Each of the three principals goes a bit deeper than skin: Bruce Dern earning some sympathy for the former P.O.W. who conforms to the popular notion among scriptwriters that all Vietnam veterans are psychopaths; Marthe Keller striking a blow for womanpower as the Black September terrorist who masterminds and single-handedly …
A secretive, monosyllabic Grand Prix racer (Al Pacino) is flung together by chance with a dizzy Italian girl (Marthe Keller) who incessantly badgers the self-important sportsman in the manner of Katharine Hepburn in a screwball comedy. He, living daily with the possibility of death in his profession, wears an arrogantly …
The Bad News Bears sequel isn't so much a follow-up as it is an Instant Replay -- the same ground is gone over in order to get the same laughs, and these kids come off as disturbingly slow learners. The grim prospect at the fadeout is yet a third installment, …
The re-staging of Operation Market Garden, the Allies' ill-conceived attempt to capture a string of Nazi-occupied Dutch bridges, takes three hours on screen, and the complex logistics of the attack seem sufficient in themselves to hold your interest for that long. But the chief reason for the film's largeness is …
The hit-and-run car, with no markings, no license plates, and no driver, belongs properly to the tradition of monster movies instead of car movies; and Elliot Silverstein, the director, dwells not on chases and crashes, but on the rapidly mushrooming sense of alarm and amazement (some of the exclamations recapture …
As to the plot, the best you can say is that, well, you can see, sort of, what it is getting at. Really a cleverly conceived policier, it follows the tracks of Inspector Lechat (French for "the cat") as he hacks through the thicket of subsidiary crimes that complicate and …
Where Joseph Wambaugh, the policemen's friend and mouthpiece, wants faithfully to represent his former partners on the force, Robert Aldrich wants to employ those same characters metaphorically to represent something bigger. Which is, the average slob. He uses the policemen's daily debasement in the L.A. nightworld to strip them of …
Steven Spielberg surpasses all of his sci-fi forerunners in the only way he knows how in material things. He has costlier, more spectacular special effects, including some really wonderful nighttime skies; he has bigger and brighter spaceships; he has louder sound effects and background music; and he has the largest …
Steven Spielberg surpasses all of his sci-fi forerunners in the only way he knows how in material things. He has costlier, more spectacular special effects, including some really wonderful nighttime skies; he has bigger and brighter spaceships; he has louder sound effects and background music; and he has the largest …
A disturbing juxtaposition of childhood and death. Carlos Saura's claustrophobic chamber piece adopts the point of view of its nine-year-old heroine (the heartbreakingly somber Ana Torrent, from Spirit of the Beehive), whose intimate acquaintance with death is highly colored by fantasy, ignorance, and innate cold-bloodedness. She, despite being thoroughly captivated …
Sam Peckinpah's WWII message movie, set in the Nazi trenches outside Stalingrad, is not exactly anti-war (under fire, the infantrymen learn to cultivate profound, soul-searching eye contact), but it is explicitly anti-officers. In one of their unending bunker debates, the aloof, aristocratic commandant asserts that all men of quality come …
Although the story comes from a certified science-fiction author, Roger Zelazny, and has been adapted by a couple of good hands, Alan Sharp and Lukas Heller, this post-WWIII adventure is a virtually unplotted sightseeing tour through stereotyped nuclear wastelands (i.e., the serviceable Southwest desert, covered over by Kool Aid skies). …
Forced comedy-mystery about a lady police detective investigating a series of murders in which the victims are stabbed in the back with identical awls and promptly respond to their wounds by dribbling identical blood down their chins. The mere idea of a female detective is not such a surefire delight …
Science-fiction satire about a computer that possesses an organic brain, Robert Vaughn's voice, a male chauvinist attitude, and a consuming desire for Julie Christie to bear him a flesh-and-blood heir. Donald Cammell, writer and co-director of Performance, handles this foolishness with little sense of fun, except perhaps in his creation …