A spaghetti Western that appears to have cut corners in both its pre-production and its post-production work (the color quality fluctuates so erratically from shot to shot that the film looks as though it is still awaiting a turn in the processing lab). It is given some moral backbone, though, …
Jean-Charles Tacchella's overpraised love story is a profusion of casual, cursory observations of family life; and in the abundance there are plenty of amusing moments, and many more that are smug, lazy-minded, and banal. It seems a nice idea to do a movie whose entire, large population is tied together …
Two adrenaline junkie stuntmen (John Hargreaves and Grant Page) accept a suicide mission to infiltrate and destroy the seemingly impenetrable fortress of a notorious Filipino racketeer.
Alongside Akira Kurosawa's customarily virile athletic work, this slow, contemplative movie is apt to be seen all the more clearly as an old man's movie, a movie made with a reduced pulse rate and a tenacious, almost desperate attempt to savor every passing moment. At bottom, it is a My …
Fred Schepisi's semi-autobiographical first feature, a surprisingly tender and even-handed account of life in a Catholic seminary. The Catholic-seminary aspect is not as big a restriction or distraction as might be imagined. It even has some unforeseen advantages. Because of it (and perhaps also because of the early-Fifties era), the …
Choral moans and fragments of Hieronymus Bosch paintings, behind the credits, serve as a springboard into a violent electrical storm, a melting man, and -- in short -- a very fast start for this madly paced horror movie about a Devil's missionary who has set up operations in a Western …
The opening looks as tough an hour's worth of plot, passion, and pathos has been compressed into a slide show of rapid-fire images accompanied by a verbose, harried narrator (isn't it Lonny Chapman's voice?). This -- history whizzing past your eyes as the narrator rushes to keep pace -- goes …
Veteran writer-director Mel Frank delivers one scene that's on a par with the material he used to give Bob Hope and Danny Kaye: two stagecoach passengers conversing in a sort of pidgin polyglot so as not to be understood by a third party ("el schmucko"). But by then, you are …
The town sheriff's ne'er-do-well son, a jug-eared redhead, swipes the winning Mustang from a stock-car racetrack -- simply to appease the whim of an All-American blonde bitch in white hotpants and knee-high boots -- and takes off on a day-long joyride with a Keystone Kop posse in hot pursuit. Charles …
Fred Koenekamp's slick inky photography is the one element in the correct key for this Thirties-style sci-fi story about a humanitarian scientist "playing God" in the laboratory of his secluded country house. On the way to an appallingly messy ending, the movie shows not the slightest interest in its own …
The erotic events in the Emmanuelle sequel attain a sort of daily-diary humdrumness: one day, a lesbian in the pleasure cruiser's dormitory; next, a tattooed polo player in the men's locker room; next, naked Oriental masseuses in the public baths; next, three soldiers in the Jade Garden nightclub; and on …
Adapted from Friedrich Durrenmatt's philosophical detective novel, The Judge and His Hangman. The structural beauty of Durrenmatt's mousetrap holds its shape not nearly as well on the screen as on the page, and the tone has been drastically altered by the overstressed symbolism, the Fellini-esque oom-pah-pah musical score, some stray …
In Clint Eastwood's third outing as Dirty Harry Callahan, the biggest malcontent on the San Francisco police force, he is shackled with a rookie female partner at the same time that he is attempting to ferret out the People's Revolutionary Strike Force, a terrorist group that has no apparent ideology …
Ingmar Bergman's clinical account of a psychiatrist's nervous breakdown (the filmmaker's interest in psychiatry extends only as far as his affirmation of its inadequacy to spiritual crisis) is divided cleanly in halves. The first, the mundane half, contains some good stuff about the heroine's grandparents, particularly the fastidious set decoration …
The first scene, backed by a chorus of angel voices, has a fake spiritualist named Madame Blanche communing with the deceased loved ones of the filthy-rich Mrs. Rainbird. It's a lot of talk -- first one face, then the other, back and forth, interminably. The second scene has Blanche reiterating …