Science fiction of the Imaginary Invention type: a piece of headgear, in this instance, able to record and transmit subjective experience, memory, emotion, and it's not clear what all. Indeed, the movie is quite carelessly thought out in terms of what the device can record and particularly from what point …
What Jim McBride has done with the Jean-Luc Godard original, whether by conscious choice or by native temperament, is to translate it back into the film noir idiom from which Godard first snatched it. It is a pretty straight Americanization, in other words, of what was a Frenchification of something …
Two sisters, one poor, one rich, fight for custody of their dead sister's son. The lush and rather decorative visual style, with a lot of foreground activity from flowers, leaves, smoke, garden trellises, stone balusters, and so forth, and a lot of shallow focus to mash either foreground or background …
Is not life in women's prison much like life all over these United States? Corruption in high places, capitalistic back-stabbing and throat-cutting, racial strife, mob riots, drugs, pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, lesbian rape, heterosexual rape, sadism, murder and mayhem, an obscenity every couple of words (or a couple of obscenities …
Haunted-car thriller, from a novel by Stephen King. It's love at first sight when a klutzy high-school kid lays eyes on a 1958 Plymouth Fury, with a history of violent deaths behind it. The feeling is reciprocated: the hero's enemies become the car's enemies, and his friends become its rivals. …
Haunted-car thriller, from a novel by Stephen King. It's love at first sight when a klutzy high-school kid lays eyes on a 1958 Plymouth Fury, with a history of violent deaths behind it. The feeling is reciprocated: the hero's enemies become the car's enemies, and his friends become its rivals. …
YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT. They don't make childhood lookback pics like this any more. It's just possible that they never did.
Based on the humorous writings of author Jean Shepherd, this beloved holiday movie follows the wintry exploits of youngster Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), who spends most of his time dodging a bully (Zack Ward) and dreaming of his ideal Christmas gift, a "Red Ryder air rifle."
Francois Truffaut's film noir exercise, like such earlier exercises of his as The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid, stresses more the content than the style. Yes, this one is in black-and-white, but, in spite of the amount of rain that comes down, is not especially atmospheric. Meanwhile, the plot …
Self-consciously feminist but rather mild and inoffensive biographical film about novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings -- inoffensive except maybe to fellow writers, who will have their own way of looking at her bouts of speed-typing when she is "inspired." The emphasis is on the group of people in the Florida backwater …
The well-drawn contrast between a child's world and an adult's world makes the early, time-biding stages more tolerable than in some horror movies. The problem, once the time-biding is over, is that the whole idea of a movie about a rabid dog seems irredeemably dull, even if that dog were …
A somewhat risky title to set in front of someone who might have gotten a bit sick of the whole Pink Panther series, and who had assumed that the death of Peter Sellers would have brought about a deliverance. Ted Wass, who seems to be trying out for only the …
Andrzej Wajda's French-Polish co-production is quite a triumph of mise-en-scène. There is quite a lot to triumph over, too. The history lesson chewed over here has that dutiful and drudgy quality of a freshman fixture on the college curriculum, with none of the imaginative liberties taken in, say, La Nuit …
Curiously cold occult thriller -- and not because of its wintry setting, which is an actual asset. "Curiously," because there is adequate attention paid to the peculiar burdens of clairvoyance, beginning with the pain of its acquisition and the accompanying loss of a fiancee and gain of a limp, chronic …