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Washington Star

Tomatometer-approved publication.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Jay Carmody The picture carries a special [place] for Washington in that it all happens right here, with local backgrounds, and with a strong suggestion that we might behave like idiots in a panicky situation.
Posted Jan 16, 2026  Edit critic review
Gaslight (1944) Jay Carmody A taut, exciting tale worthy of a cast which also includes Dame May Whitty.
Posted Jan 13, 2026  Edit critic review
A Place in the Sun (1951) Jay Carmody This is a grown-up screen at work and Stevens is a man whose taste is more than adequate to the handling of delicate material without evasion.
Posted Jan 13, 2026  Edit critic review
Out of the Past (1947) Jay Carmody Tourneur's method of building suspense has an icy urbanity about it.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Alice in Wonderland (1951) Jay Carmody Disney's brilliantly plumaged fantasy follows rather closely the formula he has established for winning customers and influencing everybody.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) Jay Carmody [The] principals are supported by a competent cast which includes some of the most brutal, stupid faces ever found to give force to a terror picture.
Posted Jan 03, 2026  Edit critic review
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) Jay Carmody Even with due allowance made for the under-development of those identified with today's delinquency, the parents and adolescents represented in the film are too painfully subhuman.
Posted Oct 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Only Yesterday (1933) E. de S. Melcher It has been filmed with great tact and beauty, and Miss Sullavan plays it for all It is worth.
Posted Apr 23, 2024  Edit critic review
White Heat (1949) Jay Carmody It has a cast worthy of a super-criminal, with such supporting players as Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brien and Margaret Wycherly. What these and the others are up to is undeniably alive with action.
Posted Apr 23, 2024  Edit critic review
The Mad Miss Manton (1938) Jay Carmody Director Leigh Jason has kept his farce moving at a suitable farce tempo and contrives to get the fullest value from the various episodes -- tense, funny and somewhere between -- with which the script endowed him.
Posted Apr 22, 2024  Edit critic review
Jailhouse Rock (1957) Harry MacArthur A motion picture which lives up to its advertising... as the best Presley picture yet. This, of course, is like saying it is much more fun to be hit on the head with a 10-round mallet than with a 20-pound mallet.
Posted Apr 12, 2024  Edit critic review
The Big Heat (1953) Jay Carmody The Big Heat covers familiar ground, it is true, but with a sharp eye to every value that makes a movie something special.
Posted Apr 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Sabrina (1954) Harry MacArthur It may bear little relationship to life, but it is a handsomely-mounted movie, and it is played with downright distinction.
Posted Mar 28, 2024  Edit critic review
National Velvet (1944) Jay Carmody The great moment of National Velvet, to be sure, is that in which Butcher Brown's little daughter, posing as a boy, rides the Pi in the Grand National. A finer, more smashing piece of film-making we never have seen than that in which the race is run.
Posted Mar 26, 2024  Edit critic review
The Searchers (1956) Jay Carmody It is in keeping alive this seemingly endless [quest] that Ford's genius asserts Itself. He has landscape to work with, and colored film and a Vista-Vision camera. With these he can achieve miracles and, to the picture's great advantage, he does.
Posted Mar 25, 2024  Edit critic review
Foreign Intrigue (1956) Jay Carmody [Foreign Intrigue] is pretty much the pat formula that Sheldon Reynolds uses in the small economy, or television, version of his serial. Expanded to fit the large screen, it suffers from what might be called self-consciousness and pretentiousness.
Posted Mar 21, 2024  Edit critic review
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Jay Carmody Hitchcock made the same picture in 1935, before he came to this country, but that should deter nobody. The story has been brought quite up to date, dressed in Vista Vision and color, and starts in Marrakesh.
Posted Mar 21, 2024  Edit critic review
Gaby (1956) Jay Carmody Both in the joy of love’s quick blooming and the pathos into which it turns. Miss Caron and Kerr are performers easily at home.
Posted Mar 21, 2024  Edit critic review
Westward the Women (1951) Jay Carmody The hardships which provide the exciting incident of Westward the Women are the familair ones of such trips.
Posted Mar 08, 2024  Edit critic review
The Sin of Nora Moran (1933) Star Staff It is morose and tangled, and whatever merit may be due, it is due only to the heroic efforts of its cast to uphold the material given them.
Posted Feb 22, 2024  Edit critic review
State Fair (1933) E. de S. Melcher Except for one or two theatric love-moments, which do not beat close to the heart of realism, it is the kind of a picture which is seldom constructed -- being honest, clean and consistently drole.
Posted Nov 10, 2023  Edit critic review
The Lone Ranger (1956) Harry MacArthur The Lone Ranger does have enough action to keep devotees of the series happy... Cattle stampedes, hand-to-hand encounters, dynamiting and sundry other embellishments add their uproar to the noise of gunfire.
Posted Nov 09, 2023  Edit critic review
The Man Who Laughs (1928) Star Staff Conrad Veidt does a wonderful piece of acting.
Posted Oct 31, 2023  Edit critic review
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) E. de S. Melcher Although there is nothing particularly sprightly about it. and some of the sequences are long and slightly tedious, the film is a fine example of how a large screen canvas may be filled with color and panoramic splendor.
Posted Apr 24, 2023  Edit critic review
The Black Pirate (1926) Star Staff Dramatic and thrilling are inadequate to express these new acrobatic feats which the agile “Doug” has to offer.
Posted Mar 22, 2023  Edit critic review
The Dark Angel (1935) Robert B. Phillips, Jr. The picture... succeeds chiefly because it attains that requisite shrewd acting, a series of lovely settings and astutely directed scenes.
