“The Big Lebowski” is about an attitude, not a story. It’s easy to miss that, because the story is so urgently pursued. It involves kidnapping, ransom money, a porno king, a reclusive millionaire, a runaway girl, the Malibu police, a woman who paints while nude and strapped to an overhead harness, and the last act…

No one would ever accuse Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” of being plausible, but it is framed so distinctively in the Hitchcock style that it plays firmly and never breaks out of the story. Later you question the absurdity of two detectives following a suspect from New York to California, apparently without being sure…

Stagecoach” is a film in which two great careers were renewed. Although he had appeared before in many films, as an extra, a stuntman and then an actor in B films, this was John Wayne‘s first starring role in a film by John Ford. For Ford, it was a return after some years to a genre about…

  “Schindler’s List” is described as a film about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust supplies the field for the story, rather than the subject. The film is really two parallel character studies–one of a con man, the other of a psychopath. Oskar Schindler, who swindles the Third Reich, and Amon Goeth, who represents its pure…

  “To Kill a Mockingbird” has remained the favorite of many people. It is currently listed as the 29th best film of all time in a poll by the Internet Movie Database. Such polls are of questionable significance, but certainly the movie and the Harper Lee novel on which it is based have legions of…

What a bold, mad act of genius it was, to make “Lawrence of Arabia,” or even think that it could be made. In the words years later of one of its stars, Omar Sharif: “If you are the man with the money and somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film that’s…

“The Adventures of Robin Hood” was made with sublime innocence and breathtaking artistry, at a time when its simple values rang true. In these cynical days when swashbucklers cannot be presented without an ironic subtext, this great 1938 film exists in an eternal summer of bravery and romance. We require no Freudian subtext, no revisionist…

    John Ford and John Wayne together created much of the mythology of the Old West we carry in our minds. Beginning with “Stagecoach” (1939), continuing from 1948 through 1950 with the Cavalry Trilogy (“Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “Rio Grande”), and finally to 1962 and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” together in…

“The Graduate,” the funniest American comedy of the year, is inspired by the free spirit which the young British directors have brought into their movies. It is funny, not because of sight gags and punch lines and other tired rubbish, but because it has a point of view. That is to say, it is against…

Andrew Davis’ “The Fugitive” is one of the best entertainments of the year, a tense, taut and expert thriller that becomes something more than that, an allegory about an innocent man in a world prepared to crush him. Like the cult television series that inspired it, the film has a Kafkaesque view of the world….

“Are you alone?” the private eye is asked in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” “Isn’t everybody?” he replies. That loneliness is central to a lot of noir heroes, who plunder other people’s secrets while running from their own. The tone was set by Dashiel Hammett, and its greatest practitioner was Raymond Chandler. To observe Humphrey Bogart in Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”…

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.” — Alfred Hitchcock So does John Carpenter. “Halloween” is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to “Psycho” (1960). It’s a terrifying and creepy film about what one of the characters calls Evil Personified. Right. And that leads us to the…

You’re going to need a bigger boat.” So the police chief famously informs the shark hunter, right after the first brief appearance of the man-eater in “Jaws.” It’s not simply a splendid line of dialogue, it’s an example of Steven Spielberg’s strategy all through the film, where the shark is more talked about than seen,…

“The Mission” feels exactly like one of those movies where you’d rather see the documentary about how the movie was made. You’d like to know why so many talented people went to such incredible lengths to make a difficult and beautiful movie – without any of them, on the basis of the available evidence, having…

    David Lynch has been working toward “Mulholland Drive” all of his career, and now that he’s arrived there I forgive him “Wild at Heart” and even “Lost Highway.” At last his experiment doesn’t shatter the test tubes. The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less…

“Gone With the Wind” presents a sentimental view of the Civil War, in which the “Old South” takes the place of Camelot and the war was fought not so much to defeat the Confederacy and free the slaves as to give Miss Scarlett O’Hara her comeuppance. But we’ve known that for years; the tainted nostalgia comes with…

