Strange artifact unearthed thirty years later and co-promoted by Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola: a Russian celebration of the birth of her Communist sister, Castro's Cuba. Director Mikhail Kalatozov, best known for The Cranes Are Flying (1957), was thinking in terms of an Eisensteinian epic. Yevtushenko had a hand in …
Spike Lee's heated discussion of interracial romance is engaging enough on the level of a TV talk show (a girl-talk session of black women itemizing the shortcomings of black men could be transplanted bodily to The Oprah Winfrey Show), but not on the level of fiction. The most glaring problem …
At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting …
At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting …
Nice idea; nice execution. A self-styled but totally untested comic named Rupert Pupkin and a female groupie named Masha kidnap a Johnny Carson-ish late-night talk-show host, each for their own private ends, Pupkin to extract a fifteen-minute guest spot on The Jerry Langford Show and the groupie to fulfill her …
A further waste of Martin Scorsese's time and ours. This stuffy "prestige picture" on the life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama up through his flight from Tibet with the Red Chinese nipping at his heels (and through four different actors in the central role: an unnatural acceleration of the reincarnation …
What Martin Scorsese and company (scriptwriter Paul Schrader, quite prominently) appear to be up to at the most basic level is something that storytellers have been getting up to since the birth of the oral tradition: retelling a standard-repertory myth and altering it in the telling. (In this case using …
Yes, yes, it's better photographed than the average concert movie, and it's better recorded, and the music itself is on the whole better. And so what? It's still a concert movie, as opposed to a movie movie. (A couple of bonus numbers, "The Weight" and "Evangeline," are staged in a …
Yes, yes, it's better photographed than the average concert movie, and it's better recorded, and the music itself is on the whole better. And so what? It's still a concert movie, as opposed to a movie movie. (A couple of bonus numbers, "The Weight" and "Evangeline," are staged in a …
Aimless days in the company of inarticulate Brooklyn street toughs -- and then one of them gets shot. Nick (Didn't Martin Scorsese Start This Way?) Gomez trains a cinéma-verité camera on the faces of his principals, and takes little interest in their surroundings. The unknown actors are very confident and …
Martin Scorsese's long awaited sequel to Raging Bull.
Martin Scorsese's long-awaited sequel to Raging Bull.
Martin Scorsese's volatile movie about reaching adulthood in New York's "Little Italy" is made up of a fistful of tough, partial truths, which are repeated frequently and adamantly to create the impression of the whole truth. His main idea of how to keep the excitement at a fever-pitch is to …
Steven Okazaki’s matter-of-fact documentary, narrated in matter-of-fact monotone by Keanu Reeves, displays a polite reticence toward is own tantalizing premise: that noted and prolific Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune had much in common with the samurai he so frequently portrayed. To wit: a man of great discipline and power, a strong, …
An uncomfortable blend of Hollywood artifices, circa 1945, and bitter feminist truths, circa 1970. New York, New York is superficially a musical pastiche, incorporating bits and pieces of Big Band memorabilia, Love Me or Leave Me backstage soap opera, MGM's musical fantasies, and the Judy Garland cult. But its Big …