Two con artists, a mustachioed charmer and a ten-year-old tomboy (acted by Ryan O'Neal and his daughter Tatum), peddle gold-embossed Good Books in the Depression-era Bible Belt. To enjoy this frayed yarn, it is not really necessary to believe in all the cunning, resourcefulness, and adorability credited to the precocious …
Grinning, giddy Tanna Frederick continues her rise to buzzy stardom, at least in the world of Henry Jaglom’s L.A. vanity movies. After the opening logo (a shot of Orson Welles’s face), all style vanishes, the plot starts to curdle, and we are left in the Jaglom zone of sterile lighting …
Peter Bogdanovich trespasses on Graham Greene territory, a story of life in exile, a wallow in waywardness, and an undoubted treat for the alienated and the sullied. The narrative exposition in general, and the badly recorded Orson Welles-ian dialogue in particular, is like slush, but the movie achieves a certain …
The first part of this Soviet film, during which you will probably get your fill of sun-dappled impressionistic images long before the director has gotten his, closely resembles Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, with its broad caricatures of stock silent-movie types (the temperamental prima donna, the masculine matinee idol with a falsetto …
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 …
Multiple-pairs romantic comedy by Peter Bogdanovich, whose concept of romance, as of comedy, tends to be hand-me-down and to not suit him very well. The action, set in Manhattan and eccentrically concentrating on the country-western scene there, matches a rather diverse group of private detectives against a rather undiverse group …
John Ford shot nine films in Monument Valley causing Peter Bogdanovich to remark, “It has become so identified with him, other directors are convinced that using it for a location would be plagiarism.” That didn’t stop Sergio Leone from doing his best work there and now it’s Lech Majewski’s turn. …
Peter Bogdanovich has unhocked dozens of gambits from old screwball comedies, and they go over so big it puts in question the assumed advancement of today's audience. It is a comedy that tastes of research rather than invention. The pointlessness of the entire enterprise is intriguing, sort of. But watching …
Auggie (Jason Tremblay), a fifth-grader born with severe facial deformities, attends public school for the first time. When handling similar material in Mask, Peter Bogdanovich surrounded his lead with a support system that would have made John Ford proud. Writer-director Stephen Chbosky’s inspiration apparently came from watching hours of ABC …