question: This post-Watergate thriller captures the paranoid tenor of the times, thanks to Syndey Pollack's taut direction and excellent performances from Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway.

numbered reviews: 1. At its best moments, Three Days of the Condor creates without effort or editorializing that sense of isolation -- that far remove from reality -- within which super-government agencies can operate with such heedless immunity.
2. Excellent paranoid thriller with an unforgettable opening
3. First-rate spy flick made by and with experts
4. Redford, Dunaway, Von Sydow, Cliff Robertson and John Houseman turn in superb work, and the film is as pure a thriller as one could hope for, with a gripping premise, hurtling plot and a marvelous air of menace.
5. fascinating cultural artifact in its reflection of post-Nixonian government paranoia, but it doesn't make the most of its potential
6. Fine espionage thriller that features great performances by Redford and Dunaway. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close.
7. Both entertaining and very intelligent thriller.
8. It's got the mystery aspect down beautifully, but because I wasn't given a chance to get behind the characters and get to know them, I had a hard time getting into the film itself.
9. ...an efficient exercise in Watergate-era paranoia.
10. Pollack excels by establishing an interesting situation, sustaining it, and--in keeping with the paranoid-thriller genre--resolving it on a pleasingly ambiguous note. [Blu-ray]


question: While surprisingly sweeter and warm-hearted than previous Farrelly outings, Shallow Hal is also less funny and more bland.

numbered reviews: 1. Shallow Hal is the most endearing portrait of outcasts since last year's Ghost World.
2. The key to enjoying Shallow Hal is to discard as many expectations as you can about a Farelly Brothers film.
3. When the final act descends into preachiness, it's nearly earned the indulgence.
4. In delivering their message, the Farrelly Brothers seem to have compromised their nothing-is-sacred comedy spirit, but at least their hearts are in the right place.
5. There's just about enough charm and laughs here to keep Farrelly fans happy. Even the fat ones.
6. [An] insulting new comedy from Bobby and Peter Farrelly.
7. The film is not as funny as their best, but fascinates in the discomforting way it foregrounds the brothers' normally buried, facile moral dialectic.
8. The Farrellys take an artistic step backward with this soft, disappointingly sentimental comedy about the true nature of beauty; they seem to have forgotten their roots in the outrageous and gross-out.
9. With the relatively untested Black coming on awfully strong, the lack of directorial finesse lets the enterprise down, creating some clunky scenes and dead air where laughs might have been expected.
10. Romantic comedy is pretty tame for Farrelly Bros.


question: Creepily atmospheric, The Innocents is a stylishly crafted, chilling British ghost tale with Deborah Kerr at her finest.

numbered reviews: 1. No shock tactics here, just the careful creation of sinister atmosphere through decor, Freddie Francis' haunting camerawork, and evocative acting. Kerr, especially, is excellent.
2. ...sends shivers down the backbone, playing the vertebrae like a skeletal hand tapping on a xylophone.
3. A real shocker, it chills the heart.
4. Wonderful adult horror, stylishly well-made and frightening on a couple of levels.
5. Based on Henry James' story Turn of the Screw this catches an eerie, spine-chilling mood right at the start and never lets up on its grim, evil theme.
6. This unresolved mystery charges the events ... with a dreadful sense of uncertainty far more thrilling than the simple supernatural chills of a typical haunted house movie -- another "turn of the screw," as James would have said.
7. If the picture is journeyman James, it is also pitapatational entertainment, the most sophisticated scare show since Diabolique.
8. This classy English mystery is adorned by a wonderful Deborah Kerr as the governess driven to extremes by a strange, haunted mansion and strange, haunted children,
9. Too much Freud and too little thought.
10. Is it the finest, smartest, most visually savvy horror film ever made by a big studio?


question: Extremely one-sided in its indictment of the Bush administration, but worth watching for the humor and the debates it'll stir.

numbered reviews:
1. Michael Moore's latest volley at the powers that be is his strongest film to date, despite familiar, infuriating flaws.
2. It's an obnoxious film, to be sure, but it's also slick and engrossing
3. The politics of Fahrenheit 9/11 aren't going to divide people, because they're already divided. It should accomplish exactly what it sets out to do.
4. As a whole, unfocused, broad, and shallow, but with moments that deserve to be seen
5. It's like shooting fish in a barrel -- finding clips of Bush embarrassing himself ain't too hard
6. Infuriating and challenging in equal parts.
7. This may be Moore's most dogmatic film to date, but it is also his most stylistically and structurally confident.
8. It does a masterful job of ridiculing the personality, intellect and employment resumé of George W. Bush, and many of its images and scenes engender a gut-wrenching emotional impact.
9. A powerful cinematic op-ed piece.
10. A sometimes sidesplitting, occasionally saddening but consistently entertaining attack on the most disastrous presidency in modern history.