Dilys Powell
Dilys Powell's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Sunday Times (UK)
(Photo Credit: Picture Post / Stringer/ Picture Post/ Getty Images)
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Maltese Falcon (1941) |
Two things in particular are notable and pleasing: The Maltese Falcon brings a new, young director, John Huston, to the surface and it gives Humphrey Bogart his best chance since The Petrified Forest. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Nov 16, 2022
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Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) |
It is gaily and beautifully played, in particular by Miss Garland, whose talents as an actress are, I believe, of a much higher order than is generally recognised. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Nov 10, 2022
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High Noon (1952) |
Stanley Kramer's High Noon is an exceptionally good Western: a dramatic, threatening start which does not wait for the credits to clear off the screen. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Sep 19, 2022
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A Man for All Seasons (1966) |
Mr. Scofield conveys with absolute command Mr. Bolt's Renaissance Christian. Both affecting and matter-of-fact, he gives the impression of being a man who in the perilous society of the Reformation never loses his wits. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Sep 07, 2022
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A Double Life (1947) |
Though it will not, I fancy, change the course of cinema history it turns out to be intelligently constructed and executed. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 17, 2022
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Hamlet (1948) |
By the end one no longer thinks of the piece as filmed Shakespeare, but accepts it simply as a splendid production of a masterpiece. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 17, 2022
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The Graduate (1967) |
I suggest that you see The Graduate for fun, and the hell with the next American cinema coming of age. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Breathless (1959) |
In spite of the undeniable brilliance of form and style, it remains no more than a superb pattern; a pattern of dried leaves cast on the surface of water. There is a closer approach to human truth in the nonsense of The Singing Fool. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) |
Among the many contributions of Disney and his team to the cinema, this is perhaps the strangest: they have made us watch with heart in mouth the adventures of beings who exist only as the projection of photographs and colored drawings. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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La dolce vita (1960) |
Fellini has not forced his material into a neat shape. He uses it in huge bold chapters, each chapter independent enough to make a film on its own. And rich enough. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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L'Avventura (1960) |
L'Avventura is a film all of one piece: landscape and architecture, the sound of the sea and the eloquent asides of Giovanni Fusco's score. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Pickpocket (1959) |
The style of the film is characteristic of the director... But this time the method defeats itself. In rejecting every irrelevant action, in ruthlessly refining away every decoration, Bresson has thrown away the motives as well. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Psycho (1960) |
From these lunatic situations Hitchcock has created something persistently compulsive. From his players, and especially from the duel between the brilliant Anthony Perkins and Martin Balsam he has drawn frightening, sombre comedy. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Peeping Tom (1960) |
[Michael Powell] did not write Peeping Tom; but he cannot wash his hands of responsibility for this essentially vicious film. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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The 400 Blows (1959) |
Sympathetic, amused, reminded, occasionally puzzled, you are carried along with it. I don't think you will get away before the end. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) |
Suddenly a new film. Really new, first-hand: a work which tells a story of its own in a style of its own. One is almost afraid to touch it. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Ben-Hur (1959) |
[The filmmakers] can't give it an imaginative size to match its physical size... Nevertheless if we must have films of this kind, this is the one to have. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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North by Northwest (1959) |
It is consistently entertaining, its excitement pointed by but never interrupted by the jokes... But it is on Mr. Grant's own performance, intent, resourceful, witty, as always beautifully timed, that a large part of the pleasure depends. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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The Wizard of Oz (1939) |
[The Wizard of Oz] has been cleverly and sometimes brilliantly devised and amusingly acted, which is occasionally witty, frequently imaginative, and only for short periods dull. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Going My Way (1944) |
Crosby, by a performance both sincere and endearing, once again shows what a good actor he can be. But the star of the film is Barry Fitzgerald, who as the aging, querulous, eccentric priest gives an impression of life and character rare on the screen. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Gilda (1946) |
Miss Hayworth is quite a girl; and it should be put down to her credit that the general exchange of insults and blows retains a certain liveliness. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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Fantasia (1940) |
Fantasia, in short, is Disney sometimes at his worst, often at his very best; and the best is on a level which no other cinematographic designer has reached. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 10, 2022
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The Great Dictator (1940) |
For me the film contained one major error: the final speech... This finale is so blatantly out of harmony with what has gone before as to nullify much of the effectiveness of the preceding two hours. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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The Grapes of Wrath (1940) |
The Grapes of Wrath is not just a film, not just a tragedy, not just a social indictment even; it is an experience; it is history unfolding like a terrible fungus; it is America. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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His Girl Friday (1940) |
