It’s a wild ride, with Cary Grant as a paleontologist, Hepburn as a zany heiress—and a leopard, the baby of the film’s title. Does it necessarily make sense? No. Is it brilliant in spite of that? Indeed.

| Feb 13, 2025

I am happy to report that Bringing Up Baby is funny from the word go, that it has no other meaning to recommend it, nor therapeutic qualities, and that I wouldn’t swap it for practically any three things of the current season.

| Dec 26, 2023

Unfortunately the narrative is too heavy with action. Movement and dialogue are so incessantly rapid that they occasionally become overwhelming. But the clean, fast fun of the film cannot be denied.

| Jul 26, 2023

It is Cary Grant's film chiefly, with Charlie Ruggles all too briefly amusing in his jungle calls.

| Jul 25, 2023

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

| Jul 25, 2023

Countless films have imitated Bringing Up Baby, most famously Peter Bogdanovich's homage What's Up, Doc?, but it is futile to look for its equal.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

If you haven’t seen it, it’s impossible to overemphasize how truly bizarre Bringing Up Baby is -- less a film than a series of nonstop comedy sketches, loosely tied together by a kooky plot and even kookier characters.

| Jul 25, 2023

If you catch me on the right day and ask what I think the best comedy of all time is, it’s very likely I’ll say it’s 1938’s screwball classic Bringing Up Baby.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 30, 2023

For all the frenetic activity, there’s also a casualness to Bringing Up Baby, and other great comedies of that era, that seems lost to us now.

| Apr 20, 2019

The enduring fascination of this 1938 screwball comedy is due to much more than its uproarious gags.

| Sep 23, 2013

A perfect example of why directors (and even us brilliant professional critics) can often be completely in the dark about what works.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 15, 2011

Classic screwball comedy stars Hepburn, Grant.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 22, 2010

There is little rhyme or reason to most of the action, but it's all highly palatable.

| Apr 2, 2008

Though it's almost impossible, try to sit back sometime and enjoy this 1938 Howard Hawks masterpiece not only for its gags, but for the grace of its construction, the assurance of its style, and the richness of its themes.

| Jun 26, 2007

One of the finest screwball comedies ever.

| Feb 9, 2006

If Hawks had a real gift it was the ability of moving things along.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 1, 2005

The zaniest, most delightful screwball comedy of them all… Hepburn at her effervescent best and Grant in a marvelous performance combining stuffiness and injured dignity with his usual debonair charm.

| Original Score: A+ | Jun 24, 2003

If you've never been to the movies, Bringing Up Baby will be all new to you -- a zany-ridden product of the goofy farce school. But who hasn't been to the movies?

| May 20, 2003

A masterpiece.

| Jan 1, 2000