The time-setting of this “Orwellian” (as we have all been instructed to call it) future is identified at the outset as “somewhere in the Twentieth Century,” and it is in fact both forward and backward from the present, laden with 1940s clothes and appliances, but further advanced into bureaucratic decadence …
The cast members of A Fish Called Wanda -- John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin -- reassemble in different characters (Kline in two characters: son and snowy-haired father) and in an English zoo, and count on the fond remembrance and good will of the audience to pull …
Dishonor among thieves, two Brits and two Yanks to be exact, plus a proper bewigged barrister who's drawn into the mess. There are plenty of fresh and funny ideas: the use of foreign languages as an aphrodisiac, a gunsel who reads (but doesn't understand) Nietzsche and will fly off the …
Dishonor among thieves, two Brits and two Yanks to be exact, plus a proper bewigged barrister who's drawn into the mess. There are plenty of fresh and funny ideas: the use of foreign languages as an aphrodisiac, a gunsel who reads (but doesn't understand) Nietzsche and will fly off the …
An almost unexportable English comedy, one which takes its pleasure in the common schoolboy practice of fantasizing about the pigpen conditions of life in the oldendays. Even for viewers who've received a proper English education in Arthurian legends, it is probably not awfully intelligible. In the slough of messy atmospherics …
The emotional blackmail implicit in this tedious Biblical spoof, from the Monty Python group, is that by not finding it funny, you are liable to be taken for a bluenose. It could be argued, though, that the followers of Cecil B. DeMille actually have more reason to be offended than …
Rather retrograde British comedy, the intended cheekiness of which is thoroughly stifled by the familiarness and outmodedness of its targets: dotty clerics, dotty gentry, dotty menials, dotty anybodies, in Edwardian England. The familiarness is not entirely without benefits, such as, for example, the supreme ease with which the various comic …
The funniest "bit" has to do with a restaurant that serves conversations to its customers (fixed menu with daily specials) and a middle-aged and (to be generous about it) middle-brow couple who are talked into trying the Philosophy. But despite that "bit," and despite the title, this scatterbrained rumination is …
Malcolm Mowbray directs Maggie Smith, Michael Palin, and a host of English character actors in this story of a desperate attempt to eat well in hard times.
British social comedy, more fearlessly ill-mannered than the old Ealing Studio ones it has widely been likened to, centered around the post-war food shortages and austerity programs. A small-town milquetoast chiropodist ("Mrs. Roach's ingrown toenail seems to have turned the corner"), egged on by his social-climbing wife ("I want a …
The imaginative child of torpid, TV-mesmerized parents is delighted one night to have a Medieval knight come crashing out of a clothes closet on horseback, gallop across the bedroom, and disappear through the far wall. The next night is even better: six midgets pop up, armed with a secret map …