Another labor of lunacy from the maker of El Topo — and his temperature would appear to have not come down any in the prior two decades. There's a dwarf, a knife-thrower, a tattooed lady, a white-faced deaf-mute, an elephant with a nosebleed (soon followed by an elephant funeral with …
Herein you will find a lot of the Angst and ennui and other European concepts associated with the old-style European art film. These properties may come as a revelation and a provocation to some. To any, however, who know Bernardo Bertolucci as the director not just of The Last Emperor …
Dark comedy, with even darker photography, about an ad exec who goes on a selective little murder spree when he's passed over for promotion. ("He was your superior, wasn't he?" "No, he was my boss.") Darkest laugh: he sets about scattering the ashes of his electrocuted wife, and the wind …
Retirement-age cop, under the mistaken impression he's got a fatal illness called Wexler's Curtain, needs to die in the line of duty in order to collect on his life-insurance policy -- a reasonable premise for a slapstick comedy by Harold Lloyd, who wouldn't have taken half the movie just to …
Laboring black comedy centering around a post-coital corpse in a hotel room. Bill Pullman, as an unconfidant vertical-blind salesman, gets good results for his pains. And Carrie Fisher gets some too, without breaking a sweat. But they're not the stars of the show. Kirstie Alley is, and she huffs and …
He's an illiterate loner (and eccentric inventor) and she's a widowed factory worker, in a blue-collar romance that winds up in white-collar wedlock: i.e., double happiness. Or double dippiness. Harriet Frank, Jr., and Irving Ravetch, veteran scriptwriters and card-carrying Hemophiliac Liberals, have polished the screenplay to a slippery slickness ("You …
Director Phil Joanou making like an Irish Scorsese: low-level hoods in Hell's Kitchen (a gentrified Hell's Kitchen now called Clinton), locked together in fuck-you-fuck-you-too repartee, and suffocated in smoky blue atmosphere. Sean Penn (with another new hairdo: black shoe polish and sideburns) is well under control as an undercover cop, …
The slob-vs.-snob soaper, Stella Dallas, remade with exactly the amount of taste and tact that ought to enable it to empathize completely with the heroine. It nonetheless seems like a forced march: the roomful of balloons for a marriage proposal, the food fight to make the dinner guests feel at …
Love or money (but not both) on a Monte Carlo honeymoon. A piece of old-fashioned fluff, which no breeze comes along to animate. It's moralistic fluff, because the original novel on which it's based was written by Graham Greene, but that doesn't help make a breeze. Robert Lindsay, Molly Ringwald, …
An ad exec and an escaped con do a kind of Prince and the Pauper, with complications never amusing, constantly annoying. Largest part of the credit for that goes to the foghorn finesse of James Belushi. (Guess which role he plays. Belushi's fans will be allowed two guesses.) With Charles …
Horror anthology with an Arabian Nights (and Hansel and Gretel) framework: a chained little boy postpones his evisceration and cooking by telling scare stories to the chef. Lucky for him it wasn't up to the viewer. He may have survived the first one, featuring a reanimated mummy out of Conan …
An American actor in London, specifically in his sixth year as second banana to an old-fashioned music-hall comic. The latter role is hideously well done (by Rowan Atkinson), perhaps because the filmmakers are not far removed from him. The main character, meantime, is much overdrawn ("This is my room. It's …
Every sweet-little-old-lady stereotype is systematically inverted so that the resulting sour little old lady (face like a tomahawk) emerges as only a comic-strip character. Or better, submerges into an underground-comic character. Trodding on a flower bed, sicking a dog on the mailman, and much, much worse, and all in all …
Spoof of superhero comics, first begun in comic format and now moved onto the screen, where spoofs of comics are more the norm. These superheroes, you understand, are actual, biological turtles, human-sized and Henson-ized, who eat pizza and speak surfese. But to make the joke plainer does not make it …