John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” will linger a lot longer than the title suggests in the mind of anyone who chooses to watch it. In fact, it might be one of the most haunting American films to come out of the 1960s, or any decade for that matter.

| Sep 23, 2022

[Rock] Hudson, an icon of good, clean romantic fun and stolid heroism, becomes the American hero unable to fathom this would-be paradise with shadowy edges and an unstable foundation.

| Jul 9, 2022

Perhaps the director's most personal film, Seconds holds a deeply human message and marvelous cautionary tale, ever hopeful to viewers who heed its warning.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 23, 2022

It is a brilliant, fascinating, weird and horrifying piece of work which probably will emerge as one of the best films of the year.

| Sep 23, 2021

It's a little difficult to figure Rock Hudson in a chiller but he shows an unexpected professional acting quality in Seconds.

| Sep 23, 2021

I think Mr. Frankenheimer was the one with bad dream. While the picture is superbly directed and has reasonably mature dialogue, he has failed to make the idea engrossing or convincing.

| Sep 23, 2021

It suffers from more than a few faults, but anyone who appreciates film entertainment made by a master craftsman will enjoy this harrowing exercise in mounting suspense.

| Sep 23, 2021

Seconds is an exceptionally original shocker, nicely balanced between plausibility and cruel fantasy.

| Sep 23, 2021

It makes a dramatic actor out of the till now fashionably predictable farceur Rock Hudson. He's not great, but he puts together a pretty good fac-simile of a man suffering the tortures of the damned.

| Sep 23, 2021

The half-world of twilight horror and stark realism that director John Frankenheimer probed so chillingly in The Manchurian Candidate has come under the Frankenheimer scalpel again in a remarkable motion picture called Seconds.

| Sep 23, 2021

On the surface, this chilling film is a most stylish piece of horror. Its underlying and saddening truth makes it into a moral nightmare.

| Sep 23, 2021

[Frankenheimer] succeeds in making the tale a weirdly absorbing thriller, full of twists and fascinating surprises, and that cinematographer James Wong Howe complements the eerie spell with his inventive black-and-white photography.

| Sep 23, 2021

Perhaps the real trouble is that a brilliantly conceived idea is never really worked out beyond its first stage. Whatever might have been made of the idea after the personality-change, Frankenheimer's development of it falls decidedly flat.

| Sep 23, 2021

Too utterly fantastic to be credible.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 23, 2021

It's a harrowing little story, well adapted by John Lewis Carlino from David Ely's novel, and director John Frankenheimer, with the assistance of James Wong Howe's fluid black-and-white photography, has done it up in a stark and uncompromising style.

| Sep 23, 2021

It isn't often that someone finds something new to say with the Faust legend, but John Frankenheimer has managed to come up with something that, while not completely satisfying is still engrossing.

| Sep 23, 2021

Hudson, however, can't be blamed for the story going to pot. It never does regain the hypnotic appeal of the initial sequences. Yet Hudson actually turns in the most forcefully convincing performance of his career.

| Sep 23, 2021

Unfortunately, any interest it might have is rapidly smothered by the deadly heaviness of the treatment, as the director fights desperately to lift himself by his own bootstraps into "significance."

| Sep 23, 2021

The photography of the enigmatic opening is the work of that great veteran James Wong Howe and creates the perfect sinister mood with bizarre angles and distorting lenses.

| Sep 23, 2021

Extremely well conceived, too, is the nature of the organisation, which is like those occult systems in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges that may be real or mere projections of our fantasies.

| Sep 23, 2021