There are very few examples each year of cinematic enterprises that are carried out with such intelligence and above all with such care. But the quality of this film must ultimately be put in its artistic place, and that place is not the highest.

| Jun 15, 2023

One of the great, action-packed epics of the late 50s, The Bridge on the River Kwai is an exceptional case study about the hysteria of war and the pride that comes before the fall.

| Jun 8, 2023

One of the greatest and most satisfying endings in all film history...

| Apr 25, 2023

For all of its grim setting and tragic conclusion, The Bridge on the River Kwai becomes a slyly humorous study in the limitations as well as the stoical splendors of the British “military mind."

| Aug 17, 2022

I have rarely seen, in a film of action, a better cast. In the end, then, it is the people who count, and as individuals, obstinate, proud, muddled, humiliated, fanatically intent on the task in hand: not as the puppets who infest most war films.

| Aug 8, 2022

The film is rather misshapen, particularly in the sections featuring William Holden, and the action that detonates the explosive finish isn't quite clear. However, Alec Guinness is compelling as the English Colonel Nicholson.

| Jul 28, 2022

This gripping tale will keep you tied to your seat thanks to the brilliant effectiveness with which Director David Lean has tied together script, casting and technical demands.

| Jul 25, 2022

The movie’s tense climax is a perfect marriage of editing and camerawork.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 12, 2022

Director David Lean had a unique eye for aesthetics which served him well on the set.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 8, 2022

Led by its star-studded cast, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a technical achievement in and of itself.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 7, 2022

It would become the first, and perhaps the greatest, of Lean's signature late-career epics, in which he places involved relationships between a few complex characters within vistas of uncommon splendor.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 18, 2022

This film is great because it will hold your interest though all its two hours and forty-one electrifying minutes.

| Feb 17, 2022

Lean's direction is masterly, with that unhurried sureness which results in the best kind of pace.

| Dec 16, 2021

Next time, if Lean gets to direct a film for a Hollywood producer, he better make sure that there are no strings attached to his honesty.

| Dec 13, 2021

An excellent World War II adventure melodrama, superbly photographed in CinemaScope and Technicolor.

| Nov 17, 2021

This latter-day Colonel Blimp is pretty hard to swallow as a symbol of the military mind, but Guinness' superb performance makes him terrifyingly and unforgettably real as an individual.

| Nov 17, 2021

The madness of war has never been shown more graphically than in this Pierre Boulle screenplay from his own novel, set and filmed on location in Ceylon.

| Nov 17, 2021

Mr. Lean's direction of Bridge on the River Kwai is a piece of sheer magic down to such a careful detail as the contrast between the natural beauty of its landscape and the man-made horror that takes place on it.

| Nov 17, 2021

Pierre Boulle's novel about the conflict between different sorts of high fanaticism had iron in its blood, and whenever David Lean's direction is able to catch that irony the effect is prodigious.

| Nov 17, 2021

This is a picture of so many excellencies it is difficult to enumerate them, but audiences will discover the various beauties and virtues for themselves during the two hours and 40 minutes which the story runs.

| Nov 17, 2021