Howard Hawks didn’t direct a film for four years after the failure of his “Land of the Pharaohs” in 1955. He thought maybe he had lost it. When he came back to work on “Rio Bravo” in 1958, he was 62 years old, would be working on his 41st film and was so nervous on the…

It is a strange comment to make about a film set inside a prison, but “The Shawshank Redemption” creates a warm hold on our feelings because it makes us a member of a family. Many movies offer us vicarious experiences and quick, superficial emotions. “Shawshank” slows down and looks. It uses the narrator’s calm, observant…

Backward into memory, forward into loss and desire, “The English Patient” searches for answers that will answer nothing. This poetic, evocative film version of the famous novel by Michael Ondaatje circles down through layers of mystery until all of the puzzles in the story have been solved, and only the great wound of a doomed love remains….

  What is remarkable about “It’s a Wonderful Life” is how well it holds up over the years; it’s one of those ageless movies, like “Casablanca” or “The Third Man,” that improves with age. Some movies, even good ones, should only be seen once. When we know how they turn out, they’ve surrendered their mystery…

“The Patriot” is a fable arguing the futility of pacifism, set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War. It is rousing and entertaining, and you get your money’s worth. The British are seen as gentlemanly fops or sadistic monsters, and the Americans come in two categories: brave or raver. Those who have a serious interest…

In their protests against Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct,” gay activists have been giving away the ending of the movie. With some thrillers, that would be a damaging blow. But the ending of “Basic Instinct” is so arbitrary that it hardly matters. This is not a movie where the outcome depends upon the personality or behavior…

The last words in David Lean’s “The Bridge on the River Kwai” are “Madness! Madness … madness!” Although the film’s two most important characters are both mad, the hero more than the villain, we’re not quite certain what is intended by that final dialogue. Part of the puzzle is caused by the film’s shifting points of…

Garden of Evil is a sprawling western from Twentieth Century Fox in 1954. Directed by Henry Hathaway, it was shot on location in Mexico, in Technicolor and CinemaScope. Visually it’s a stunning motion picture with a rousing score by Bernard Herrmann (this was the only western for which he composed a score in his entire illustrious…

Holding forth about actors a few years ago, John Huston allowed as how there were good ones and bad ones, and then there were a few like splendid thoroughbreds: All you had to do was judge their gait and you could see they had class. In this category, he placed Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. He didn’t mention any movies,…

Growing older was a smart career move for Bette Davis, whose personality was adult, hard-edged and knowing. Never entirely comfortable as an ingenue, she was glorious as a professional woman, a survivor, or a bitchy predator. Her veteran actress Margo Channing in “All About Eve” (1950) was her greatest role; it seems to show her defeated…

The hero of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” is trapped in a wheelchair, and we’re trapped, too–trapped inside his point of view, inside his lack of freedom and his limited options. When he passes his long days and nights by shamelessly maintaining a secret watch on his neighbors, we share his obsession. It’s wrong, we know,…

The way he sees the character of Sam Bowden is the key to why Martin Scorsese wanted to remake the 1962 thriller “Cape Fear.” Bowden, played by Nick Nolte, is a defense attorney who is threatened by a man from his past – a rapist who has finished a 14-year prison sentence and wants revenge for what he…

“Home Alone” is a splendid movie title because it evokes all sorts of scary nostalgia. Being left home alone, when you were a kid, meant hearing strange noises and being afraid to look in the basement – but it also meant doing all the things that grownups would tell you to stop doing, if they…

A fundamental difference between “The Silence of the Lambs” and its sequel, “Hannibal,” is that the former is frightening, involving and disturbing, while the latter is merely disturbing. It is easy enough to construct a geek show if you start with a cannibal. The secret of “Silence” is that it doesn’t start with the cannibal–it…

“I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life,” says one of the searchers through the warehouse of treasures left behind by Charles Foster Kane. Then we get the famous series of shots leading to the closeup of the word “Rosebud” on a sled that has been tossed into a furnace, its paint curling…

What a work of art and nature is Marilyn Monroe. She hasn’t aged into an icon, some citizen of the past, but still seems to be inventing herself as we watch her. She has the gift of appearing to hit on her lines of dialogue by happy inspiration, and there are passages in Billy Wilder’s…

