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

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

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

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

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

Give this one an "E" for effort if not a "D" for distinguished.

| Sep 23, 2021

Once Rock appears, though, the spell is shattered, and through no fault of his own. Instead of honestly exploring the ordeal of assuming a second identity, the script subsides for nearly an hour into conventional Hollywood fantasy.

| Sep 23, 2021

James Wong Howe's black and white photography is masterly and his trick of insinuating a distorting lens unobtrusively into an otherwise normally shot scene is really unsettling.

| Sep 23, 2021

[Seconds builds] toward an ending of such nightmarish intensity that any viewer who might have been wishfully toying with the idea of such a project for himself will certainly be jarred into second thoughts.

| Sep 23, 2021

The movie is fascinating near-science fiction melodrama, badly acted, directed and written.

| Sep 23, 2021

Much as I admire the work of John Frankenheimer, I cannot recommend Seconds, except, perhaps, for the first half hour, which is as nightmarishly absorbing as almost anything in The Manchurian Candidate.

| Sep 23, 2021

From the opening-credits sequence, Seconds mangles and distends the windows of perception until viewers get immersed in [Arthur's] sweat-soaked nightmare.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 13, 2013

US suburbia boredom is treated in an original manner in this cross between a sci-fi opus, a thriller, a suspense pic and a parable on certain aspects of American middle-class life.

| Sep 23, 2007