Clint Eastwood as the star and owner of a Wild West show who, even in the face of dwindling attendance and grumbling employees, remains unshaken in his rosy, Roy Rogers philosophy of life, and maintains a special soft spot for the younger generation of, as he terms them, "little pardners." …
The availability of Brazilian films in this country has shrivelled up to almost nothing since Cinema Nôvo first got looked into, ca. 1970. Directed by Carlos Diegues, one of the charter members of the movement, this old familiar tune about the contamination of Brazilian culture by American could seem fresh …
Comedy out of the better-slob-than-snob school. But then, it hasn't much to be snobbish about. Its main boasting point is in finally giving Rodney Dangerfield a film role large enough to move around in: a nouveau-riche vulgarian who invades the inner sanctum of an exclusive country club. Bill Murray has …
The apparent plan was to treat the formation of the Village People in the style of an old Hollywood musical, though there seems to be some uncertainty as to which old musical and what that style was. Nancy Walker, a directorial debutante, shows more care with roles she herself could …
Satisfactory neither as documentary, which was the least that could have been expected of director Robert Kaylor (Derby), nor as a melodrama of the midway. What potential there was to delineate the mystique and the ambience and the inner workings of carnival life is pretty thoroughly siphoned off, soaked up, …
Middle-aged college professor cheats on wife with nubile young co-ed, and wife follows suit with virile young handyman, thus setting the stage for a ménage-à-quatre in a cozy Vermont cabin. Enter the married couple's daughter; enter the co-ed's father; enter the daughter's fiancé -- all of whom, showing as much …
Surely the title ought to have been seen to be applicable only during production, and immediately upon release should have been altered to Cheech and Chong's New Movie, thus creating the world's first evolutionary movie title, turning into Cheech and Chong's Latest Movie on the second-run circuit, then into their …
The opening shot of a train entering a tunnel -- the sexual symbol that passeth no one's understanding -- does much to lower whatever expectations you can muster up for a late-period Fellini film. The subsequent spectacle of Marcello Mastroianni milling around at a radical feminist convention with the look …
Costa-Gavras gives up politics for romance, a sort of guns-for-butter deal, and he appears to have gone into delirium from the sense of release. His script, from a Romain Gary novel, has a luxuriant, exhilarating quality, something like walking across mattresses, and the storyline, about two lost souls who literally …
The main contribution traceable directly from Loretta Lynn to the movie on her life -- besides, of course, her having lived it and then recounted it in that bastard literary form, the as-told-to autobiography -- is simply her felt presence looking over the collective shoulder of the moviemakers. This queenly …
Well and deservingly known as cinematographer for such people as Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, News from Home) and Yvonne Rainer (Lives of Performers, Film about a Woman Who...), Babette Mangolte takes over the director's seat for this study of a young female painter trying to find her bearings in the …
Can love bloom and grow between two rivals in what is ballyhooed as the Super Bowl of piano contests? and will his Beethoven beat out her Mozart (or will she opt at the last minute for Prokofiev?)? and will the outcome hurt their chances for happiness? and, most suspensefully of …
William Friedkin's footnote to his Boys in the Band, a cursory look at the heavy-leather and S/M corner of the homosexual world. This dark and unexplored nook is chosen apparently only for its voyeuristic appeal, and is observed from the point of view of a middle-class gaper. The better title …
Bette Midler as a modernized Mae West who takes full advantage of what more she can get away with saying, gesturing, and gyrating, and doesn't have to trust to insinuation. She exercises a taste in songs not often carried over into her jokes, but she appears to enjoy herself enough …