>
Manny Farber
Tomatometer-approved critic
(Photo Credit: Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
The Big Heat (1953) |
The characters seem to be wrapped thinly around steaming amounts of vengeance, avarice, or cruelty, but Marvin and Ford make it a well-acted movie that offers interesting impressions of how a practical-minded American male operates in crises - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Apr 11, 2024
|
|
|
|
Strangers on a Train (1951) |
Hitchcock’s latest film, Strangers on a Train , is fun to watch if you check your intelligence at the box office. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Jun 20, 2023
|
|
|
|
In Which We Serve (1942) |
One is aware from the start of this movie that it is something new, not done before... The content of each shot was conceived in a film sense rather than any other, and no other picture this year has equaled it. Not even nearly. - The New Republic
Read More
| Posted Mar 25, 2022
|
|
|
|
Casablanca (1942) |
Casablanca is as ineffectual as a Collier’s short story, but with one thing and another -- like Bergman, Veidt and Humphrey Bogart -- it is a pleasure of sorts. - The New Republic
Read More
| Posted Feb 18, 2022
|
|
|
|
Mrs. Miniver (1942) |
The picture is entertaining enough, but its cloying goodness will make you yourself feel like a problem child. - The New Republic
Read More
| Posted Jan 03, 2022
|
|
|
|
Crossfire (1947) |
[Crossfire] has the neatness of a Chiclet, the tone of a nickel, and the speed of a hiccup. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Nov 17, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Macomber Affair (1947) |
This movie suffocates you with Hemingway's puerile notions about what makes men heroes and cowards, and it will probably sell only the five-year-old yeggs in the audience. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Nov 17, 2021
|
|
|
|
Sunset Boulevard (1950) |
An uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Oct 11, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Thing (1951) |
The Thing (from Another World) is a slick item thriftily combining a heavy science story with a pure adventure yarn for better than ordinary entertainment. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 21, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Little Fugitive (1953) |
The film pleased me for about five minutes, even though the plot seemed manufactured to permit yet another documentarist to shoot his favorite run-down American environment; then it disintegrated into a compromise with the truth. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 16, 2021
|
|
|
|
Lonelyhearts (1958) |
Lonelyhearts turns a revered novel of pessimism into a semi-optimistic newspaper story, confused in casting. rigid in story-telling, but mildly gripping because of its TV-style intimacy and drive. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Sound and the Fury (1959) |
In many ways, "Sound" is a bad joke... However, everything outside the story is sharply etched and fairly gripping for an opulent movie. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Rio Bravo (1959) |
Rio Bravo is a soft, slack, not very rousing Western by a man (Howard Hawks) who knows better, having supervised a nearly endless chain of masterful journey films. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Hustler (1961) |
The Hustler is cut down to almost nothing by tons of pompous elegance (Paul Newman and male associates), and then intermittently saved by Miss Laurie's grace on top of inferiority, slackness and a willed driving towards self-destruction. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) |
There is one mannerism, a somber, time-devouring stare which [Albert Finney] wedges into each seduction, that destroys the credible surface of his characterization. It gives the role an inexplicable theatricality. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Wild Strawberries (1957) |
An eerie, felicitous opportunism steered this film -- just enough Freudian bitters, modern marriage, supernatural overcast, and "smashingly beautiful" postcards to provide a full matinee of culture for the expanding middlebrow-highbrow audience. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Sun's Burial (1960) |
With the resilience missing, the flip motions only accentuate the supineness of the actors who, while trying for the shrill terror of a Goya drawing, resemble a subway vendor's jiggling dolls. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Splendor in the Grass (1961) |
Having finally ditched the boxed-in theatrical form, Kazan hurls his shrieking restlessness directly at the audience in what seems a last ditch effort to summon up the memorializing grandeur of latter-day George Stevens direction. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The 400 Blows (1959) |
Truffaut has a knack for communicating the uneasiness of life about him, of the fussy and despoiled, though too often he achieves it by diddling his people and situations annoyingly like a piano player stoically hitting the same sour note. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Walk East on Beacon (1952) |
The movie has been turned into a crushing bore by a producer who is so dryly factual and absorbed with mechanical wonders that his movies would ring like an anvil if you bounced them. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Carrie (1952) |
One has the feeling that the director is working with material that is as heavy and dignified as a Steinway grand inlaid with precious stones. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Sniper (1952) |
A smooth, technically astute, 100 per cent dull melodrama. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Pride of St. Louis (1952) |
[An] ultra-civic-minded work manages to kill the idea of baseball as the national pastime. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
High Noon (1952) |
A movie which does take you into every part of the town and features features Cooper's beautiful rolling gait, but which reveals that someone spent too much time over the drawing board conceiving dramatic camera shots to cover up the lack of story. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Outcast of the Islands (1952) |
