The story of an owlish Jewish pawnbroker perched inside a cage in his Harlem shop and haunted by idyllic visions of the Old Country and nightmarish visions of barbwired concentration camps is played for high tragedy, climaxed by a symbolic crucifixion on a paper spindle. A conspicuous case of overreaching. …
Akira Kurosawa locks together, in an uneasy alliance, a Gillespie-Kildare duo of idealistic doctors, toiling in the Lower Depths, a familiar Kurosawa locale; and in the course of this three-hour, full-bodied, medical soap opera, he builds some memorable moments around the humble trappings there -- the scrub brush and water …
Antonioni's experiment in coloring the world of a schizophrenic, with disappointingly decorative results. (The question is, does he also do living rooms?) The actors, Monica Vitti and Richard Harris, could sue for desertion, if not for outright abuse.
Polanski's brilliantly crafted and profoundly morbid thriller about a London manicurist who harbors a consuming hatred of sex, and who, when her stable sister leaves town on a romantic holiday, goes spectacularly insane locked inside her flat — the walls turn to putty, the carcasses putrify, and the outside world …
In many ways, although not in the way of sheer handsomeness, this is the apex of Jean-Pierre Melville's art. It is set apart from his others by the largeness of its population (composed of course only of cops, gangsters, and their acolytes: there's no one else in Melville's universe) and …
One of the earliest tremors in the prolonged late-Sixties rumble of Czechoslovakian filmmaking. It's sufficiently plain-spoken and maudlin in its handling of human comedy, of human tragedy, of irony, of fantasy, that it walked off with the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Ida Kaminska portrays the old Jewish shopkeeper …
A bedtime story for nonbelievers. Luis Buñuel's little forty-five-minute parable about the 15th-century ascetic, St. Simeon, who lived atop a pillar, has a clumsy, stop-and-go pacing, but is related with a grand raconteur's gusto. (The end is a particularly waggish stroke -- the Devil whisks Simeon into the 20th Century …
The reprise of. If you have resisted seeing it all this time, there is no compelling reason to knuckle under now, although you might be surprised how well Robert Wise's restrained and graceful direction compensates for all the kids and the Oscar Hammerstein optimism. Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer.
Pure schmaltz. Jason Robards, at his most unbuttoned as a TV gag writer, is a free spirit and a beloved dad to his teenage son -- but is he "good" for the boy? With Barbara Harris, Martin Balsam; directed by Fred Coe.
Sean Connery's James Bond act at its most blasé. In the fourth installment of the series, there's an almost complete surrender to gadgetry, as 007 flies like Mighty Mouse through sky and sea, en route to thwarting a plot involving a heisted H-bomb. The movie, overall, is very fast, efficient, …
Roger Corman's last attempted adaptation of a Poe story, and one of the best of them. As in the others, the original story, presumably too loggy and prosaic, serves just as the springboard for a flight of necrophiliac imagination. Good, somber use made of the green English countryside and the …
With Clive Donner as director, Woody Allen's hit-and-miss humor finds a richer texture and a wider range of mood than it finds, in the immediate future, with Allen himself as director. In a generally classy cast, Paula Prentiss as a suicide-prone stripper slightly outclasses the rest -- Peter O'Toole, Peter …
Cult item dug out of the Sixties rubbish bin for reissue in the Nineties. Its most surprising and titillating features, much more than the bulge-revealing jockey shorts, swimming trunks, and white slacks of Sal Mineo (did he misplace a sock?) or the bra-and-panties cheesecake of Juliet Prowse or the thematic …