Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
In the profusion of European-produced Charles Bronson vehicles, this one, from Sergio Sollima, about a Mafia hit man, merits special attention. As usual, Bronson's wife, Jill Ireland, is on hand; but not as usual, her role here is more than token. It is primarily her presence that invests these conventional …
They don't make 'em like this any more. René Laloux directs this story of a world where humanity is considered a lower life form.
Werner Herzog's mock documentary/travelogue on a graveyard locale — a godforsaken region of the Sahara littered with ram-shackle native dwellings and abandoned remnants of Rommel's WWII desert campaign. The movie guards its intentions like a crafty card player, and grows on you by degrees — a hard movie to get …
Roman Polanski's lecherous private joke about a hippie hitchhiker (someone has described her as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Little Annie Fanny, though she favors the latter) who stumbles from a roadside rape into the mixed-nuts company at a secluded Italian villa: a bedridden patriarch, an arthritic pianist, …
The first movie exported from Jamaica, a genuine curiosity among black exploitation movies. The story might have been thought up by a wistful adolescent who can't, or won't, make up his mind between two different Hollywood-clichédreams of glory. For a while it follows a struggling-young-artist pattern (in this case, a …
The creators of the Fritz the Cat cartoon, writer-director Ralph Bakshi and producer Steve Krantz, climb up the biological ladder from R. Crumb's animals to some rather rubbery, cute, caricatured humans in the Popeye and Bluto mold. There is still the contented wallowing in Big Town blues, and the consorting …
Mad scientist stuff, having to do with a wheelchair-bound, black-gloved Pavlovian who habitually cracks his knuckles and performs frontal lobotomies on whoever checks into his sanatorium for a weekend of rest and relaxation. Knowledgeably eclectic and quirkily humorous, but in the long run stunted and disappointing, particularly the late-arriving monster …
Lovers' tragedy about a Rimini university professor whose aspirations as a poet were an early, long-turned page in his life and who now devotes his time to debauchery, and a female student of his who is the sort naturally to catch a teacher's eye and who, for precisely the same …
The enduring cliché here is that a run-on revel, especially one conducted in fresh-air countryside (cf. Rules of the Game, Smiles of a Summer Night), will progressively ruffle the feathers and pluck the feathers of the assembled guests, and will produce dazzling glimpses of their unmentionables underneath. These Swiss clucks, …
Norman Jewison's pre-sold youth movie. It has vibrant electronic music (played at perilous volume), a legion of agile young bodies, a clean and aromatic environment, and a beach-y color scheme of sky-blues and desert-tans. All it needs, beyond that, is a subject worthy of its buoyant production values — something …
Hall Bartlett's filmization of Richard Bach's best-seller is about as honest and up-front an offering as could be imagined. It is exactly what you expect: Hallmark greeting-card pictures and philosophy, put to the tunes of Neil Diamond. James Franciscus and Juliet Mills provide the simpering seagull voices.
Bernardo Bertolucci's big splash. It has been so overdiscussed that nearly every incident seems familiar even as it's happening. And so, the focus of attention is narrowed to where it mainly belongs — the extravagances of Bertolucci's juicy romantic style, his inexplicable bursts of camera movement, gushes of music, rich …
Roger Moore confiscates the James Bond role with no trace of apology or regret; he is smooth and pretty and unperturbed, and he acts as though always poised for a still photographer to snap his portrait. This Bond escapade — a blithely reactionary tale of British and American intelligence battling …
Robert Altman's provoking revision of a late, intricate Raymond Chandler detective novel is devoted less to creating a mystery than a muddle. The impenetrable darkness, the stealthy zooms and circuitous tracks of Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography, and the ceaseless buzzing or humming of the actors, conspire together to cover up the …