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Penelope Gilliatt

Penelope Gilliatt's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Biography:

(Photo Credit: Doug Griffin/Toronto Star/Getty Images)

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
The Conversation (1974) 94% EDIT “This is a screenplay of the first quality, written with the eerie foresight of a real writer. It is very simply directed. Nothing gets in the way of the intended double meanings of the script.” – The New Yorker Sep 24, 2024 Full Review Dog Day Afternoon (1975) 96% EDIT “The movie succeeds, on the whole, because it has the crucial farcical virtue of not faltering.” – The New Yorker Apr 6, 2024 Full Review Billy Liar (1963) 91% EDIT “There is nothing sentimental in the film, which is buoyantly accurate and finally very bitter. Tom Courtenay's gritty performance is one of the things that contribute to its seriousness: he's too good an actor to try to make a character sympathetic.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review The Exterminating Angel (1962) 94% EDIT “Like all metaphors, The Exterminating Angel is not meant to be extended and explained: it is about panic and suggestibility, about the unconscious, about the reassurance that people feel in the traps of class and superstition.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review Days of Wine and Roses (1962) 100% EDIT “There is a kind of nervy, self-loathing sycophant whom Jack Lemmon can play better than any other actor in America: he did it in The Apartment, and there is a harrowing variant in his new film, Days of Wine and Roses.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review This Sporting Life (1963) 96% EDIT “This Sporting Life is a stupendous film. It has a blow like a fist. I've never seen an English picture that gave such expression to the violence and the capacity for pain that there is in the English character.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review The Eclipse (1962) 87% EDIT “It is a description of unhappiness by someone incapable of transmitting the feeling of it.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review Cape Fear (1962) 88% EDIT “There is some efficient terror-business in the film, but the suspicion that a meal is being made of your cringing stomach and your glazed eyeballs isn't very endearing. Nor is the brutal retributive climax.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review Summer Holiday (1963) 33% EDIT “Peter Yates's Summer Holiday, with Cliff Richard, must he the most cheerful and skilful British musical of our generation.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review The Devil's Eye (1960) 71% EDIT “The performances by the Breughel-faced Bergman repertory company are wry, peculiar and comic.” – Observer (UK) Mar 9, 2024 Full Review Chinatown (1974) 98% EDIT “The film, set in the thirties, from a script by Robert Towne, is wickedly skillful, funny, and socially alert.” – The New Yorker Mar 8, 2024 Full Review The Servant (1963) 90% EDIT “The thing that is most exhilarating about the film is that it has been written by someone who is obviously excited by the cinema and made by someone who obviously respects words.” – Observer (UK) Mar 7, 2024 Full Review The Pink Panther (1963) 89% EDIT “The picture has a performance by Peter Sellers that is one of the most delicate studies in accident-proneness since the silents.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review The Leopard (1963) 98% EDIT “It gives you an extraordinary sense of the texture of a grand family's life in Sicily during the Risorgirnemo. Visconti accumulates details like a Russian novelist.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) 69% EDIT “This is a grim new variant of the old knockabout form, a comedy that deliberately brutalises every convention that makes people laugh. What it be comes, not surprisingly, is a comedy hat makes people feel battered and bleak.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) 91% EDIT “It plays on the public's subconscious resentment of film stars... Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is an oddly vengeful movie.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Winter Light (1962) 77% EDIT “Though it is the most explicitly religious film Bergman has made, it is also one of the most accessible to non-religious people; everyone recognises despair.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review The Mouse on the Moon (1963) 88% EDIT “There are stylish small performances by John Le Mesurier, Terry-Thomas and Frankie Howerd, and Michael Pertwee's script has a few very funny and impenetrably English jokes.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Francis of Assisi (1961) EDIT “Up to the moment an hour and a half dead through when I tossed In the sponge, the only little friends to appear had been a few birds, a litter of briefly glimpsed piglets and a duck called Brother Duck.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Kapò (1959) 57% EDIT “Rooted as it is in the truth, the film cannot be anything but pitiful, but the manufactured sentiment is that much more affronting.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review General Della Rovere (1959) 90% EDIT “[General Della Rovere] is beautifully organised. The double-crosses change shape like a cat's-cradle, and pull out finally with one swift tug. The failure in the film is simply that it is very dully acted and made.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Cleopatra (1963) 56% EDIT “The events have no pressure behind them: instead of erupting out of the upheavals of three powerfully exciting and self-willed personalities, they seem to be happening because the extras and the sets are there.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Eva (1962) 64% EDIT “The use of Venice in the winter is beautiful; so are the sets. There are things to carp about in the film... but the style is strong enough to make animal leaps over the gaps.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Weddings and Babies (1958) 92% EDIT “Twice faintly tinged with kitsch, but full of improvisational insights and beguiling mutters, with Viveca Lindfors and John Myhers gripped in a weary affair that is a painfully recognisable clinch of rows and reconciliations.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Murder, She Said (1961) 89% EDIT “Directed by George Pollock, who has included some beautiful severe photography of drab autumn country, Murder She Said is an adroit Agatha Christie thriller oddly like a thirties pastiche.” – Observer (UK) Mar 6, 2024 Full Review
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