If love at first sight is a reality, then in this information age there should also be the possibility of love at first cybercontact. When people meet via computers or personal ads or phone-in radio shows – when their first sight of each other is through a communications medium – isn’t it still possible that…

There is no movie musical more fun than “Singin’ in the Rain,” and few that remain as fresh over the years. Its originality is all the more startling if you reflect that only one of its songs was written new for the film, that the producers plundered MGM’s storage vaults for sets and props, and…

There must be fewer experiences more wounding to the heart than for a parent to look at a child and fear for its future. In inner-city America, where one in every 21 young men will die of gunshot wounds, and most of them will be shot by other young men, it is not simply a…

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that “Casablanca” is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only…

“The Piano” is as peculiar and haunting as any film I’ve seen. It tells a story of love and fierce pride, and places it on a bleak New Zealand coast where people live rudely in the rain and mud, struggling to maintain the appearance of the European society they’ve left behind. It is a story…

It was Francois Truffaut who said that it’s not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, end up making combat look like fun. If Truffaut had lived to see “Platoon,” the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion. Here is a movie…

They meet at first in the middle of the prairie, holding themselves formally and a little awkwardly, the cavalry officer and Sioux Indians. There should be instant mistrust between them, but they take each other’s measure and keep an open mind. A civilized man is a person whose curiosity outweighs his prejudices, and these are…

Butch (Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) were two Western outlaws (unsung until now) who led a gang of cutthroat train robbers. But when Harriman, the railroad tycoon, got up a special posse of experts to hunt them, they lit out for Bolivia and stuck up banks there. You can see, in “Butch Cassidy and the…

“Thelma & Louise” is in the expansive, visionary tradition of the American road picture. It celebrates the myth of two carefree souls piling into a 1956 T-Bird and driving out of town to have some fun and raise some hell. We know the road better than that, however, and we know the toll it exacts:…

The idea has a certain allure to it: A cop is trapped inside a high-rise with a team of desperate terrorists. He is all that stands between them and their hostages. Give the terrorist leader brains and a personality, make one of the hostages the estranged wife of the cop and you’ve got a movie….

Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” plays like an anthology of the best parts from all the Saturday matinee serials ever made. It takes place in Africa, Nepal, Egypt, at sea and in a secret submarine base. It contains trucks, bulldozers, tanks, motorcycles, ships, subs, Pan Am Clippers, and a Nazi flying wing. It…

  Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” takes place at that moment when the old West was becoming new. Professional gunfighters have become such an endangered species that journalists follow them for stories. Men who slept under the stars are now building themselves houses. William Munny, “a known thief and a murderer,” supports himself with hog farming. The…

“The Godfather” is told entirely within a closed world. That’s why we sympathize with characters who are essentially evil. The story by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola is a brilliant conjuring act, inviting us to consider the Mafia entirely on its own terms. Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) emerges as a sympathetic and even admirable character; during the…

John Ford’s “The Searchers” contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne’s best performances. There are shots that are astonishingly beautiful. A cover story inNew Yorkmagazine called it the most influential movie in American history. And yet at its center is a difficult question, because the Wayne character is racist without apology–and so, in a…

No, I never loved you Walter — not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you, just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot. Is she kidding? Walter thinks so: “Sorry, baby. I’m not buying.” The puzzle…

When John Huston came back from the war and Humphrey Bogart was a star big enough to choose his next project, the two of them chose to make a film about a seedy loser driven mad by greed. “Wait till you see me in my next picture,” Bogart shouted to a movie critic outside a New York nightclub. “I…

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” is the most elegant expression of the master’s visual style, just as “Vertigo” is the fullest expression of his obsessions. It contains some of the most effective camera shots in his–or anyone’s–work, and they all lead to the great final passages in which two men find out how very wrong they both…

Inspired by a true story, as they like to say in Hollywood, the film traces the fleeting ups and frightening downs of Chris Gardner, whose efforts to keep his family from sinking into poverty evolve into a life-and-death struggle of social Darwinian proportions. It’s the early 1980s, and while Ronald Reagan is delivering the bad…