Peter Bogdanovich's shapeless compression of Larry McMurtry's off-the-rack sequel. Supposedly thirty years have passed since the events in The Last Picture Show, though the actors have in reality endured the passage of just nineteen, and Cybill Shepherd in particular is not disposed to try to look older than she actually …
Continued cutesy-poo. Well, not cutesy-poo exactly, but cutesy-peepee (except no longer on the couch, but in potty training and blindfolded in a public men's room -- and that's just during the pixillated credits). There are new complications as well: little Mary, now at five years of age, is starting to …
Courtship via the method laid out in that most respected S&M; manual, The Collector -- of imprisonment-until-capitulation. The suitor is fresh out of a mental institution, with a haircut to prove it, and his selected dreamgirl is an actress in a grade-B horror film -- of which the set and …
The Turgenev novel, put by Jerzy Skolimowski into pretty pictures, and lightly sprinkled with Polish drolleries. The United Nations cast (Timothy Hutton, William Forsythe, Valeria Golino, and Nastassja Kinski with Goldilocks curls) is not very convincing; and they, or we, are not made more comfortable by one of Skolimowski's typically …
A middle-class black family in South Central L.A. is visited by an uninvited face from the past -- their specific personal past but also their symbolic racial past. There is an air of theatricality about the piece -- a stiltedness, a stuffiness -- and there is an insufficient air of …
Amid a host of amusing ideas about our possible future, an engrossing central one: artificially implanted memories, courtesy of Rekall, Inc. ("as real as any memory in your head ... and that's guaranteed"); and of course artificially erased ones, too. (Not to be included among the amusing ideas are the …
An art-imitates-life-imitates-art carousel, revolving around a radio soap-opera writer (ca. 1951) of such genius that his words emerge from the typewriter fully visualized, with cameo performances by the likes of John Larroquette, Buck Henry, Elizabeth McGovern, Peter Gallagher. Real life, in which a callow youth woos an older woman, is …
Long-postponed followup to Chinatown, with an awful lot of background info taken for granted after a sixteen-year break, and with a totally different visual style from its forerunner -- a bit like the relationship of The Hustler to The Color of Money, except that in the present case both films …
Roundabout romance between an apathetic high-school girl, awaiting nuclear extinction, and an ex-con the nature of whose crimes has undergone endless permutation in the rumor mill. Little folksy drolleries gather round like flies at a Dairy Queen, and as dismissibly. It mostly falls flat -- but budgeted so modestly, so …
Coolly measured and unobstreperous thriller that merits praise in kind. The female half of a Dutch couple on holiday in France — neither the happiest nor the unhappiest of couples -- disappears without trace at a rest stop. An interesting situation, slightly remindful of Antonioni's L'Avventura, except that we've seen …
Both of the van Gogh brothers, the celebrated painter as well as the not-so-celebrated art dealer who couldn't "move" his sibling's paintings. This attention to Theo, while democratic in an almost parental way, subtracts more than it adds: it gives us less of Vincent, and, equally important, less of his …
Third year at med school: all the drama, the glamour, the glibness; the tears, the laughter, the yawns; the competitiveness, the camaraderie, the contrivance; the triumphs, the failures, the promise of big salaries in the future. Pretty no-nonsense work by Jimmy Smits as the head surgeon; pretty likable work by …
A comedy of phoney miracles and true faith, played out against a background of the Cuban missile crisis. This background, and its promise of the Apocalypse, seems as though it ought to be more complementary and supportive than it is. Not only is it not, but, with its fallout-shelter frenzy …
The Local-Girl-Made-Good is about to return to Clyde, Ohio, and everyone's in a tizzy: the house she was born in is pronounced an Historical Site, a ball is planned, and so on and so on. Malicious small-town satire sweetened with sympathy for the high-school weirdo who doesn't fit in. Winona …
Kind of a King Lear recast as Shakespearean comedy, capped off with the obligatory revel. Always a man interested in chasms, John Boorman here surveys much the same terrain as in Leo the Last, only in New York instead of London: urban haves and have-nots (but gonna-get-somes). And also as …