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Movie Trial: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

The movies that split people down the middle, put in the Empire dock… Simon Ingram (Prosecution) and Kat Brown (Defence) on Steven Speilberg’s “A. I.: Artificial Intelligence”

The Servant (1963) – Review by Andrew Sarris

The Servant is a genuinely shocking experience for audiences with the imagination to understand the dimensions of the shock. In years to come The Servant may be cited as a prophetic work making the decline and fall of our last cherished illusions about ourselves and our alleged civilization.

2001: A Space Odyssey – Review by John Simon [The New Leader]

2001: A Space Odyssey is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines, and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans. For all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, this is a kind of space-Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story.

Once upon a Time in the West (1969) – Review by Dave Kehr

In Leone’s hands, capitalism itself becomes a mythic force, as much a part of the landscape (it’s embodied here by the building of a railroad across the desert) as the horses or mountain ranges. In criticizing the myth — in filling in the economic relationships American westerns have skipped over —Leone expands and enriches it, which is what the best criticism does.

THE KILLING FIELDS (1984): UNREAL – Review by Pauline Kael

The Killing Fields, which is based on Sydney Schanberg’s 1980 Times Magazine article “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” is by no means a negligible movie. It shows us the Khmer Rouge transforming Cambodia into a nationwide gulag, and the scenes of this genocidal revolution have the breadth and terror of something deeply imagined.

Blow Out (1981)

Blow Out (1981) | Review by Pauline Kael

De Palma keeps our senses heightened that way all through Blow Out; the entire movie has the rapt intensity that he got in the slow-motion sequences in The Fury (1978). Only now, De Palma can do it at normal speed.

Prizzi's Honor (1985) Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner

Prizzi’s Honor (1985) | Review by Pauline Kael

If John Huston’s name were not on Prizzi’s Honor, I’d have thought a fresh new talent had burst on the scene, and he’d certainly be the hottest new director in Hollywood. The picture has a daring comic tone—it revels voluptuously in the murderous finagling of the members of a Brooklyn Mafia family, and rejoices in their scams.

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985) – Review by Pauline Kael

Rambo: First Blood Part II explodes your previous conception of “overwrought”—it’s like a tank sitting on your lap firing at you. Jump-cutting from one would-be high point to another, Rambo is to the action film what Flashdance was to the musical, with one to-be-cherished difference: audiences are laughing at it.

PURPLE RAIN (1984) – Review by Pauline Kael

As a movie, Purple Rain is a mawkish fictionalized bio […] It’s pretty terrible; the narrative hook is: will the damaged boy learn to love? There are no real scenes—just flashy, fractured rock-video moments.

Gremlins (1984) directed by Joe Dante

Gremlins (1984) | Review by Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael’s review of Gremlins in 1984 was, much like the film itself, a mixed bag. She acknowledged its entertainment value and technical accomplishments but ultimately found it uneven and morally questionable

The Bible (1966) – Review by Pauline Kael

One of the worst failures of the movie is, implicitly, a rather comic modern predicament. Huston obviously can’t make anything acceptable out of the Bible’s accounts of sinfulness and he falls back upon the silliest stereotypes of evil

THE PLUCK OF ‘BARRY LYNDON’ – REVIEW BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

So Barry Lyndon is a failure. So what? How many “successes” have you seen lately that are half as interesting or accomplished, that are worth even ten minutes of thought after leaving them? By my own rough count, a smug little piece of engineering like A Clockwork Orange was worth about five. I’m reminded of what Jonas Mekas wrote about Zazie several years ago: “The fact that the film is a failure means nothing. Didn’t God create a failure, too?”

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (1989) – Review by Pauline Kael

Crimes and Misdemeanors, written and directed by Woody Allen, is a sad, censuring look at the world-famous doctor and other crooks in high places who (in Allen’s view) have convinced themselves that they can do anything, because they don’t think God is watching.

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