Posted Mar 10, 2023  Edit critic review
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Jay Carmody Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, whatever its defects, is the perfect representatives of Lorelei Lee, and... Dorothy.
Posted Mar 08, 2023  Edit critic review
Sayonara (1957) Jay Carmody Warners should find themselves rolling in money, popularity, and the old conviction that there is nothing wrong with the movies that a good picture cannot correct.
Posted Mar 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Flower Drum Song (1961) Jay Carmody It is sweet, sentimental, sad and seemingly endless.
Posted Feb 27, 2023  Edit critic review
Safety Last (1923) Star Staff Never before in the history of the Industry, perhaps, has there been a picture made that so successfully combined the highest degree of thrills and laughter and held those two elements at a continuous pitch of tense interest for so long a period of time.
Posted Feb 21, 2023  Edit critic review
Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) Jay Carmody “Requiem for a Heavyweight” is assured a top rung among 1962’s movies. Man's subhumanity to man is the theme of the film.
Posted Feb 14, 2023  Edit critic review
Back to Bataan (1945) Jay Carmody This is the story of the Filipino refusal to give up, a blending of fact and fiction which adds up to a dramatic spectacle of gallantry of an appeal rarely achieved in its field.
Posted Feb 01, 2023  Edit critic review
Diabolique (1955) Jay Carmody This is a superbly chilling slice of life, one indeed to challenge the best of Alfred Hitchcock. It is a tale of murder which turns the innately innocent setting of a boarding school into a hair-raising labyrinth of passion.
Posted Jan 31, 2023  Edit critic review
Main Street (1923) Star Staff ... Yet there is a subtle humor in this silver-sheet version that was lacking in the written page, and the audience sees a bit of fun poked slyly at Carol Kennicott, the idealistic heroine, as well as at the typical, narrow Main streeters.
Posted Jan 25, 2023  Edit critic review
Frankenstein (1931) E. de S. Melcher A blood-curdling drama which so out-Draculas Dracula that the latter might as well be a Sunday afternoon parlor game.
Posted Jan 18, 2023  Edit critic review
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Jay Carmody There is uproarious comedy, heartbreaking poignance, suspense, excitement and a dozen other elements fused into a masterpiece that involves more imagination than has gone into the making of all other films to date.
Posted Dec 21, 2022  Edit critic review
My Four Years in Germany (1918) Star Staff Painstaking care has reproduced, even to the most minute detail, events of import from the pre-war days, on through to the almost overnight change of front on the part of Germany from a "peace-loving" nation to "the war beast."
Posted Nov 16, 2022  Edit critic review
The Maltese Falcon (1941) Jay Carmody Young Huston establishes himself immediately as a director who can teach a lot of tricks to his elders. They add up to the major trick of producing a melodrama that is chockfull of entertainment... which masks the fact that it was made once before.
Posted Nov 11, 2022  Edit critic review
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) Patricia Simmons It’s a picture that will bring tears to your eyes, but send you away proud of them. It’s also a picture whose principal appeal hinges on a store of wonderful youthful memories which you probably thought you had forgotten.
Posted Nov 10, 2022  Edit critic review
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) Jay Carmody The Capra genius for creating unforgettable incident manifests itself in a dozen sequences in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Posted Nov 09, 2022  Edit critic review
King Kong (1933) E. de S. Melcher The "trick" photography in this is the nearest thing to a miracle the cinema has produced. We defy you to figure out just how it has been done.
Posted Nov 09, 2022  Edit critic review
The Shop Around the Corner (1940) Harry MacArthur The Sullavan touch and the Stewart touch mean quite as much to The Shop Around the Corner as the "Lubitsch touch."
Posted Nov 08, 2022  Edit critic review
Stalag 17 (1953) Jay Carmody It is a comedy drama that is both comic and dramatic.
Posted Nov 05, 2022  Edit critic review
The Thief of Bagdad (1924) Star Staff Two hours of superb diversion.
Posted Oct 26, 2022  Edit critic review
The President's Mystery (1936) E. de S. Melcher It is stated by a popular magazine that our Chief Executive was responsible for the plot of... The President’s Mystery. If this be so, then he had a good idea and followed it up to the hilt. Nor did R-K-O leave him in the lurch.
Posted Oct 25, 2022  Edit critic review
A Study in Scarlet (1933) Star Staff [A] well-directed and most modern of Sherlock revivals. Mystery film fans will like it.
Posted Oct 22, 2022  Edit critic review
Shanghai Express (1932) E. de S. Melcher The picture itself ranks high among the really artistic creations that the screen has put forth -- and this through the uncanny direction of Josef von Sternberg, who has vitalized it into something far removed from the ordinary.
Posted Oct 21, 2022  Edit critic review
Peter Pan (1924) Star Staff The spritely and evanescent spirit of childhood has been coaxed Into a celluloid film at last, with Incomparable beauty and appeal, as Peter Pan.
Posted Oct 20, 2022  Edit critic review
The Toll of the Sea (1922) Star Staff Many of the vistas are so artistic that for a moment the spectator might think he was looking at a rare water color from the hand of a master, until a wind-tossed pine branch or rippling wave remind him that this is even more wonderful.
Posted Oct 18, 2022  Edit critic review
Village of the Damned (1960) Jay Carmody Behind this rather silly title lies one of the period's truly exciting screen tales, chillingly imagined and icily visualized in direction and performance.
Posted Sep 28, 2022  Edit critic review
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