A somewhat livelier movie about the stock market than "Rollover" -- praise so faint that it would do better just to lie down with a cool washcloth pressed to its forehead. And Michael Douglas, while no less of a Leftish actor happy to cut his own character's throat, is a …
Funny idea, sort of, to identify the modern-day bounty hunter here as the great-grandson of the Wild West bounty hunter on the old TV series of the same name. And that could have been, as intended, the end of it — a frivolous funny idea along with such other ones …
An Optimists' Club movie about a San Quentin lifer who discovers the world of literature at the prison library ("Give me a thick book, I don't care what it's about" -- Tolstoi, Nietzsche, Genet, Dostoevski, Camus, Jacqueline Susann), writes his own play and forms his own theater troupe, is discovered …
Lindsay Anderson in an autumnal mood, apparently in imitation of or homage to his idolized John Ford, with old Harry Carey, Jr., popping in momentarily to ram the point home. It was a lovely thought, a generous thought, possibly too selfless a thought, to team up Lillian Gish and Bette …
The opening shot is a roiling hotbed of texture on a perfectly, or almost perfectly, flat and placid surface, just a few square inches of rough-hewn doorjamb and gently swinging unlatched door -- what proves to be the door to a rural classroom, inside which we will witness a stern …
At the outset, yet another KGB agent has just been shaken out of the ranks of British Intelligence, and paranoia is running high. Or is it really paranoia at all? This is unmistakably John le Carré country or its next-door neighbor (the director, Simon Langton, had done the television miniseries …
What makes Madonna a strong "personality" -- her chutzpah, her air of having been granted a fiat by God, her belief in her powers to numb the spectator's perception and turn ambivalence into adulation -- makes her almost useless as an actress. At least when used by a director who …
Wim Wenders's sentimental fantasy for eggheads, about an invisible angel patrolling the streets of Berlin, where he has evidently been on duty since the dawn of time, witnessing and remembering the deeds of humans, and providing fleeting and ineffectual comfort for them with the occasional arm around the shoulder. Despite …
Writer-director David Leland reportedly based his story here on the early years of Britain's notorious madam, Cynthia Payne (the time-setting is 1951), after he had already written a screenplay on her prime years, Personal Services. And for certain you can find traces in it of Happy Hooker-type bragging. The pseudonymous …
Supernatural battle of the sexes, from the book by John Updike. Two New England divorcées and a widow, who all have untapped magical powers, make a frivolous wish for "a tall dark prince travelling under a curse." What they get instead is a boorish Jack Nicholson with a ponytail -- …
Writer-director (and former actor) Bruce Robinson's semi-autobiographical piece about two London actors near the end of the Sixties, whose careers have thus far gotten nowhere but whose drug-and-alcohol-and-paranoia lifestyles are already in full, woozy swing. The characters and their relationship are believable; the comedy tends to be a bit broad …
The title gives precisely the proper emphasis. This is a movie about female employees, about their relations to each other, to their customers, to their employer. Their place of business, which automatically arouses a wider-spread interest than would a movie set at a dry cleaner's or a donut shop, is …