The Hitchcock thrillers that Brian De Palma has plundered this time are, first, Rear Window, and second and foremost, Vertigo. (Wasn't it enough that he stole the latter plot for Obsession?) Even if you do not see through the ruse straightaway or do not solve the mystery by way of …
A tug-of-war over the body and soul of a charismatic women's emancipationist, ca. 1875, between a repressed lesbian and a Southern gentleman of the old school ("He's an enemy of our movement and our sex. You must fear him"). But the emancipationist has an interest in the gentleman too, as …
Mutiny thereon. You might presume that if someone were going to bother to make a third version of the famous and infamous events aboard H.M.S. Bounty, they must have thought of something to do with it that their predecessors hadn't thought of something akin to Brando's dandified interpretation of Fletcher …
The only, and ample, reason to see this is the dancing. And even that, as directed by Joel Silberg, is often badly framed and parcelled out in mere snatches rather than fully formed sequences. One such sequence, in which a dancer identified as Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers performs a pas-de-deux …
Adolfo "Shabba-doo" Quinones and Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, promoted to the status of break dancers emeriti, are content for the most part to rest on their laurels. Or as one of them expresses it at one point: "Look, we're not gonna waste any of our moves." They do dole out …
Defensible perhaps as a Runyonesque (as everyone seems to have agreed to call it) portrait of show people at the lowliest level, a fraternal salute from an established star (Woody Allen) to all his brethren who never struck a spark, an effusive valentine from "Never Too Big" to "Never Say …
The situation in Northern Ireland is pointed up none too undramatically: a Catholic youth, reluctantly drawn into terrorist activities, develops a yen for the Catholic widow of a Protestant policeman he himself had a hand in murdering. The very tentatively unfolding romance is your basic regimen of lending a hand …
True story, mid-19th-century, about an upper-class Argentine debutante who runs off with a priest. After the tough-talking historical prologue, the misty soft-focus photography might be seen as ironic, but this is an interpretation harder to maintain when things get around to the remarkably smooth passion-consummation in a jouncing horse-drawn coach. …
The title identifies the room number of the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, in which Wim Wenders entertained a gaggle of his fellow filmmakers one at a time, sat them down in front of a camera and with their backs to a soundless television (the enemy), and confronted them with the …
A cross between Village of the Damned and The Wicker Man: heathen youth in Nebraska (pretty corny, all right). The worst of the gore is sprung first thing, and thus the rest of it, though more discreet, becomes worse in anticipation. And there seems to be an eternity of anticipation. …
Alan Rudolph's self-designated "serious comedy," about seekers of love in Los Angeles, is indeed a comedy in the rudimentary sense that it has a nontragic ending, and is serious in the sense that it is unfunny. The deliberate stylization of the thing, though it may cut off comments about such …
An over-imaginative eleven-year-old (Henry Thomas), with a superhero named Jack Flack as his imaginary playmate, stumbles upon a real-life espionage plot and is unable to impress the fact on his no-nonsense father (Dabney Coleman, who, with less gray in his hair, also plays Jack Flack). Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin, who …