But was there ever really a Bunny Lake? Otto Preminger's urbane kidnap thriller rises to an over-the-moon climax, but the rest of the journey is enjoyable enough -- under the guidance of an unusually human and charming Laurence Olivier as a Scotland Yard inspector. Carol Lynley and Keir Dullea make …
Also known as Kill Baby Kill: Mario Bava's swift night journey through green, blue, and amber lights in a foggy country village, ridden with superstition and peopled with a vengeful withered countess in a crumbling castle, a billiard-bald burgermeister, a mesmerized Kate Greenaway child with a nutty-putty volleyball, an amusingly …
Tallulah Bankhead's final feature film performance: a religious fanatic obsessed with her dead son and fixated on his unlucky fiancé. Sic transit gloria mundi. Directed by Silvio Narizzano.
David Lean's vision of Pasternak's novel is designed for filmgoers who are prone to remark "ooh" and "ahh" at wide-screen pictures of flowers, icicles, deserts of snow, fields of wheat, and so forth. Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger.
Russ Meyer's live-action comic strip (in weekday black-and-white) about a predatory pack of hot-rod hellcats: not one of his "nudies," but instead a cross-over attempt for the drive-in market, and a failure at the time. The first five or ten minutes are a kick. Perhaps any five or ten minutes …
Marco Bellocchio's murderous black comedy of dissension and dissolution in an artistocratic family made up of various sickies and loonies. Scenes of family strife nudge close to typical Italian domestic comedy in sheer clamor and chaos. But, shoving the other way, Bellocchio's coverage of the milieu and Lou Castel's characterization …
And also according to Karl Marx. Pier Paolo Pasolini, a Leftist and atheist, dips into his sacred source material with a highly suspicious selectivity, and extracts an image of Jesus Christ as a revolutionary. Pasolini scored some automatic points with the critics by seeming to take as his inspiration their …
Otto Preminger's Second World War soap opera, opening in Pearl Harbor on the night before the Day of Infamy, cuts a wide swath and hoes a long row (it was shown originally with an intermission), and it gives a good idea, in down-to-earth human terms, of what it must have …
Two astronauts, Fuji and Glenn, are sent to investigate the surface of the mysterious "Planet X" recently detected on the far side of Jupiter. There they encounter advanced and seemingly benevolent human-like beings called the Xiliens and their leader, the Controller. The aliens usher the astronauts into their underground base, …
Federico Fellini's Rose Bowl Parade of color, costumes, and oom-pah-pah. Snail-paced and terribly wearing. An aging Giuletta Masina, with her immobile little-girl-lost expression, gets swallowed up in scene after scene.
The satirical target (out of the Evelyn Waugh novel) is the deluxe American funeral, and the plan of attack is to swing hard and not worry whether the blow lands anywhere near the mark. The subject is sufficiently ticklish that a certain exuberant tension is maintained even when the swipes …
Sam Peckinpah's first big-budget production, a Civil War-period Western of knotty complexity, to do with a mixed-nuts posse of Union regulars, Confederate POWs, a handful of custodial "coloreds," Indians, and ragtag civilian volunteers in pursuit of an Apache raiding party south of the border, and pursued in turn by a …
Probably the best amnesia thriller ever, though it takes Gregory Peck a while to realize he's suitably afflicted. By then, he also realizes he's a target for murder. As seemingly impossible in its set-up, as damnably tantalizing and tormenting, as a John Dickson Carr pseudo-supernatural detective novel, and yet with …
Toothless and timid detective story, offering vicarious thrills exclusively to the diehard, gray-haired Agatha Christie fans whose contact with the outside world extends only as high and wide as the mystery shelves at the public library. Margaret Rutherford is Miss Marple; George Pollack directed.