Each time I've watched it - and I've watched it many times - Mel Brooks' The Producers has felt horribly pertinent to the present moment.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 1, 2018

The Producers has many things going for it -- notably a wild, ad-lib energy that explodes in a series of sight gags and punch lines.

| Aug 12, 2008

Mel Brooks has turned a funny idea into a slapstick film, thanks to the performers, particularly Zero Mostel.

| Aug 12, 2008

Everything that can go wrong in an amateur film does go wrong, from the timing to the structure to the pitch of the performances.

| Aug 12, 2008

Brooks' first feature, an absolutely hilarious and tasteless New York Jewish comedy about Broadway.

| Jun 24, 2006

It's the ultimate punchline, the killer gag, that a proto-novel that turned into a proto-play that ended up as a movie about the worst musical in history, is now the most popular musical in town.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 6, 2004

Hilarious and irreverent, Brooks' first film has the good fortune to be graced with the comic genius of Mostel, Wilder, and Shawn.

| Oct 1, 2003

Sublime.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 19, 2003

Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way.

| May 20, 2003

The one aspect of the original Producers that still stuns is the roaring, over-the-top, in-your-face thereness of its two lead performances.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 1, 2002

The film is ripe with treasures worth rediscovering.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 19, 2002

This shamelessly low-brow, fearlessly satirical Brooks movie may just be Hollywood's ultimate satire, a furiously witty 'reductio ad absurdum' worthy of the great Augustans like Pope and Swift.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 13, 2002

Brooks's magnum opus is still a ferocious gale of bulldozing Jewish mockery, dominated by Zero Mostel's comb-over juggernaut.

Full Review | Jun 4, 2002

The star not only indulges himself gluttonously, but the director seems to be doubled up with laughter at how funny he is being through Mostel; and the film bloats into sogginess.

| Dec 8, 2001

This is one of the funniest movies ever made.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000