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La Strada
(1954)
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Mr. Harper
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The way La Strada moves within a consistent reality of its own creating, without fumbling or straining for effects, gives a suddenly new impression of what movie-making competence might look like.
Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Ivanhoe
(1952)
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Mr. Harper
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Unconditionally recommended.
Posted Apr 14, 2022
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From Here to Eternity
(1953)
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Mr. Harper
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Only Mr. Sinatra manages to break through the ordinary into art.
Posted Mar 15, 2022
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Cold War
(2018)
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Giles Harvey
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Cold War recalls the visual aesthetic of the Polish Film School, the cinematic movement, inspired in part by Italian neorealism, that flourished in the period of mild liberalization that began in 1956, three years after Stalin's death.
Posted Aug 26, 2021
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Finian's Rainbow
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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[Finian's Rainbow] looks as though it has been rehearsed for, say, two months, then photographed in a week's time.
Posted Aug 12, 2020
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Hot Millions
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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[A] wonderfully funny movie.
Posted Aug 12, 2020
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Star!
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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While Star! betrays everything in its course, it betrays no one more than its own star, Julie Andrews.
Posted Aug 12, 2020
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Dear John
(1964)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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Much has been made about the erotic nature of the movie, and that is a good thing... for it is very sweet eroticism.
Posted Aug 12, 2020
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The Lion in Winter
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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Mr. Goldman's script cannot resist undercutting the subject by trivializing it.
Posted Aug 11, 2020
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The Fixer
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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In the face of Frankenheimer's beautiful intentions it is really awful to have to say that The Fixer is a high-minded, monotonous drone.
Posted Aug 11, 2020
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Ice Station Zebra
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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Buy some popcorn and see the movie.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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The Brotherhood
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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If this story of the Mafia seems near bankruptcy, it's because nearly everything in it is in debt to something else that was done better at another time.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Candy
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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The joke, if it ever really existed, has gone out of Candy in her film embodiment. In its place is a long, dreary vaudeville, six or seven acts' worth.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Ulysses
(1967)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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Mr. Strick directed Ulysses and shared the screenplay with Fred Haines. I congratulate them both.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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The Night They Raided Minsky's
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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It seems a shame, for the director William Friedkin apparently wanted something more...but in the end the crassness of the story does him in.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Persona
(1966)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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This original and individual work acts upon us in its own way; what is finally impossible to escape are the faces of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, agonized objects of Bergman's worship.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Accident
(1967)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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In the end, for all the fairly sensational things that have been brought to pass, it is the audience that is left forlorn and lonely, excluded from the often boring private visions of Harold Pinter's characters.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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La Guerre Est Finie
(1966)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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In La Guerre Est Finie, Resnais has caught the wholly bitter taste of life-in-exile and the obsessive quality that often accompanies the pursuit of hopeless causes.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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The Last Tycoon
(1976)
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Stephen Koch
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The Last Tycoon is a beautiful and interesting failure precisely because it lacks confidence and energy, because it substitutes the uncertain beauties of nostalgia and style for whatever inventiveness was required to fulfill its promise.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Closely Watched Trains
(1966)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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One of the most appealing movies of the year.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Camelot
(1967)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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This Camelot could be moved into Disneyland, intact.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Far From the Madding Crowd
(1967)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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There is so little authentic feeling in Far From the Madding Crowd.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
(1967)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is another of his Euclidean problems in human geometry, worked relentlessly through step-by-step to the last tear and the neat solution, both of which are designed to provide full satisfaction.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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War and Peace
(1966)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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The Tolstoyan directness comes through the film, the attempt stated and restated -- to resolve the dilemma of how to live. And while the movie sometimes hammers its moral points home with something less than grace, its epic quality never fails.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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The Young Girls of Rochefort
(1967)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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This follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the French at their least charming, being a nearly unbearably coy Gallic imitation of an MGM musical dating from the heyday of Gene Kelly.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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The movie, it seems to me, is a kind of galactic deep freeze, empty inside, both extraordinarily tedious and fancy at the same time.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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The Chinese Girl
(1967)
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Robert Kotlowitz
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Its pace, for all the talk, is exhilarating, its use of primary colors hard and beautiful, its shifts of mood and action are both intricate and dazzling; while its feeling for its characters is always serious and affectionate, even when Godard is mocking.
Posted Aug 04, 2020
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Bacurau
(2019)
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Ela Bittencourt
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Mendonça and Dornelles's film is... an attempt to grapple with unspeakable, horrifying evil -- but an evil that must be understood in social and historical rather than biblical terms.
Posted May 02, 2020
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The Other Side of the Wind
(2018)
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J. Hoberman
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Sure to be wildly overpraised and cursorily dismissed, The Other Side of the Wind is often awful and frequently great, occasionally at the same time. The main thing is that it gives Welles the last word.
Posted Jan 07, 2019
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Phoenix
(2014)
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Daniel Mendelsohn
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But as Petzold's film slinks toward this metaconclusion, all the artistry - the ingenious allusiveness and the Russian-doll plotting - finally upstages whatever larger point he wanted to make about history and identity, Germans and Jews.
Posted Apr 17, 2018
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Labyrinth of Lies
(2014)
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Daniel Mendelsohn
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I couldn't help wishing for less earnestness and more artfulness... But Labyrinth of Lies is too eager to tell the truth and get to its foregone conclusion: the beginning of the trials, and the inevitable title cards that describe their results.
Posted Apr 17, 2018
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Alexander
(2004)
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Daniel Mendelsohn
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The film that resulted from this obsessive desire for historical accuracy is a dud: a baggy, incoherent, bloviating mess in which any sense of the thrilling and impressive arc of Alexander's career sinks beneath the weight of period detail.
Posted Apr 17, 2018
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Paddington
(2014)
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Rivka Galchen
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Silly and smart and witty and pretty and just feel-good enough that you don't have to feel too bad about feeling good.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
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When Marnie Was There
(2014)
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Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
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Unlike American animated films, which only gesture at moral seriousness, Marnie and other films like it are centrally, sincerely concerned with the complex trials of adolescence.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
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The Boy and the Beast
(2015)
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Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
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The family dynamics in The Boy and the Beast are more astute and involved than they are in any of Hosoda's other features.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
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Beasts of No Nation
(2015)
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Nat Segnit
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The result is a film that is at once diligently dramatic and oddly becalmed, a film about unutterable horror that isn't particularly horrifying.
Posted Mar 22, 2018
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Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation
(2015)
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Rivka Galchen
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Instead we have heroes like Hunt, who fight against transparency and accountability. It's no surprise that the government ends up embracing him all over again.
Posted Mar 22, 2018
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Hail, Caesar!
(2016)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The Coens' Hollywood is an empire, where fraud is cheerful, natural, invisible - where people can live as they want to, so long as they don't trouble the system that keeps them employed. Everything goes fine there until the Commies show up.
Posted Mar 14, 2018
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Star Wars: The Force Awakens
(2015)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The film's political resonances are as mutable - and as muddled - as those of its predecessors.
Posted Mar 14, 2018
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No
(2012)
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J. Hoberman
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Given the charnel-house atmosphere of Tony Manero and Post Mortem, it's striking that Larraín concludes his Pinochet trilogy on a note of near-giddy optimism.
Posted Mar 04, 2018
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12 Years a Slave
(2013)
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J. Hoberman
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12 Years a Slave is, like The Trial, a trapdoor over the abyss. Although less abrupt than Kafka's novel, the movie wastes little time before plunging its viewer into a nightmare of dehumanization.
Posted Mar 04, 2018
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