Critic Reviews
| 100 |
Baltimore Sun David Zurawik
This three-night exploration of the film kingdom of Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack L. Warner is directed by historian Richard Schickel, and it is not to be missed. |
| 80 |
Hollywood Reporter Marilyn Moss
This telling is so dense that at times there might even seem to be too much Warner Bros. here, if such a think is possible when it's this delicious. |
| 80 |
Variety Rob Nelson
Schickel's unsurprisingly smart assemblage of talking heads gives it a valuable measure of critical and scholarly sensibility. |
| 70 |
TV Guide Matt Roush
Critic and film historian Richard Schickel’s terse valentine of a script (Cagney “moved with a dancer’s grace and a psycho’s fury”) bounces around too frantically, but there’s an awful lot of classic ground to cover. |
| 70 |
The New York Times Ginia Bellafante
If the first half holds together more successfully than the rest, it is because after the 1960s, it becomes harder to tell what makes a Warner Brothers movie a Warner Brothers movie. |
| 70 |
LA Weekly Robert Abele
It entertainingly runs through the studio’s prominence as a talkie pioneer, a well-oiled purveyor of gangster pics and lurid melodrama, a champion of working-class hopes and fears before leaning right after World War II, a haven for iconoclast visions in the ’70s, and currently a tent-pole factory where art-strivers Eastwood and George Clooney are allowed to--as they categorize it--do one for the studio, then one for themselves. |
| 70 |
Los Angeles Times Mary McNamara
The "this" you must remember is that the film is essentially a birthday present from Warner Bros. to itself, an endless toast rather than a purely journalistic examination. Which is perfectly fine, of course. |
| 60 |
Washington Post Tom Shales
You Must Remember This is basically satisfying and sometimes insightful. |
| 50 |
Orlando Sentinel Hal Boedeker
The inventory is impressive, but the presentation is tedious. |
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