Popular reviews

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★★

  So long, ya bastard.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  "She has taken an oath to preserve human life."

  Ford's last film and his last western - where all men on horseback are little more than degenerate warlords. At first a battle of social systems but then the collapse and futility of all of them when confronted with a world where one can look at anothers hopelessness and laugh at them. And worse - to look at human suffering and feel not even incomprehension, but indifference. So it is not a clash of values, but a question - what is it to be human, and what is it to be non-human?

  All life is hell beyond apocalypse - but by some incredulous miracle, there is still compassion.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 1

  Stagecoach 2: Truth vs. Religion, and the ultimate confrontation of reality via the collapse of known social constructs. And when it all breaks down, all that's left is compassion and cruelty. Ford's most philosophical picture - meaninglessness doesn't mean that life is without meaning. "She has taken an oath for the preservation of life," one character says of Bancroft. It circles back on itself - Bancroft martyrs herself, and the film becomes one of those rare masterpieces which only art can achieve - both a rejection and reclamation of ones faith.

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  Review by Not Andrew Sarris ★★★★★

  John Ford's 7 Women has caused a slight stir in the trade by opening on the bottom half of a double bill with Burt Kennedy's The Money Trap, by all odds the daily double of the decade. My critical colleagues were more pitying than scornful as they confronted this latest opus of a director who has been in the business for more than fifty years. Some of them knew how I loved and admired John Ford and tried to break the news to me gently. Ford, after all, was now past seventy, and perhaps it was time to put the old war horse out to pasture. Ford's premature burial crew had the advantage of me, because Metro had neglected to…

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  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★★

  Cahiers: O que você pensa da evolução do cinema desde 1945, e mais particularmente das tendências atuais dos cinemas americano e europeu?

  Jean-Marie Straub: É o europeu (menos o tcheco) que se tornou o que o americano foi por muito tempo: a cabeça investigativa do cinema, como diz Rivette. Após os últimos filmes de Boetticher, o cinema americano (nova-iorquino incluso, exceto Echoes of Silence) titubeia (Fuller), atropela-se, parodia-se, plagia-se e até mesmo, como no caso de Nicholas Ray (que acabou, dizem, de aceitar um trabalho indigno para a Atlas-Film, Duisburg), trai-se e renega-se. (Até mesmo Hitchcock, Hawks e Walsh me parecem não progredir muito, ao passo que Chaplin, Lang, Renoir e Rossellini, por exemplo, nunca tiveram medo de se deixarem…

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  Review by Sara Clements ★★★★½ 2

  ANNE BANCROFT IS SO HOT....WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THIS

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★

  everything fordian condensed into a bottled-up neo-feudal framework, it is his version of a black narcissus hothouse picture, but where the metaphysical presence is entirely absent, replaced by a war of order vs. chaos, puritanical civilization vs. debauched barbarism, with anne bancroft in the middle, the ultimate ford protagonist who is a wandering burnout without a home, searching for a purpose -- she finds it in an apocalypse which questions sanity itself, blaring on the chinese frontier with a gorgeously brassy elmer bernstein score.

  despite the eastern setting, it is so starkly biblical in implication, almost a parable, a critique of theoretical faith vs. practiced faith, which for ford is nothing less than a universal ethics of that which is…

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  Review by Shea ★★★★½ 2

  Roses are red
  Anne Bancroft is hot
  I think that I'm gay
  I love her a lot

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  Were they allowed to execute children just off camera in 1966? I guess so. Jesus fucking Christ, John Ford. Way to make a point.

  This film has a stacked cast, some progressive ideas on gender norms and Christian morals, and straight up racist caricatures for villains. These caricatures are slightly mitigated by more nuanced portrayals alongside them, but it's hard to get past. For all Ford's depiction of goodness and sacrifice does for me, the Genghis Khan-as-bandit villain does the opposite.

  Still, Bancroft delivers a great performance, with Sue Lyon and Margaret Leighton and even Mr. Green Acres doing a solid job (though the latter hams it up on occasion, it's still nice to see him around). The setting--the whole…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★

  “So long ya bastard!” Is the last line of dialogue in this John Ford adaptation of British author Norah Loft’s short story Chinese Finale, and it's a suitable epitaph under the circumstances as it was to be the final feature film directed by the legendary filmmaker; completing a genuinely remarkable career that extended over half a century. 

  Set in China in 1935, the film reveals a beautiful understanding of togetherness along with an accompanying joyful animosity as it charts seven devout female missionaries attempting to safeguard themselves from a clan of Mongolian warriors governed by a brutal warlord. 

  It emphasises an embodiment of revisionist ideals from the director, and in no small degree performs as a classical triumph from a…

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  Review by Miguel Marías

  DIGNO final de la larga y gloriosa carrera de Ford, 7 mujeres es un reto y un desmentido. Tan abusivamente considerado un «director de hombres» —olvidándose, no se entiende cómo, de Maureen O'Hara, Ava Gardner, Jane Darwell, Vera Miles, Joanne Dru, etc.—, como Cukor un «director de mujeres», Ford se encierra en un estudio con nueve (que no siete) actrices y casi prescinde de los hombres para rodar, a los setenta y un años, su película más combativa. También la más próxima a la abstracción, la más despojada, la menos sentimental. No debía estar para bromas y parece como si intuyera que le quedaba poco tiempo y menos metros de película: esta vez no hay casi humor, ni canciones, el…

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  Review by mike_sabathia ★★★★★ 2

  It's almost hard to believe that the last film by one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium is so little known. It would be understandable if it were a disaster, as final films sometimes tend to be, but as it happens it isn't. Far from it. For my money, 7 Women is not only one of Ford's best but simply one of the finest final films any director has ever made.

  The film is set in a remote Christian missionary posts in rural China, in 1935, where all but one of the residents are women. Miss Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton) is the head of the mission. As the film opens, everyone is elated to learn that…