Louis De Funes's brand of comedy, a specialized taste if ever there was, seems to be aimed at cribs and high chairs and baby buggies. With him, making funny faces is a nervous reaction to any three consecutive seconds of calm. His various squints and head-tilts perhaps put him in …
When not involved in drumming up admiration and chuckles for Clint Eastwood, with glib subplots and wisecracks, this Dirty Harry follow-up noses around a potential good idea about a secret "death squad" within the police force that institutes select executions free of judicial red tape. Ted Post's direction is professional, …
Another of Ken Russell's bumptious and self-serving "biographies" of canonized artists, this one more disjointed than most, as it riffles through the memories, fantasies, and dreams that enliven the Austrian composer's train trip back to Vienna after a collapse of health in New York City. Some of these visions -- …
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 …
Lindsay Anderson's ideas -- about the class system and bureaucracy and modern warfare and such things -- have been bouncing around British movies for years, but the form, here, is revitalizing: a picaresque fantasy, reminding you at different turns of Godard and Buñuel and Ford and Fellini, and having to …
This college-daze story of a Harvard law-school student out for the attention of his hoary professor is only of TV caliber. The lack of genuine confrontation plus the dull flannel sobriety of the direction and photography leave the viewer with hardly any choice but to join in appreciation of John …
Two con artists, a mustachioed charmer and a ten-year-old tomboy (acted by Ryan O'Neal and his daughter Tatum), peddle gold-embossed Good Books in the Depression-era Bible Belt. To enjoy this frayed yarn, it is not really necessary to believe in all the cunning, resourcefulness, and adorability credited to the precocious …
The Billy Bonny tale, told to death, dissolves into a murky dream in which large masses of anonymous gunmen drift around in vaguely defined Southwest territory, most of them sooner or later slaughtered in Peckinpah's most tiresome style, the bodies taking slow-motion Raggedy Ann spills and emitting thin streamers of …
Darryl Duke's threadbare production immerses itself in the habits and habitats of a special way of life, that of a C&W; singer, and is quite captivating in the opening scene in a red-lit roadside cafe. Disappointingly, the thing plows straightaway toward Face in the Crowd moralizing and kicks up the …
Sidney Lumet's search for sticky fingers in the NYPD is so blindered in its vision of police life (cops spend most of their working hours making collections, evidently), and Al Pacino's voyage into disillusionment, hippie grooming, and institutional boat-rocking is so swift and smooth and nudged along by the lugubrious …
The 200-years-in-the-future format admits some fond reprises of science-fiction nonsense (battling a giant blob of chocolate pudding with a broom) and the usual round of gags about computers, robots, utopias. Typically, in this sterile and stark white-black-and-flesh-colored movie, Woody Allen is so negligent about establishing comic ambience or momentum that …
Science fiction from Russia, stereotypically somber, talky, ponderous, unwieldy. It dispenses its rewards rather grudgingly: a startling visual trick here, a pastoral insert shot there, and an overall tone of seriousness such as you might expect at a "Space Emigration" seminar. Through most of its three hours, you are looking …
From the heights of his craggy-mountain body, Charlton Heston gazes disgustedly upon what the world has come to (pea-soup smog, people living on stairways, etc.) in this future-time detective story; and as in the first Apes movie he is left at the fadeout bellowing the terrible truth about human destiny. …
A minor masterpiece from Spain, which country has not yielded many, major or minor. On one level, it has to do with the psychological devastation that follows from an impressionable little girl's viewing of the original 1931 Frankenstein. On another level, it has to do with the wider-scale psychological devastation …
The Butch Cassidy gang, Redford and Newman and director George Roy Hill, regroups for a Mission: Impossible-like caper (you can never be sure that even the snafus aren't part of the fake-out scheme), set in the urban 1930s. Re-creation of the period is pretty thorough in terms of interior decoration …