You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story

Baltimore SunDavid Zurawik

This three-night exploration of the film kingdom of Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack L. Warner is directed by historian Richard Schickel, and it is not to be missed.

Hollywood ReporterMarilyn Moss

This telling is so dense that at times there might even seem to be too much Warner Bros. here, if such a think is possible when it's this delicious.

VarietyRob Nelson

Schickel's unsurprisingly smart assemblage of talking heads gives it a valuable measure of critical and scholarly sensibility.

TV GuideMatt Roush

Critic and film historian Richard Schickel’s terse valentine of a script (Cagney “moved with a dancer’s grace and a psycho’s fury”) bounces around too frantically, but there’s an awful lot of classic ground to cover.

The New York TimesGinia Bellafante

If the first half holds together more successfully than the rest, it is because after the 1960s, it becomes harder to tell what makes a Warner Brothers movie a Warner Brothers movie.

LA WeeklyRobert Abele

It entertainingly runs through the studio’s prominence as a talkie pioneer, a well-oiled purveyor of gangster pics and lurid melodrama, a champion of working-class hopes and fears before leaning right after World War II, a haven for iconoclast visions in the ’70s, and currently a tent-pole factory where art-strivers Eastwood and George Clooney are allowed to--as they categorize it--do one for the studio, then one for themselves.

Los Angeles TimesMary McNamara

The "this" you must remember is that the film is essentially a birthday present from Warner Bros. to itself, an endless toast rather than a purely journalistic examination. Which is perfectly fine, of course.

Washington PostTom Shales

You Must Remember This is basically satisfying and sometimes insightful.

Orlando SentinelHal Boedeker

The inventory is impressive, but the presentation is tedious.