Pauline Kael

"Is it a great movie? I don't think so. But it's a triumphant piece of filmmaking"  

"A first-rate piece of work by a director who's daring and agile (...) It's heaven – alive in a way that movies rarely are."

"An entertainingly imbecilic musical comedy—a piece of pop dadaism"  

"The film is festive. It doesn’t disguise its narcissism; it turns it into bright-colored tragicomedy (...) This wild man has a true talent."  

"[Weir] has succumbed to blandness (...) The farm country is used as a fantasyland for the audience to visit; it has its allure, but you’re ready to leave when Book goes"  

"The images have an unreal clarity (...) Kinesthetically, the film gets to you. It gets your heart thumping."  

"It keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us -- but half-heartedly"  

"The way 'Saturday Night Fever' has been directed and shot, we feel the languorous pull of the discotheque, and the gaudiness is transformed. These are among the most hypnotically beautiful pop dance scenes ever filmed (...) Travolta gets so far inside the role he seems incapable of a false note (...) 'Saturday Night Fever' gets at something deeply romantic: the need to move, to dance, and the need to be who you'd like to be. Nirvana is the dance; when the music stops, you return to being ordinary"  

"It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too"  

"'Carrie' is a menstrual joke—a film noir in red (...) De Palma uses tawdriness as a tuning fork"  

"Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours (...) The best editing in an American movie in a long time"  

"Robert Surtees’s stylized cinematography (...) helps to clarify the subject matter. The film badly needs this stylization, because, of course, its shallow overview of town life is dangerously close to TV."  

"The whole thing became amorphous and confused. Paramount did rather better by the romance than the politics; Ingrid Bergman is lovely and affecting as Maria."

"One of the finest of all the movies that deal with life at sea, and one of the most successful of all attempts to put Eugene O'Neill on film"  

"The movie’s aural-visual humor and poetry are sustained despite the wobbly plot and other weaknesses."  

"Most of the players give impossibly bad performances (...) But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, 'stars' were, this is perhaps the best example of all time."  

"Hopper may have the makings of a movie [perhaps more than one], but he blew it in the editing room. If he was deliberate in not involving the audience, the audience that is not involved doesn’t care whether he was deliberate or not. That there’s method in the madness doesn’t help. The editing supplies so little in the way of pace or rhythm that this movie performs the astounding feat of dying on the screen in the first few minutes, before the credits come on."

"The scale of the film is huge and operatic, and it loses the intimacy of the best neorealist films, and their breath of life."  

"Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love"  

"The picture is thoroughly charming."