The debut of star and director and producer and writer and co-editor Charles Lane, a silent movie set in contemporary New York (with a music track, but few sound effects and no audible dialogue -- not until the last few moments) and shot in black-and-white (mostly mid-range grays, very tasteful). …
An American Playhouse production, with all the literateness and literariness that that banner stands for. It has the considerable pleasures of place and of people -- a real place (a Maine coastal town, on closing day at the century-old boatyard) and people who look like they might really live there …
William Shatner, inheriting the director's hat from Leonard Nimoy, seems to camp his role here a little more than he was ever allowed to do under any other director than himself (it's his first such assignment). And the action, in his uncallused hands, is flabby in the extreme. However, it …
Lusty, long-armed, life-embracing saga of a small family in a small town. Actress-turned-director Lee Grant has total faith that there is no scene so false, so cornball, so negligently directed, that actors can't rescue it. That's true, or partly true, in the case of an actress as gifted as Stockard …
Extended hen party for six Suthunnuhs who either patronize or work at a hair parlor called Truvy's Beauty Spot -- that's the social link between them. One-liners are passed around the group like canapés, and each of the top-line actresses (Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah, …
Extended hen party for six Suthunnuhs who either patronize or work at a hair parlor called Truvy's Beauty Spot -- that's the social link between them. One-liners are passed around the group like canapés, and each of the top-line actresses (Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah, …
Jane Campion's first feature film -- also Sally Bongers's first feature film as cinematographer -- is made with the eye of a borderline schizophrenic: off-balance compositions and camera angles unable to differentiate the relative importance of people and mere things. In this, the camera eye is nothing less than an …
Buddy stuff. Yuppie cop and prole cop, Armani suits vs. blue jeans and T-shirt, etc. Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell each have a sense of style in the heat of the action, but the nattering wisecracks ("Where the hell did you learn to drive?" "Stevie Wonder!") keep dousing them with …
It looked to be an auspicious occasion: a salute to hoofers, directed by the son of a Hollywood choreographer (both named Nick Castle). Nostalgia, however, has an uphill struggle. The rapprochement between tap-dance and rock-and-roll ("You wanna dance to that junk?") goes against nature; the photography is MTV pea soup; …
A strange man known only as the "metal fetishist", who seems to have an insane compulsion to stick scrap metal into his body, is hit and possibly killed by a Japanese "salaryman", out for a drive with his girlfriend. The salaryman then notices that he is being slowly overtaken by …
Another Hollywood raid on the French cinema, this time with the full co-operation (directing, writing, executive producing) of the original filmmaker, Francis Veber. It says something about the state of the art in the 1980s that Hollywood should be so impressed with inferior French imitations of Hollywood at its fluffiest: …
Provocation without conviction is Bertrand Blier's game. The proposition this time: How could a man with a beautiful wife take up with his plain secretary? Blier is interested only in the question, not in any of a thousand conceivable answers. Schubert and slow-motion punctuate (ironically, bien entendu) the romantic passions, …
There's a preliminary hump to be got over: why it should matter to eight spoiled brats and a social butterfly to be accepted as true-blue Wilderness Girls (not Girl Scouts, but same difference); why they couldn't be content as just an independent social club. Once over it, however, this rolls …