It's impossible to watch The Wizard of Oz today without feeling, within minutes, some kind of mystical connection to people you will never know. When Judy Garland sings "Over the Rainbow," there's the sense of participating, just by watching, in some beautiful shared human experience.

Today, in the days of home video, a child can watch The Wizard of Oz around the clock on a five-foot plasma screen. Yet it was scarcity that gave that earlier experience its value: You knew this was your only chance to see the movie for an entire year (and when you're 5 years old, a year is an eternity). And you knew—and this was a big part of the excitement—that other people were watching it, too. You could feel it.

Anyway, the entire sequence, from Dorothy's arrival in Oz to her departure on the Yellow Brick Road, has to be one of the greatest in cinema history—a masterpiece of set design, costuming, choreography, music, lyrics, storytelling and sheer imagination.

Mick LaSalle, 2009, San Francisco Chronicle

Don't miss this restored 1939 classic. There's nothing to beat the incredible sugar-rush of that shift from sepia-monochrome to full colour as Dorothy realises she's not in Kansas any more. It's a movie that speaks of Hollywood's unacknowledged fascination with the exotic, the mad, the unreal. Despite its earnest endorsement of the idea that there's no place like home …well, frankly there are plenty of places like boring old home, but nothing's like Oz. It's a wonderful trip behind the lines of thinkability, and the talking apple trees that slap you when you try to pick their fruit are the equal of anything in Lewis Carroll. A solid-gold Christmas treat.Peter Bradshaw, 2006, The Guardian

This wonderful romp of a movie looks magical on the big screen: colors are a picnic for the eyes, details loom so clearly you can practically touch them and there's a sense of the larger-than-life with a film that's already larger than life.

And with an audience, it's a treat to watch Dorothy and Co. skipping down the Yellow Brick Road. The film hasn't played in theaters for more than 25 years, which means a couple of generations have missed the magic of seeing it as a social event in theaters.

Peter Stack, 1998, San Francisco Chronicle

A delightful piece of wonder-working which had the youngsters' eyes shining and brought a quietly amused gleam to the wiser ones of the oldsters.

And the circumstances of Dorothy's trip to Oz are so remarkable, indeed, that reason cannot deal with them at all. It blinks, and it must wink, too, at the cyclone that lifted Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, right out of Kansas and deposited them, not too gently, on the conical cap of the Wicked Witch of the East who had been holding Oz's Munchkins in thrall. Dorothy was quite a heroine, but she did want to get back to Kansas and her Aunt Em; and her only hope of that, said Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, was to see the Wizard of Oz who, as every one knows, was a whiz of a Wiz if ever a Wiz there was. So Dorothy sets off for the Emerald City, hexed by the broomstick-riding sister of the late Wicked Witch and accompanied, in due time, by three of Frank Baum's most enchanting creations, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion.

The [fantastical elements] are entertaining conceits all of them, presented with a naive relish for their absurdity and out of an obvious—and thoroughly natural—desire on the part of their fabricators to show what they could do.

Frank S. Nugent, 1939, New York Times