This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
Scriptwriter and former film critic Paul Schrader's directing debut, a hot-under-the-blue-collar propagandrama about how the System contrives to divide and conquer the workers in the Detroit auto industry. (The manufacturers of Checker cabs, who opened their facilities to the filmmakers, are graciously absolved, in the acknowledgments, of any likeness to …
The opening looks as tough an hour's worth of plot, passion, and pathos has been compressed into a slide show of rapid-fire images accompanied by a verbose, harried narrator (isn't it Lonny Chapman's voice?). This -- history whizzing past your eyes as the narrator rushes to keep pace -- goes …
An epigraph from Friedrich Nietzsche, a time-jump of ten years into the future, a heavy-metal song track, a cameo by Roseanne Barr (and hubby), an allusion to Twin Peaks, a psychedelic video-game sequence, a promised (for those who can hang on that long) climactic 3-D sequence, an overall contemptuous jokiness, …
Roger Moore confiscates the James Bond role with no trace of apology or regret; he is smooth and pretty and unperturbed, and he acts as though always poised for a still photographer to snap his portrait. This Bond escapade — a blithely reactionary tale of British and American intelligence battling …
Feds and mobsters alike are after one little bounty hunter and a white-collar bail-jumper. The attempts at ingratiation are at times a little queasy-making (the bounty hunter was drummed out of the police force for his honesty, the embezzler took money from the mob and gave it to charity), but …
Two-faced sci-fi satire about a TV game show of 2019 A.D. that caters to the public's taste for violence with actual, to-the-death manhunts. The difference between that game show and this movie is in degree, not in kind. Plus the fact that the game show is only imaginary while the …
Moral outrage is unbecoming in a fantasy, perhaps in any fiction. But just as in his Capricorn One, Peter Hyams has hypothesized a preposterous situation so as to allow himself to act indignant about it. The situation here -- nine Los Angeles County judges who have set up a "Court …
A cut-rate Andromeda Strain, but still serviceable, about a germ-warfare experiment (under cover of agronomics) that infects everyone in the laboratory and turns them on their fellows in homicidal rage -- everyone, that is, except the security monitor and wife of the local constable. Why is she immune? The answer …