It is intensely exciting and funny, a picture which flashes by you before you have had time to remember that for an hour and a half you have forgotten the war. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Double Indemnity (1944) |
Double Indemnity, indeed, turned out to be a pretty good job. Good first of all because the story is told with much sureness and control. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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49th Parallel (1941) |
Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey, Laurence Olivier and Anton Walbrook are the stars in a cast flashing with talent; and Michael Powell directs with his usual flair for the handling of action against a natural background. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Citizen Kane (1941) |
This is an adult film, technically and psychologically adult, recognizing the ultimate obscurity in which every human life moves; one of the few, the very few, films to present not an abstraction, but a man. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Vertigo (1958) |
The plot is a brilliant box of devilish tricks. And yet the film disappoints. It seems too long, too elaborately designed; the narration of this kind of criminal intrigue sags under such luscious treatment; it needs the touch of the harsh and the squalid. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Nights of Cabiria (1957) |
I come away drowning in sympathy for its principal character, and the admiration for Giulietta Masina which I failed to experience with La Strada quite overwhelms me with the new film. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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The Seventh Seal (1957) |
The magnificent craftsmanship, of course, I admit. But beneath the surface of the high-class, bony morality which has understandably attracted so much admiration there lurks what to me is a dreadful squashy sentimentality. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Paths of Glory (1957) |
Mr. Kubrick has not been able to inject into figures which are literary and alien from the rough vitality which so naturally flowed [in The Killing]. Nevertheless, Paths of Glory in its authority, its piercingness, is an extraordinary film. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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The Ten Commandments (1956) |
The whole experience (with an interval) lasts roughly four hours. I am afraid that long before the time was up I was silently imploring Mr. DeMille to let his people go. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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A Face in the Crowd (1957) |
A Face in the Crowd is one of the few genuinely political assaults the cinema has made. And it belongs to a different era. It savages. It explodes: it is the guided missile. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Sweet Smell of Success (1957) |
Inside the cinema, so superbly is the thing done, one's skin crawls with credulous horror. The acting is first-rate, in particular Tony Curtis's performance as the lizard who scurries at the crocodile's call. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) |
Gratefully one hails a science-fiction film which is both inventive and humane. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Around the World in 80 Days (1956) |
Around the World in Eighty Days is like a serial; a serial in brilliant Technicolor and a system by now called, I believe, Cinestage, ending in the most ingenious credits I have ever seen. It is a journey through scenes where the sun is aways shining. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 09, 2022
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The Sugarland Express (1974) |
One is apt to fear for the second film of a promising young director, but for once anxiety was unnecessary. The Sugarland Express is okay; a bit too long... but generally balanced, accomplished, satisfying. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Day for Night (1973) |
It has been a pleasure; one is sorry it is over; and I at any rate come out feeling positively good-tempered myself. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Save the Tiger (1973) |
I very much doubt whether one would recognize the range of themes were it not for a masterly performance by Mr. Lemmon. Without him the film might look like just another glance at a man on the edge of breakdown. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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O Lucky Man! (1973) |
Good films have navels; they draw nourishment from other works. And O Lucky Man! is a very good film. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Last Tango in Paris (1972) |
If the script, if the whole film declines to involve us, we are thrown back not on interest in human beings but on the inquisitiveness about sexual practices. And again I find myself asking what the fuss is about. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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The Sting (1973) |
The Sting is directed and played with great verve; the 1936 underworld is recreated with delight; and the victims deserve what they get. You can sit back and enjoy their discomfiture. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Pinocchio (1940) |
To some people the didacticism of the picture may seem a bit overpowering. But how marvelous the invention is throughout! - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Rebecca (1940) |
One might have thought that when blackmail and murder were out Hitchcock's feeling for quick explosive action would show itself. Oddly enough he seems instead to lose interest. Perhaps the exquisite silliness of the story was too much for him. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Nashville (1975) |
Altman's film strikes an English observer as the purest, possibly the simplest Americana, the kind of thing which it takes an American to know about, which nobody else can understand so well. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) |
It is a political film... I mean political in the sense that it is about power, about ideological tyranny, and behind its façade are all the Solzhenitsyns who didn't get out. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Seven Samurai (1954) |
Seven Samurai is long; it is brutal; it is not always easy to follow. But it is magnificent. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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On the Waterfront (1954) |
The film is splendidly acted. This is the third time that Marlon Brando has played under Kazan's direction, and this time my reservations about his gifts disappear. As the racketeer's errand boy... his performance is magnificent. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) |
For me at any rate farce makes the theme of Dr. Strangelove not only more bearable, but also more believable. After all it is difficult to accept Doomsday unless as a monstrous joke. - Sunday Times (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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