Werner Herzog's Radical Left slanting of an old-fashioned Lost Patrol adventure yarn. The anti-imperialist, anti-militarist storyline concerns a splinter group of Pizarro's conquistadors searching in vain for El Dorado and mown down a man at a time by invisible Peruvian cannibals. What gives this inevitable, countdown plot (18 dead, 6 …
The first movie of the Monty Python group is a scattering of scatter-shot comedy routines; and with fresh starts every few minutes, it boasts a few stretches of unflagging comic invention. There are also some sputtering routines -- more of that kind. And the dreary animation sequences are mainly for …
Probably the best 1959 movie made in 1972. Bill Wilder's latest opus hides beneath its Samuel Taylor romantic comedy facade, several layers of undertones, issuing from the director's complex blend of sourness, sentimentality, and corn. Playing off Jack Lemmon's patented brash American businessman, Juliet (sister of Haley) Mills lives up …
David Newman and Robert Benton, authors of Bonnie and Clyde and There Was a Crooked Man, are the smart alecks of Hollywood, cutting through history's mists to remind us of man's universal pettiness. Their promising story of a good Christian lad, who flees from the Civil War draft and falls …
Masked members of a secret club look on at the ravishing of Marilyn Chambers by a flock of lesbians and a black man with the crotch cut out of his longjohns, and, for an encore, by four men on swings, coming at her from all points of the compass. The …
For his first directing try, a yarn about black pioneers. Sidney Poitier seems to have very orderly notions of what he wants to do, especially in the action scenes. Costarring Harry Belafonte with gimmicky bad teeth and Poitier with a gimmicky thunderous gun.
Three-cornered love affair in placid pastels. The complicated situation unfolds along an unpredictable path that never, in its lengthy meanderings, comes anywhere near deep psychology or timely themes or trendy film techniques. While the whole thing seems to be a sort of anachronism, it develops a sort of stubborn lifelikeness …
Charles Bronson as a half-breed (which accounts for both the stealthiness and the mustache) who lures a white man's posse into the wilderness. Out there, he makes every last man feel absolutely miserable. The audience feels likewise. Directed by Michael Winner.
The last and probably least of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Rohmer always had to guard conscientiously against the tendency to shed weight, and here, in the tale of a bright-blue-eyed office worker's erotic caprices, he has trouble even keeping his feet on the ground. With Bernard Verley, Zouzou, Beatrice …
The late Edie Sedgwick, ex-Warhol "superstar," in a role modelled on her own life. The film was shot, off and on, over five years (before completion, the leading lady died), and it looks that way, as if the idea of what the film was about changed several times, and as …
Not without its impressive points (the decayed parchment-gray of Harriet Andersson's skin and the grunting exertion of her performance), Bergman's film about three sisters and their excruciating memories is nonetheless one of his shallowest. The characters make unproven declarations that they are in a dream or in misery or in …
Rather too dreamily photographed; but this little parable about four Atlanta businessmen out of their element on a canoe trip in uncivilized hillbilly country is very intensely acted, especially by Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty in very tricky roles. Manliness is the issue at nearly every turn, and the varying …
Luis Buñuel's pleasant reminder that, at age 72, he is still on the watch. If the student revolutionaries seem a bit stiff and out of place, the drug-smuggling South American ambassador and the Catholic Bishop and the loyal maid and the various dreamers seem extremely comfy. The gags are spun …