

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[Features] more quotable dialogue in one movie than most screenwriters manage in a lifetime.

Full Review | Comment (1) | Original Score: 5/6

Still retains its stagy power to provoke theater lovers by its elaborate wit and campy bad taste.

Full Review | Comment | Original Score: B