No potboiler by Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins or one of their relatives has ever lurched faster and farther into daydream improbabilities. And none of those, furthermore, has had the indecency to drag in Goethe and an analytical note on him by Leslie Fiedler. Writer-director James Toback, who somewhat resembles …
Robert M. Young, who thought it was a good idea to film Miguel Pinero's play Short Eyes, makes an even bigger mistake with this William Mastrosimone piece. It begins at the level of the average slasher film: first some cross-cutting between a sinister motorcyclist (opaque visor, snakeskin boot) and his …
We see them for ourselves, these Spirits of the Air, buzzing around the wooded nook like dragonflies, we and two wee girls of eight and twelve; and then we sit back and watch as the benighted grownups of WWI-time England debate their existence. The plodding attention to the historical "facts" …
Brief Encounter on the Manhattan commuter train -- but not all that brief after all, and without anything like Noel Coward's verbal facility. Michael Christofer's underwritten script maneuvers the characters fairly cleverly into place, but then gives them nothing much to do or say once there. A glaring oversight, this, …
The tempestuous directorial debut of scriptwriter James (The Gambler) Toback, about a confused young man who vacillates between the career choices and value systems represented by his Italian-Catholic Mafioso father and his Jewish classical-pianist mother. It is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. Harvey Keitel, with his portable cassette-deck …
An early screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's, disinterred and refurbished for his friend and colleague Robert Rodriguez to direct, and for himself to act in (amateurishly, as always, but with thoroughly aroused senses of fun and enthusiasm). The pre-credits scene exhibits some genuine movie sense. An extended bit of fat-chewing between …
Tim Blake Nelson's filmization of his own stage play invites viewers once again to be ground under the Nazi boot heel. It poses the timeless question of how low the human animal will sink for survival -- and not even for survival, necessarily, but just "for vodka and bed linens," …
An island, a summer house, a Superior Court judge, a wife half his age, a next-door childhood playmate of the opposite sex, and an ex-boyfriend, soon a corpse. An intended dark comedy negated by a relentlessly light heart. It premiered on the HBO channel prior to its unnecessary theatrical release. …
The point of departure is truly inspired: a young Australian woman's religious conversion while on holiday in India, and the scandalized reactions of her middle-class suburban family back home, the most severe of which is to enlist the help of a recommended deprogrammer: "The number-one exit counselor in America." The …
Manhattan murder mystery with a grabbing start, and then a lot of grip-loosening for romantic dalliance and comic doodles. The mystery itself, when intermittently remembered, never regains its hold: the "special investigator" on the case goes way beyond the normal eccentricity allowed a Great Detective ("He's a fuckin' beatnik! He's …
Harvey Keitel plays an aging Mafia don who decides the time is right to train his middle-aged, mildly retarded son (writer/director Hyung-rae Shim) as his successor. The only thing that kept me watching this period-genre parody was the schizophrenic production design — it’s impossible to pinpoint in what part of …
What Martin Scorsese and company (scriptwriter Paul Schrader, quite prominently) appear to be up to at the most basic level is something that storytellers have been getting up to since the birth of the oral tradition: retelling a standard-repertory myth and altering it in the telling. (In this case using …
Starring Adam Sandler. By now, that much -- that little -- should be a sufficient review. To say that he plays the weakling son of Satan -- to say that he plays him as if afflicted with a humpback, a clubfoot, cerebral palsy, throat cancer, and limp lifeless hair -- …
Martin Scorsese's volatile movie about reaching adulthood in New York's "Little Italy" is made up of a fistful of tough, partial truths, which are repeated frequently and adamantly to create the impression of the whole truth. His main idea of how to keep the excitement at a fever-pitch is to …
Women have their support groups -- why not men? Or so reasons an ex-ballplayer (.320 lifetime batting average, World Series ring) who is starved for fellowship. They -- seven of them -- tell stories ("This is more than a club. This is a symposium"), they laugh, they fall silent, they …