After divorce, that is. As visualized and verbalized by Alan ("The Man Who Understands Women") Alda. He and Ann-Margret go their separate ways and meet new people, but no one they would want to meet again, until, with a nice symmetry, she finds a waiter named "Doc" and he a …
William Richert's adaptation of his own semi-(quasi-)autobiographical novel, Aren't You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? The semi-(quasi-)(anti-)hero makes a bid to become the most hilariously highfalutin teenager since O'Neill's alter ego in Ah, Wilderness! The bid comes in impudently low. What mainly brings it down is the grotesquerie of the …
Freddy's dead and buried (or buried at least) until a dog pisses fire and splits open the earth and lets him loose again. There is some expressive camerawork for the effects of a Mickey Finn; and the climax, when the imprisoned souls escape Freddy's body, is slightly spectacular. But one …
The first three hours of Christine Edzard's six-hour adaptation of Dickens's Little Dorrit -- and you needn't see the second three to know it is mostly a big bore. Mostly but not wholly. Part of the problem, which should come as no surprise, lies with the original author. Dickens was …
A nifty bit of tightrope-walking -- or fence-sitting. Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines are plainclothes MPs in Saigon, 1968, so they can't be branded as dovelike wimps, but neither do they have to bloody their hands on the Viet Cong, and -- best of all -- the trail they are …
The twenty-seventh, so they say, full-length cartoon feature from the Disney people: it takes only as much as it can use from Dickens's Oliver Twist and throws it to a pack of stray dogs and an alley kitten. The narrative moves along briskly, unchecked even by several song-and-dance interludes; there's …
Skullduggery in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, centered around a seedy little secret agent more Kafka than Graham Greene, occupying a remote Aegean island, faithfully filing reports to the Sultan and hearing nothing in return for twenty years, and now caught up in a plot that he (and we) …
Word-heavy, image-slim. The script -- corrosively foulmouthed but at the same time gratingly literary -- is a collaboration of director David Burton Morris and the three leading players. It lays machismo bare: when machismo, that is, boasts of a twenty-eight-inch penis, the script demands that his drawers be pulled down …
Paul Schrader brings his typically cold touch to a typically hot topic -- the kidnapping of the California newspaper heiress by the Symbionese Liberation Army -- and produces a typically unaccountable absence of sizzle. Heretofore, this had been a topic which only the lowliest exploitationist (cf. Abduction, 1975), or one …
A "big" movie from Scandinavia. Not big like the kind of broadaxe Viking epic the title might suggest, but big in the way of a brick-sized 19th-century novel, big in number of screen minutes, big in ambition, big in size and number of themes explored: the strengthened bond between father …
Teen suicide: a subject torn from the front page of the daily paper, or else from a followup story on the front page of its Lifestyles section -- not a very reliable prescription for a work of fiction, but one guaranteed to win scattered applause from people who care nothing …
Police Story 2, a more traditional, but nonetheless superb action comedy, opens with Jackie being demoted to traffic cop. Chu and his gang return eager to do battle along with a new threat in the guise of a gang of mad bombers. Faulting the film for not being as tightly …
A new director labors under an old curse: Gary Sherman, who did the excellent Raw Meat and the less excellent but still good Dead and Buried. This series, however, is so set in its ways that it needs only a carpenter, not an architect. The most that Sherman can do …
Our second lesson in the Hopi language, a little more difficult in application than the first (Koyaanisqatsi). "Life in transformation," the advertising poster succinctly suggests, but the postscript on the film itself goes off in another direction: "An entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other …
An underplotted murder mystery with some possibly interesting possibilities to do with the territorial jostling between military and civilian police. The personal animosity between the military cop and the civilian one (who used to be a military one himself) prevents the possible interest from becoming definite, or else throws a …