After the pastoral interludes of The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, Walter Hill returns to the urban milieu of The Driver and The Warriors, but his decline since the latter pair continues nonetheless. One of the more obvious differences between them and the present work is the abandonment of an …
People who enjoyed the predecessor seem to be disappointed in the sequel. People who did not enjoy the predecessor will have difficulty telling much difference. But because fidelity, not originality, is the goal this time (a new writer and director, Ken Finkleman, has taken over for the Kentucky Fried Theater …
The opening sequence, in which a band of Left-wing terrorists take hostages at the American consulate in Munich and arbitrarily execute one of them, is pretty gripping. Subsequent developments, in which the victim's bereaved lover — a mild-mannered cryptographer for the CIA — defies his superiors and sets out for …
A cinéma-verité portrait by Robert Duvall of a ten-year-old New York gypsy. The fictional storyline, about the theft of a family jewel and its eventual recovery, introduces us to a lot of individual gypsies (and others); and Duvall gives them, in semi-improvised dialogues, as loose a leash as they might …
Going-through-the-motions filming of the Broadway hit. On past evidence, no one would imagine that director John Huston has any special aptitude for musicals. Or on present evidence either. His first-ever musical, after three dozen movies and more than twice that many years, is big, slow, and ugly. Albert Finney, doing …
It must first be acknowledged that this self-proclaimed nuclear Reefer Madness is every bit as much a propaganda film as the 1940s and 50s relics it so confidently holds up to ridicule; and second be acknowledged that the assembled educational films, commercials, and newsreels, presented without commentary and without sufficient …
Perhaps Israel Horovitz, the author author, identified himself too closely with his protagonist, and thus assumed that anything falling within his experience would be sure to engage our sympathy. However that may be, he has not given any shape to the mass of troubles burdening a good-hearted Broadway playwright: troubles …
The rare American movie to make the jump from television to theaters, and without having to cross any oceans to do it. No one is apt to question its credentials (it debuted, after all, on public TV, not network), although the straight-shooting social consciousness is rather more characteristic of TV …
The sort of Western -- self-consciously legendary and shot full of absurdist holes -- that kills interest in all other sorts. Fred Schepisi, the Australian director, displays here a sporadic eye for the Texas landscape and for the movement of light and shadow thereon. This, combined with such other physical …
Synthetic folktale, drawn to ancient specifications: a king's son deprived of his birthright and his identity in infancy, reared in exile, coming back in adulthood to carry out his prophesied revenge. The main point of originality is the bit of witchery whereby the embryonic hero is transferred from human womb …
Béatrice Romand, an engaging teenager in Eric Rohmer's series of Six Moral Tales (in Claire's Knee, to be exact), has grown up to be an engaging young woman in his ensuing series: Comedies and Proverbs. Which is not to say that the character she plays isn't a typical Rohmer fathead, …
Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, scriptwriting partners who are also husband and wife, have written a semi-private joke about scriptwriting partners who become husband and wife, and about what happens next. The various topics that are ambled through are hardly very private: Hollywood producers, health-food restaurants, wedding chapels, trains, weather, …
The stage musical Burt Reynoldsized (and Dom DeLuisized). Dolly Parton is fine (despite doing a pointless and less good rendition of one of her best songs, "I Will Always Love You"), and Charles Durning prances onto the scene too late and too briefly to do much good, and Colin Higgins …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …