Worth seeing for the face-reddening, throat-constricting, vein-popping performance of Nick Nolte as a college basketball coach fashioned after Indiana U.'s Bobby Knight (who appears as himself in the climactic game, opposite Nolte on the sideline). At any rate he is fashioned after Knight up until he forges a Faustian pact …
A homosexual birthday gathering, organized a little like a formal congress, where each invited guest represents one of the many shades of gay -- a midnight cowboy in darling blond curls, a closet case in gray flannel, a transvestite, etc. Psychotherapeutic party games, with predictable echoes of Albee, peel away …
A gang of comical crooks, rousted from the pages of Damon Runyon, knocks over the Brink's stronghold in Boston and is all set to live high on the hog the rest of their lives, when one of their members, played by Warren Oates, double-crosses them by going straight (as opposed …
William Friedkin's footnote to his Boys in the Band, a cursory look at the heavy-leather and S/M corner of the homosexual world. This dark and unexplored nook is chosen apparently only for its voyeuristic appeal, and is observed from the point of view of a middle-class gaper. The better title …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
William Friedkin's best, a gritty policier shot on location in New York, follows a career cop (Gene Hackman) on the trail of heroin smugglers.
Horror story about the violation of Yuppie Paradise: a canyon home once featured in Architectural Digest, an advertising husband and a designing wife, and a little bundle of joy called Jake. The violator, making the nameless governess in Turn of the Screw look like Mary Poppins, is an English nanny …
Grueling, grisly chase thriller with Benicio Del Toro as a Rambo-gone-bad -- a Kosovo vet and now a run-amuck "killing machine" -- and Tommy Lee Jones as the Richard Crenna who trained him to kill (but never killed anyone himself) and who alone can unplug the machine. The pursuit encompasses …
Screenwriter Joe (Showgirls) Eszterhas follows his standard procedure of hiding a rudimentary, amateurish, nonsensical narrative behind a diversionary smokescreen of salaciousness: a flayed corpse, a collection of sex-partner pubic hair, an envelope of blackmail photos of the Governor of California in flagrante delicto, a beachfront love nest equipped with hidden …
After a contract killing goes wrong, a hitman hired on spec takes a 14-year-old virgin as his “retainer.” This is director William Friedkin’s second film with playwright Tracy Letts; their first pairing, Bug, turned out to be an effective gut-wrencher that never once felt like canned-theatre. You’ll need a Rival® …
Two mentally gifted pre-teens from opposite sides of the social scale, and of the Atlantic Ocean, recognize one another as kindred spirits through their mutual interest in the philosophy of Heidegger (whom the slightly more worldly boy has, however, outgrown). There is little else in this ingratiating romantic comedy to …
An underplotted murder mystery with some possibly interesting possibilities to do with the territorial jostling between military and civilian police. The personal animosity between the military cop and the civilian one (who used to be a military one himself) prevents the possible interest from becoming definite, or else throws a …