An academic hoax -- faked footage of a "lost" New Guinea tribe in the Anthropology professor's backyard -- and a happy ending for the hoaxers. (Useful documentary evidence of moral decay in America.) A few old pros and one new -- Richard Dreyfuss, Lily Tomlin, Elaine Stritch, and Jenna Elfman …
A half-deaf, half-lame, and fully retired private detective, at work on a memoir entitled Naked Girls and Machine Guns, is sucked back into a world of plentiful corpses when his former partner turns up at his door, drooling blood. This type of elegy to the obsolete gumshoe is a pretty …
Privileged moments with the multiple-personalitied comedienne, on stage and off it, over the twenty months in preparation for the Broadway opening of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. But rather random moments when all's said and done, amounting to little more than an advertisement, or appetizer, …
Seashore romance, lusciously photographed by Philip Lathrop, and, despite some large improbabilities and larger embarrassments, classically crafted by writer-director Jane Wagner. The woman in the affair is Lily Tomlin, a well-to-do Malibu matron who behaves like a candidate for Geritol, displays a personal (or political) preference for bra-less fashions, and …
Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin star as estranged friends who reunite to seek revenge on the petulant widower (Malcolm McDowell) of their recently deceased best friend. Along the way, Fonda’s character reunites with her great love (Richard Roundtree) as each woman learns to make peace with the past and each …
Robert Altman continues to course over salient features of the American Scene with amazing speed and mobility. His leaps-and-bounds progress is made to look effortless, smooth, liquidy because of his habit of skimming, primarily. Here, he and his allies visit Music City, U.S.A., but they arrive there with their ideas …
Cunning piece of popular entertainment, pushing the proper buttons to bring out the grievances of almost everybody toward their bosses, and particularly those of secretaries. At its laziest, it settles for illustrating dog-eared pages out of the feminist primer. Certainly, it gives up any pretense of honest observation in its …
Confused-teen-crazy-world comedy, fairly formulaic (a gallery of stereotypes, a splash of gross-out, a dab of sentiment, an instructive moral), notwithstanding the genuflections to Fine Literature. Agile comic turns by Jack Black, Catherine O'Hara, Lily Tomlin, and John Lithgow. But the romantic leads, Colin Hanks and Schuyler Fisk, bear so strong …
The moviegoer's first introduction to Pee-wee Herman, and both of them should be very happy about it. Jerry Lewis would seem to be the comedian's closest screen cousin, at least in measurement of time, but he even bypasses Lewis in likeness to their silent-era forebears, with his complete and unalterable …
Steve Martin carries the Inspector Clouseau torch into a sequel, thoroughly doused though the flame may be. (Kevin Kline got out while the getting was good, leaving the role of Clouseau’s superior to John Cleese, with unaltered British accent. And previous director Shawn Levy handed the bag to Harald Zwart.) …
Its title and its emcee have been taken from Garrison (a/k/a Garrulous) Keillor's weekly public-radio show. But there is no mention of the imaginary world of Lake Woebegone, MN. The sole setting is the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, named after native son F. Scott, and ticketed for the wrecking …
Lily Tomlin's one-woman stage show transported to the movie house, and tricked up with shock-cut costume changes, split screens, double exposures, superimpositions, sound effects for pantomime, and suffocating or at least distracting background music. It's still not a movie, although Tomlin's impersonations can stand up to the closest of closeup …
Woody Allen doing a takeoff on F.W. Murnau and the German Expressionists in general, with shades of the "white" horror of Dreyer's Vampyr, plus his more customary dashes of Bergman (a travelling circus with a Swedish-accented magician). The black-and-white photography by Carlo di Palma is highly (if also drily, academically, …
Robert Altman shuffles together several Raymond Carver short stories, or at any rate several sets of characters from them, and in so doing transforms pithiness into garrulity -- three hours' worth. At the same time he has upped the levels of kookiness and smuttiness, and lost touch with Carver's common …
A welcome development: big-screen luminaries (Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, Keira Knightley, Tom Hiddleston, et. al.) lending their luster to the short-film form. At their best, short films function like short stories, trimming away every excess to deliver aesthetic completion in a fraction of the time. It's a difficult …