François Truffaut updates us on the no longer worrisome Jean-Pierre Léaud character from The 400 Blows, who, posted now in a private eye's job, has developed into a sort of young Bob Hope, bumbling and flailing to no ill effect in a world of lambs, over which Truffaut hovers protectively, …
Broadway musical adaptation of Fellini's La Strada directed by Bob Fosse and starring Shirley MacLaine and Sammy Davis, Jr.
Woody Allen's kidding of crime movies of all types -- the prison break type, the stick-em-up type, the semi-documentary type, the newsreel type. The marital comedy, with Janet Margolin, is more consistent, especially in earning laughs. Altogether, it's what Johnny Carson might describe as "wild."
Alfred Hitchcock's demystification of espionage agents, who herein bear a strong likeness to corporate execs (well-tailored suits, lots of conferences, phone calls, plane trips, and business lunches or teas). Except when it tries to be romantic or suspenseful, it's a very sedate, straightforward treatment of a very sinister, serpentine plot. …
Boozy, one-eyed Marshal Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) is hired to babysit a headstrong teenager (Kim Darby) on her journey through enemy territory in search of the man who killed her father. While the Vietnam war raged, the Academy no doubt deemed it a gutsy move on their part to bestow …
Sam Peckinpah's earth-shaker about a holdup gang in the changing Southwest of the Nineteen Teens. The violence is self-consciously didactic, and the philosophy is self-consciously existential. It remains one of the imperative movies of its time, though its merits are highly variable from one moment to the next. William Holden …
Costa-Gavras's muckraker-style unmasking of the military regime in Greece, thinly disguised here as a fictitious country. Simple-minded as politics, and even as melodrama, the investigation of a political assassination, conducted by the admirably impartial and relentless Jean-Louis Trintignant, turns up a good deal of quick gratification for Leftist paranoia and …