Iris Barry

Iris Barry
Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:
(Photo Credit: Sasha/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Publications: The Spectator, National Board of Review Magazine

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
94% Faust (1926) If a film version of Faust is to be consistent, it should not, as this does, totter between the extremes of Flemish art and those of pretty picture postcards. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 6, 2020
83% The Lady (1925) In [Norma Talmadge's] new piece, The Lady, she has occasional moments of emotional power, and some of the film itself has charm, when it recaptures so quaintly the atmosphere of the long gone music-halls. But it is not a good film. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2020
86% So Big (1924) Intelligence, sincere feeling and an elusive kind of beauty distinguish [Colleen Moore's] performance as the little school-mistress turned farmer's wife. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2020
No Score Yet Skinner's Dress Suit (1926) [Denny's] films are definitely delightful and extremely funny, not farces like those of Lloyd and Keaton, but real, light comedy, from which the plaguey humour of dress suits, dance partners and domestic and business life in general is deftly extracted. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2020
No Score Yet What Happened to Jones? (1926) I warmly recommend What Happened to Jones. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2020
82% Graustark (1925) Graustark is a triumph of folly and bathos. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2020
No Score Yet Soul of Humanity (Les Miserables Part I) (1925) The film has its own strange power, and it is mercifully large in conception and dignified in treatment. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 14, 2020
No Score Yet The Threepenny Opera (L'opera De Quat' Sous) (1933) Here is an extravaganza in Hogarthian vein, but dressed out in deliciously exaggerated late 19th century costumes, and set in a romantic London underworld that never was. - National Board of Review Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 20, 2019
No Score Yet Abraham Lincoln (1924) Lincoln's life and his character... are on the heroic scale, and this film has excellently recreated both; but more than that, it has an unaffected simplicity and naturalness very much more powerful than any mock-romance. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 23, 2019
No Score Yet Mons (1926) Mons is a picture in a thousand, one which each single individual should see. It is a purge for apathy and forgetfulness as well as an inspiration. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 23, 2019
No Score Yet Michel Strogoff (1926) This spectacular film from France, with its surging mobs and bloodthirsty incidents, leaves one with a rather mixed impression. It is not a good film, but it is a little enjoyable. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 23, 2019
29% Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1924) Had it been called anything else it would have seemed a faintly more interesting melodrama than usual on the often reiterated seduction theme. But that it should pretend to be a version of Thomas Hardy's novel is monstrous. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 11, 2019
No Score Yet Dante's Inferno (1924) Now that a powerful American producer, Mr. Fox, has attempted to film the Inferno, we can only sympathize with his crude if sincere desire to give something more dignified to the picture-theatres than their usual fare, and acknowledge that he has failed. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 10, 2019
No Score Yet Lover of Camille (1924) The Lover of Camille, intended to be a distinctive film, lacks even the constructive skill in which America has no rivals. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 10, 2019
96% Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1926) There is a real poetry of size and opulence in the film. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
No Score Yet Manon Lescaut (1926) A picture which is so packed with visual beauty that one needs to see it several times fully to appreciate its perfection. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
No Score Yet Nell Gwynne (1926) It can sincerely be said that it is infinitely brighter and better than the average of our native pictures. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
100% Varieté (Variety) (Jealousy) (1925) A grim drama in the life of a troupe of acrobats, it is incomparably acted by Emil Jannings. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
100% The Black Pirate (1926) Each new Douglas Fairbanks seems better than the last. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
No Score Yet The Salvation Hunters (1925) The Salvation Hunters is an honest thing ; and if it rouses the critical faculties that is a good sign, a proof that the man who made it aimed high, aimed above pleasing the public by drugging it. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
No Score Yet Charley's Aunt (1925) There is little enough amusement of any other kind, save what is supplied by sub-titles taken from the veteran farce. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
No Score Yet Forbidden Paradise (1924) Too often the cinema presents us with a picture of attractive moral laxity, and tags a text at the end. There is no text to Forbidden Paradise, nor was any necessary, for the laxity it shows is not attractive, though depicted with fine wit. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
No Score Yet The Miracle Of The Wolves (1924) The Miracle of the Wolves is sound rather than astonishing, though the Louis XL of M. Dullin is superb. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
100% The Epic Of Everest (1924) To my mind the great merit of this film is its almost abstract beauty and its direct satisfaction of a human need. It is not art, I know, but it sets an example to those who try to produce pictures which are. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
100% The Marriage Circle (1924) The Marriage Circle may well silence those who claim that the film cannot compare as a dramatic form with the stage-play. For this is at once perfect cinematography and perfect conventional drama. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 2, 2019
No Score Yet Hotel Imperial (1927) [The producers] worship a minor deity called "box-office appeal," which demands that every film should have a stereotyped happy ending, however improbable. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 3, 2018
No Score Yet The Goose Hangs High (1925) One of those satisfyingly Ordinary American films of domestic life. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
100% The Kid (1921) Beyond its ability to wring the heart, The Kid of all Chaplin's pictures perhaps most manifests his extraordinary knowledge of life, which his sensitive perceptions and comic imagination use as the raw material for laughter. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 14, 2018
100% Grass (1925) [A] marvelously well-photographed record of human life in outlying parts of the world. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 9, 2018
86% Moana (1926) A delight. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 9, 2018
96% Greed (1925) On behalf of the minority of film-goers who will, however even they may be shocked by [Erich von Stroheim's] fierce realism, perceive that he has made here a masterpiece in quite a new manner, one feels inclined to thank him. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
60% Warning Shadows (1922) I would boldly urge all unbelievers to see it. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
97% Metropolis (1927) The cinema, even here at its best, and full as it is of invention and thrill, is still only at the mental age of seventeen. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
100% What Price Glory (1926) What Price Glory comes out in spots of sobbing sentiment now and then, is very slow in places... [but] it contains the incredibly convincing performances of Victor McLaglan and Edmund Lowe as the two soldier-heroes, and occasionally it has greatness. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
100% Peter Pan (1924) A refreshing and welcome film. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
No Score Yet Isn't Life Wonderful (1924) It is always painful to have to abandon an article of faith; but, frankly, I can no longer hope that Griffith will produce another good film. There only remains gratitude for his achievements in the past. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
100% The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann) (1925) The Last Laugh is a progress: it is not parasitic on any novel or play, does not resemble any literary form at all. It contains one of the finest pieces of sustained character-acting yet seen. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
100% The Big Parade (1925) There is a peculiar delight in sitting through a play in which every dialectic skill is used -- where the aptness of language to express character, emotion, the interplay of thoughts gives one a pure joy. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
82% Sally of the Sawdust (1925) Griffith again lays on the mother-sentiment too thickly in places. But, all in all, Sally of the Sawdust is good entertainment. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
No Score Yet Don Q Son of Zorro (1925) This plot simply exists to create difficulties for the athletic Fairbanks to overcome... His movements are almost poetically graceful, and what is more they are infused with a light spirit of comedy. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
100% The Gold Rush (1925) Let no one fail to appreciate those small details, of [Chaplin's] perfectly timed and quite exquisite acting, as when he has most kindly boiled one of his famous boots for a starving miner-pal, and serves it up after due testing with a fork. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2018
63% America (1924) The film itself is ordinary, and shows hardly any trace of the largeness and sensitiveness of vision that made The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance the two finest American films produced in ten years. - The Spectator EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2015