Penelope Gilliatt
Penelope Gilliatt's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Sight & Sound
New Yorker
Observer (UK)
(Photo Credit: Doug Griffin/Toronto Star/Getty Images)
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) |
It's a story like Pagliacci. It has pathos, it has heart. (As usual, when he's forced to lift his eyes from the camerawork he realises the film is pretty terrible.) - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Feb 08, 2023
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A Man for All Seasons (1966) |
For me the only thing wrong with the film, in fact, is the secret ingredient that it is inoffensively and sweetly boring. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Sep 08, 2022
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I Am Curious (Blue) (Jag är nyfiken - en film i blått) (1968) |
It is decked out with a lot of idiot sociology and seriously marred by its mock humor, which has the discomfort and occasional ugliness of a jape by a meagre-spirited schoolmaster. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 08, 2022
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Isadora (1968) |
The picture is a wittily distanced account of a believable woman, and the attitude changes everything. If film biographies of the gifted are generally the dulled things they are, I think it is partly because the people making them are so concussed by awe. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 08, 2022
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Putney Swope (1969) |
Some of Downey's film is lousy. Some of it has a peculiar surreal opportunism and rudeness to his hosts -- to the party, to the payers, to the American economy -- the works blissfully. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 07, 2022
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The Wild Bunch (1969) |
Apart from Peckinpah's simple technical control and the cut of his script, which is a knife that never slips off the bone, there is an angry quality to his mind. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 07, 2022
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The Red and the White (1967) |
The Red and the White makes Cinemascope the only apt proportion. It expresses feelings in the characters' bones. As the soldiers are physically on the screen, so they are psychically in the story. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 06, 2022
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Easy Rider (1969) |
Ninety-four minutes of what it is to swing, to watch, to be fond, to hold opinions, and to get killed in America at this moment. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 06, 2022
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The Hidden Fortress (1958) |
Kurosawa is a wonderfully fierce director, with a stringent sense of humour, and a wily eclecticism when it suits him. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Jun 28, 2022
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Cleo From 5 to 7 (1961) |
Cleo is a fascinating experiment in subjective reporting. It looks beautiful, and because it is absolutely attentive to the realities of the character it has a moving purity and humour, without any sentimentality at all. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Feb 17, 2022
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Porgy and Bess (1959) |
Otto Preminger's film is ponderous and flat. It has nothing like the spirit of, for instance, his own Carmen Jones. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Jan 20, 2022
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Night Moves (1975) |
We are forced to manage on no answers, it says, because the wrong questions are put; or on glib answers, because questions are put without any urgent impulse to find out anything new. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 15, 2021
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The Three Musketeers (1973) |
The pratfalls, and the rude turnings taken by antique speech, are very funny. They are ready-made for the beady attentiveness of humorists and children. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 15, 2021
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In the Name of the Father (1971) |
The movie has cleverness but not much wisdom. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 15, 2021
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Lucia (1968) |
The film -- all two hours and forty minutes of it -- says with mounting energy and comic spirit as its three episodes go on that things have now changed, but that they can change only a little while machismo still reigns. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 15, 2021
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West Side Story (1961) |
[West Side Story] is at least the best screen musical since On the Town and may not get all the praise it deserves: it is galvanic, technically thrilling, and stylised with a neurotic skill sometimes only just short of genius. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Dec 02, 2021
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Hatari! (1962) |
It is filmed with every possible cliché, and the romantic-comedy situations barge towards their targets with the delicacy of a rhino hurling itself at its dinner. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Apr 21, 2021
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My Life to Live (1962) |
Where Breathless and Une Femme est une Femme were full of tumbling life, this one is studiously frozen. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Apr 21, 2021
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Lawrence of Arabia (1962) |
Spiegel and Bolt and David Lean have run into an old problem with biographical art: they have invented too much to please biographers, and yet they have not taken the bolder liberties that make art. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Apr 20, 2021
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The Connection (1961) |
For Shirley Clarke's direction there can be nothing but praise... This is a film with more creative flair than any that has come out of America for years. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Feb 11, 2020
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Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971) |
Rather splendid, rather encouraging. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 19, 2019
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Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) |
The whole movie is often frightening in the wrong way -- not by force of satire but by weight of attitudinizing. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 18, 2019
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The Caretaker (1964) |
Every line in it involved the most delicate decisions of film-making, and all three actors are even better than they were on stage. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Mar 20, 2018
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Le Samouraï (1967) |
Cold, masterly, without pathos, and not even particularly sympathetic; it has the noble structure of accuracy. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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Princess Yang Kwei-fei (1955) |
Princess Yang Kwei Fei miraculously reproduces the comings and goings of the hero's thought, and it is in this sense that Mizoguchi's realism is most classical. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) |
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is some sort of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor. Technically and imaginatively, what he put into it is staggering. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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Adam's Rib (1949) |
Katharine Hepburn conveys an extraordinary abundance of spirit. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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Pat and Mike (1952) |
Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin here wrote an engaging screenplay about emotion-without-display for their rare uncut diamonds. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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Woman of the Year (1942) |
The film earlier has one of the very best Tracy-Hepburn love scenes, full of the sense of private shelter that they uniquely purvey. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) |
George Lucas, who made American Graffiti, has put together a sci-fi film that draws on any number of associations. Star Wars is both amazing and familiar. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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The Passenger (1975) |
Earlier Antonioni films have often seemed studied, but not this one. Its details are easy and apropos. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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Bonnie and Clyde (1967) |
Bonnie and Clyde don't really know that killing kills. The film does -- unlike the run of movies about violence now, which mostly know that killing sells. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 14, 2013
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