1. Few movies have communicated with such dark hilarity all the anxiety and flamboyant misery of youthful sexual initiation
2. It's smart, witty, and troubling all at the same time.
3. Lovely Katharine Ross couldn't be more appealing as the daughter.
4. It is a good topical movie whose time has passed, leaving it stranded in an earlier age. I give it three stars out of delight for the material it contains; to watch it today is like opening a time capsule.
5. The most engaging thing about Mike Nichols is his awareness, strong enough to remind you of the late, great Preston Sturges, of how to use bland and idiotic exaggeration as a comic safety-valve.
6. It isn't often one gets even half a film as funny as this.
7. The Graduate gives some substance to the contention that American films are coming of age -- of our age.
8. Anne Bancroft is the stand-out. She brings depth, subtlety, and a melancholy sadness to the part that goes far beyond what is in the script.
9. Be agog at Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson in some of the most hilariously icky seduction scenes ever filmed. See Mike Nichols (with help from Simon & Garfunkel) take control of the Zeitgeist. See the mood go dark -- darker than you remember.
10. Robert Surtees's stunning, innovative camerawork contributes telling visual ironies and the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack perfectly captures the mood of disaffected youth seething beneath the laid-back exterior of 1960s California.
Based on these individual reviews, what is the critic consensus?
The music, the performances, the precision in capturing the post-college malaise -- The Graduate's coming-of-age story is indeed one for the ages.