Carol Reed has created an exceptional film that entangles the spectator in tropical textures and worries him with the shame and guilt of a hero who betrays only his friends. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Marrying Kind (1952) |
The story behind a sad little divorce suit told by the cut-back method, with the director (Cukor) using a sneak camera without putting any heart or belief into it. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Fighter (1952) |
An inexpert mixture of politics and hokum. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
In the Street (1948) |
The technique of documenting life in the raw with a concealed camera has often been tried out, in Hollywood and in experimental films, but never with much success until this small masterwork turned up. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Boots Malone (1952) |
[Milton Holmes] is a born story-teller even if his stuff runs to pulp. His script treats the actuality of working for a living and does it without those short cuts that chop current movies into static fragments. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Forbidden Games (1952) |
The two stars, Brigette Fossey and Georges Poujouly, manage to be natural, comic, and utterly moving in a hair-raising way without even trying. You should see this film, even at art-theater prices. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
My Cousin Rachel (1952) |
The picture happens to be a mystery, but because it is tied to the wispy conventions of romantic fiction, it never gets on the road. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Above and Beyond (1953) |
A picture that is interesting despite its lack of filmic virtues. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Tony Draws a Horse (1951) |
Perhaps, this is the English way of distracting your attention from obvious cheesecake. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Secret of Convict Lake (1951) |
A grotesquely overcivilized Western larded with small talk about decency and indecency, peace of mind, kindness. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Force of Arms (1951) |
Olson can wind her voice into an ambiguous composition of ferocious, haunting, demanding elements that captures the ear and refuses to relinquish it until the moment has been milked dry. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
That's My Boy (1951) |
A puerile TV-style pigskin parody. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Fabiola (1949) |
A two-hour chaos of disconnected sequences snipped more or less at random from a much longer French production. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Women Without Names (1950) |
A detention-camp melodrama [that] will probably play here to an almost solidly male audience -- aesthetic to the core -- drawn in by such ads as "women trapped by intrigue... and the heartless passion of ruthless men!" - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
People Will Talk (1951) |
Though People Will Talk is basically only a Dr. Kildare story about "good" medicine and "bad," it has been precociously adult-erated a the toniest film of the year. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) |
The story proceeds as Tennessee Williams first wrote it, except that all the frankest -- and most crucial -- dialogue has been excised and the last scene has been churned disastrously to satisfy the Johnson office but confound the spectator. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Red Badge of Courage (1951) |
Though [Courage] is a thin study, over-directed and underwritten... it is also the most sharply focused view of soldiering yet presented by Hollywood, and, in the pure sense, one of the most uncompromisingly artistic films ever made in this country. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
Detective Story (1951) |
Detective Story is far more absorbing than some equally lurid message melodramas (Day in the Sun, Streetcar) now being touted for the Academy award. But it plays the same hoax on its audience. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
On Dangerous Ground (1951) |
By the time it reaches the run-down of an adolescent murderer over half the snow-covered hills of northern California, the customer is as fed up with motion as the panting actors. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
My Son John (1952) |
It is done with such earnestness as to be slow-moving, but the actors are masters of intricate timing and intonation and have the easy spontaneity and control to put across a story that is mostly talk in parlor, bedroom, and bath. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Big Night (1951) |
The Big Night is so slow, murkily lit, and incoherently involved with the meek pantomime of John Barrymore, Jr., that it might make more sense if the reels were run backward. - The Nation
Read More
| Posted Sep 15, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Horse Soldiers (1959) |
The Horse Soldiers is the disaster of the month, an uneventful canter in which Ford, without any plot to speak of, falls back on boyish Irish playfulness to fill a several-million-dollar investment. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 14, 2021
|
|
|
|
Middle of the Night (1959) |
The director, Delbert Mann, does a clichéd grim realism with backgrounds, weather, faces. The two miscast leads, Frederic March and Kim Novak, are a sometimes effective but generally square approximation of garment district miserables. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 14, 2021
|
|
|
|
The Nun's Story (1959) |
When the plot turns up, Zinnemann reduces each heroism to kernel size and then resumes his tasteful but rather insipid documentation. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 14, 2021
|
|
|
|
Some Like It Hot (1959) |
Some Like It Hot is a real weirdie: Wilder gets no laughs at all out of his sizzling, fast wedding of female impersonation to 1929 thrills, but, from a non-entertainment angle, his movie has a not-quite-real surface that is worth examining. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 14, 2021
|
|
|
|
Compulsion (1959) |
Compulsion has surprising power, the feeling of a new intellectualism being poured into the handsomely mounted "liberal" juggernauts Sam Goldwyn once produced. - The New Leader
Read More
| Posted Sep 14, 2021
|