Dirty politics in a student-body election, climaxing in a shame faced public confession stolen directly from Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero. A routine distortion of high school life, with overaged, overskilled actors and with hardly a parent, a teacher, or a textbook in sight; at least halfway serious in …
An accordion-like compression of early rock-and-roll history, sociology, and mythology. This Memory Lane movie pushes a goodly number of nostalgia buttons, and it hopes that the subject matter and the fond feeling for that subject matter are alone sufficient to carry an audience along. It hopes, also, to camouflage the …
An attractively shabby Robert Mitchum, a pleasurably befuddling plot, and a gleefully wanton piece of destruction at the end when Mitchum steers a monstrous Caterpillar willy-nilly through a greenhouse. With Bradford Dillman, Richard Egan; directed by Robert Clouse.
Ingmar Bergman's characters suffer from many things, one of them being logorrhea. They talk directly to the camera, they talk solitarily to themselves, they talk to framed photographs, and of course, when given the chance, they talk each other's ears off, but even then their gaze tends to wander into …
Having exhausted their fund of profanities, boners, and late-inning miracles in their two earlier outings, the precocious Little Leaguers are shifted into the background in order to convert this sequel into a Tony Curtis vehicle. Curtis is mostly unfunny, but not unaffecting, as a middle-aged, graying, and increasingly desperate version …
Laurence Olivier must have been drawn to this by the same force that impelled him to do Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for television. Again, he's Big Daddy, or actually Big Great-grand-daddy, the tyrant of a Detroit automobile empire. Speaking in an unidentifiable accent that sometimes, perhaps, is in …
At the heart of this up-to-date private eye caper is the question, Whatever happened to the student radicals of the Sixties? And the several given answers are not lacking in humor, nor in sentimentalism for the good old days of peace marches, SDS meetings, and such. That one of these …
Although relocated in modern-day England, this stays closer to the letter of the Raymond Chandler original than Howard Hawks's 1946 version did. And yet, hastening through the labyrinthine plot in well under two hours, it turns brusque and unfeeling. Not all is a loss, though. There's a nice counterpoint effect …
John Milius's epic-scale treatment of three surfing buddies and their California Casual lifestyle is always pleasantly absurd, but its most side-splitting possibilities, in the mock-heroic mode, are not realized until the lugubriously nostalgic second half, when the three blond beachniks must face up to the problems of Aging, the Changing …
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 Lone Ranger Nazi-hunter, modelled on Simon Wiesenthal, is made to seem a worryingly feeble hero, afflicted in his dotage by the world's growing indifference, his own infirmity, his leaky plumbing, and his overdue rent; but the sympathy evoked by the role is more than cancelled out by Laurence Olivier's …
In the event you have been a little late on the uptake, here are laid out (a,b,c,d, etc.) all the horrors and lunacies of the U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, beginning with the sheepshearing in Marine bootcamp and extending to the body counts in the Vietnam rice paddies. Some …
Was the death of General Patton the result of a mere motor accident, or was he in fact struck down by a high-powered rubber bullet which snapped his neck, without puncturing his skin, at the precise instant his car collided with a strategically parked truck, thus falling victim to a …
A Little Man comedy, Italian-style, not many doors down from Charlie Chaplin and Charley Chase. Each of the tribulations of an immigrant laborer in Switzerland is underlined, encircled, starred, and arrowed, as if with thick black marking pencil, so that you have the urge to clean up the picture with …
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 …