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Joan Didion
Joan Didion's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Vogue
(Photo Credit: Henry Clarke/ Contributor/ Conde Nast Collection /Getty Images)
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Le Doulos (1961) |
In its violence and speed and vigour, this absurd jungle of the imagination is more or less bound to photograph well; Melville, however, does a particularly clean job of direction. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Servant (1963) |
A movie of great possibilities and great failings. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Captain Newman, M.D. (1963) |
A good movie to catch (and "catch" is the verb) if it's playing, say, on Eighty-sixth Street and you live on, say, Eighty-first Street and don't feel up to reading Leo Rosten's book of the same name. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Cool World (1964) |
The absence of technique is so pronounced as to raise some doubt as to whether Shirley Clarke, who directed it, had ever before seen a movie. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) |
Molly Brown is lively and fun, an exercise in those homely sentiments we learned as children, thrived upon, and, sometimes to our regret, outgrew. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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What a Way to Go! (1964) |
What a Way to Go is supposed to have cost six million dollars, which averages out to about a million and half a laugh. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Carpetbaggers (1964) |
Even the downright smuttiness of The Carpetbaggers has an engaging period innocence. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Zulu (1964) |
A rousing reconstruction of the 1879 Battle of Rorke's Drift. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Organizer (1963) |
That someone should have thought to cast Marcello Mastroianni as a seedy, itinerant, and slightly visionary nineteenth century labor organizer -- in The Organizer -- marks the triumph of a certain misapprehension. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Thin Red Line (1964) |
The Thin Red Line is a curiosity: a quite mediocre war movie, based upon the James Jones novel about Guadalcanal, with some of the best battle scenes -- fast, lucid, beautiful -- that I've ever seen. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Good Neighbor Sam (1964) |
Like so much current comedy, it is underwritten; it is underdirected; it is underacted. Resurrect the Thin Man. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Joy House (1964) |
Alain Delon remains a success story I fail to comprehend. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Bedtime Story (1941) |
A kind of prolonged sick joke. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Youngblood Hawke (1964) |
In the book, the venality of Wouk's fantasies merely depresses; in the movie, those same fantasies assume a certain manic charm. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Lilith (1964) |
For every scene which disturbs the imagination there is an immediate and easy answer; for every uneasy glimpse of that emotional slippage, there are fifty minutes of therapy. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Ride the Wild Surf (1964) |
I have recently fallen under the spell of teen surfing movies, an enthusiasm I should probably try to pass off as sociological. In fact, they amuse me. Of the current crop, I am pleased to report that Ride the Wild Surf is a first-rate surfer. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Goodbye Charlie (1964) |
Both Miss Reynolds and Tony Curtis behave gamely, but Goodbye Charlie is one of those games that will never be won. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Girl With Green Eyes (1964) |
I like the story so much that I wondered for a long time why I so disliked the picture, why it seemed so spurious. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Americanization of Emily (1964) |
Although Julie Andrews is supposed to be playing a war widow, she's actually playing Mary Poppins. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Pumpkin Eater (1964) |
There are no easy answers here, no inadvertent banality, nothing off-key. Anne Bancroft gives a flawless performance. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Cheyenne Autumn (1964) |
A melancholy epic which [John Ford] seems to have directed under the misapprehension that it was an action comedy. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Guns of August (1964) |
The picture tends ever to the superficial. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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World Without Sun (1965) |
It is, in the strictest sense, wonderful to look at, a pucture of hallucinatory beauty. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Dear Heart (1965) |
It's a kind of middle-class Marty, a less melancholy Summertime, and, for an hour-and-a-half out of two, touching and pleasant to watch. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) |
Kiss Me, Stupid is quite a compelling and moving picture, and I would very much like to have seen Wilder play it straight. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Love With the Proper Stranger (1963) |
[Love with the Proper Stranger] seemed to me so curious a mixture of old-fashioned schmaltz and up-to-the-minute grubbiness that I could conclude only that I was the slightest bit over the hill. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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America, America (1963) |
In his unswerving insistence upon America as Redeemer, Kazan has made a kind of miracle play. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) |
I have a good time at movies like Katie Elder; I like the country and I like John Wayne and I like Dean Martin and I like gunfights. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 13, 2020
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Morituri (1965) |
It is competent, skilled, professional, and slick, and because it is all these things, it is marvelously entertaining. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 13, 2020
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Major Dundee (1965) |
So far these might seem familiar conventions, familiar characters. But wait. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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Young Cassidy (1965) |
I think I have never seen anything sillier. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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The Pink Panther (1963) |
I wouldn't have thought it possible to film an unfunny scene with ape suits. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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The Caretaker (1964) |
What goes on in a dark room on an immense luminous screen is quite a different proposition from what goes on in a semi-darkened theatre. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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Act One (1963) |
The only movie I've seen in 1964 that already looks and sounds thirty years old. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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The Cincinnati Kid (1965) |
Nothing seems to be at stake. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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A Rage to Live (1965) |
Hollywood does not get [A Rage to Live author John] O'Hara's game; either does not get it or makes the shoddy assumption that the audience will not get it. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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The Sound of Music (1965) |
South Pacific, The King and I, West Side Story: They have all been a little embarrassing, but [this] is more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people like Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 04, 2020
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Crack in the World (1965) |
Although my tolerance for books of science fiction is so low as to be imperceptible, I remain spellbound for even the most spurious science-fiction movie. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 04, 2020
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Doctor Zhivago (1965) |
[Doctor Zhivago] is, in its skill and finish, everything a "big" picture should be and rarely is. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 04, 2020
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Inside Daisy Clover (1965) |
Only Christopher Plummer and Katherine Bard... seem to know what the point of the picture is. If the director, Robert Mulligan, ever knew, it slipped his mind while he was photographing the beach in sun-washed blues, like a set for Carousel. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 04, 2020
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Charade (1963) |
Since the plot does not bear close tracking, let me note simply that Cary Grant still looks imperishable, Audrey Hepburn still looks like a Givenchy foundling, and the entire affair is carried off as a mild joke upon itself. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 03, 2020
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The Victors (1963) |
The Victors is a bad movie: its shoddiness runs deep. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 03, 2020
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Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) |
While this sounds trying, it is not, so light and pretty and stylish is the picture, everything swimming in the green grass of England and the sweet lambent air of a 1910 that never was. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 02, 2020
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The Pawnbroker (1964) |
Lumet seems to me something of a puzzle. While some instinct leads him to undertake tremendously promising projects, he brings to those projects only a stunning literal-mindedness. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 02, 2020
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A Patch of Blue (1965) |
A modest effort only barely protoplastic. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 02, 2020
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Life at the Top (1965) |
An il-advised sequel to the energetic Room at the Top. - Vogue
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| Posted Mar 02, 2020
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