Dickens's Oliver Twist musicalized for the stage by Lionel Bart and accorded a stuffy screen treatment by Ronald Neame. It has delicate, pretty little boys (Jack Wild, Mark Lester) and hard-breathing, overbearing men (Ron Moody, Oliver Reed) and several enervated, limp-limbed, puppetish dance numbers. Shani Wallis contributes a nice smile, …
Franklin Schaffner directs, Rod Serling scripts, Leon Shamroy photographs, and Chuck Heston stars in the architect of the Apes franchise. The shocking reveal that ends the picture still packs a punch over 50 years after its release.
Jacques Tati's strained, on-tiptoes comedy follows the star-director through the funhouse of modern Paris, a maze of corridors, compartments, stairways, entrances and exits. It is often quite beautiful for the sleek surfaces and the straight-lined geography, as well as for the intricate staging in those surroundings, but it sacrifices laughs …
Critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, pulling together for a change, legislated this thin-soup, pastel-pastoral thriller into the sleeper of 1968. Its proudest achievement is its naughtiness in joking up the subject of matricide. The dialogue, by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (scriptwriter for TV's Batman), shows an accurate ear for contemporary …
Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (the latter manages to steal every mutual scene from the former, who has devoted his entire career to the art of stealing scenes) portray a pair of seedy Jewish theatrical entrepreneurs whose scheme for financial gain depends upon the guaranteed flop of their next show. …
Frank Simon's fascinating documentary about a hotly promoted drag-queen beauty contest staged in New York City's Town Hall and juried by such aficionados as Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Terry Southern. The movie's minor defects are attributable to the modest journalistic scope of the project: a certain technical raggedness and …
Zeffirelli's superproduction of the Shakespeare lovers' tragedy adheres to the favorite method of high-school drama classes for achieving pizzazz or an approximation thereof — lots of running around and lots of yelling. It's true that Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting are almost the right age for the early-teen lovers, and …
Roman Polanski's Hollywood debut, and his deepest dive into commercialism. These working conditions serve mainly to point up his shortcomings as a storyteller. He slides right over some of the cues for spine-tingles, as if he simply missed them in his reading of the trashy Ira Levin novel. And his …
Russ Meyer fiddles around in the forested wilds of Canada, or thereabouts, choreographing every sort of sexual stunt he can imagine (the only constant is mammoth mammaries), and throwing in, for good measure, a blissfully tasteless, hopefully timely racial angle. Unrelievedly rambunctious and, in the long run, tiresome. With Erica …
Jean-Luc Godard's Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, as charted over lethal weekend roads. The virtuoso tracking shot along a mile-long traffic back-up has been justifiably singled out for comment, but this film is actually much more of a piece than usual for Godard. Also more accessible, even forceful, than …
The Beatles cartoon. It wants to be, but it is not, the Sixties equivalent of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Clever enough and colorful enough to be diverting for half an hour or so, though it goes on a lot longer than that. Directed by George Dunning.