Old-style, meticulously plotted and paced private-eye case steers perilously close to parody (Robert Mitchum's wry first-person narration, the bluesy horn solo on the soundtrack, Charlotte Rampling's Bacall impersonation). But Dick Richards's steady-handed direction holds it to a course so straight and sure that it achieves instead a kind of fundamentalist …
Divine chases fame all the way from high school to the electric chair -- a mock tabloid tragedy by John Waters. "Give us something twisted, give us something warped," the fashion photographer's entreaty to Divine, as she madly shakes her walrus-like body, might well be the motto of the entire …
Orson Welles's tediously prankish essay on the topic of illusion and reality, incorporating both staged and spontaneous material, as well as some second-hand stuff, all shuffled together in a hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye style. Some of it is moderately intriguing (the sessions with art forger Elmyr de Hory, shot not by Welles but …
Richard Lester's appendage to his Three Musketeers, a year previous, dispenses more of the same: Alexandre Dumas's fancily woven intrigues, acted out by blundering oafs, exclaiming things like "oof" and "oops," in a frantic knockabout comedy style. Prolonged to this length, the never-ending escapes and recoveries of the characters go …
The early stages of this spiders' uprising in rural Wisconsin -- real hairy bugs crawling around kitchen and bedroom -- are unpleasantly icky; then when the spiders attain the size and agility of parade floats, you can breath more easily, but you still can't find much to smile about. The …
The Maysles brothers' astonishing peek into the magnificent ruin of two womens' lives.
A dirty trick. With Lynn Redgrave, in variable hairdos, eyebrows, and lipsticks, as Xaviera Hollander; directed by Nicholas Sgarro.
Charles Bronson is the archetypal transient loner, stealing in and out of big cities aboard night trains, on a placid, vacant Panavision screen. This is a far-fetched ballad about he-man virtues, both physical and ethical, surviving in a difficult, debasing underworld — it's about Depression drifters pummeling one another for …
With its fond, indulgent, film-fan outlook, Howard Zieff's sweet-tempered spoof of early Hollywood seems actually more condescending than a Nathanael West-ian nightmare vision of the movie colony. The Jeff Bridges protagonist, an Iowa farm boy who decides to Go West to become a Zane Grey Western writer, is played as …
Joan Micklin Silver's ambitious but penny-wise independent production about the Americanization of Jewish immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side at the turn of the century. The substantial subject is filtered down to individual scenes that are tidy, to-the-point, and a bit thinned-out. (A big line comes across loud and clear: …
Religious persecution of Jews, by Catholics, in 16th-century Mexico -- handled without the usual Joan of Arc histrionics, moral victories, and rooting interests. Directed by Arturo Ripstein with a surrealist's inscrutable poker face, and photographed by Jorge Stahl with a clear, sculptural light bathing the stiffly costumed figures and the …
Robert Aldrich's slightly feverish vision of the assorted dreamers and schemers in the City of Angels, over their heads in hot color and murky shadow. Scriptwriter Steve Shagan's post-mortem on a teen-age runaway, apparently a suicide, is teasingly well plotted around numerous interruptions and postponements, and ultimately is unable to …
In the course of four erotic short stories, Walerian Borowczyk travels over a mountain range of bare bosoms and through a forest of pubic hair. The first, and best, of the four has a wonderful feel for climate and topography. And in general, Borowczyk exhibits a careful, selective, still-photographer's eye …
The beginning is a squeamishly funny skit about an abnormally difficult birth and a befuddled team of doctors, and the punchline comes when the newborn babe massacres everybody in the delivery room. If this feat is hard for you to picture, it is also hard for director Larry Cohen. The …
Love among the international set, and among the floral bouquets, the lamps, the cushions, the Panavision rooms. The desirable remark about Once Is Not Enough would be, "It's too much." Alas, it only rarely reaches that extreme, although it is often in the act of stretching. It is told with …