Sci-fi comedy for devotees seven and under. Two state-of-the-art androids (Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters under thick coats of lacquer) go AWOL from the repair shop, accompanied by a cruder, joke-telling robot called Catskill, and pursued by something called Crimebuster, a Panzer-like contraption equipped with blaring loudspeaker and blazing guns. …
Didactic love story, heavier on the "didactic" than on either the "love" or the "story." A real-life situation, of two lost souls colliding on the rebound from romantic break-ups, is discernible, but just barely, beneath all the psychodrama, the socio-sexual polemics, and the nonlinear narrative technique. Most of the action …
Comedy remake of a classic Fifties sci-fi thriller, with a King Kong motif tacked on toward the end, and a last-gasp intimation of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Any good taste exhibited in the choice of source material is evident nowhere else. Except for the passable special effects and the …
The idea of a gang of modern-day motorcyclists living by the chivalric code, jousting with one another from the seats of their Harleys, conjures up visions of some sort of Monty Python lunacy: a band of born-again Hell's Angels, coat of arms tattoed on their biceps, taking up the lance …
Somewhat on the principle of it taking a thief to catch a thief, a French businessman sends a klutz to find a klutz: his own daughter who has disappeared in Acapulco. (There proves to be little difficulty finding Mexicans who can converse fluently in French.) Pierre Richard, as the second …
A fascinating spectacle: Mexican director Arturo Ripstein coming to grips with witchcraft hokum and at the same time holding on to his customary starch sobriety, his long-term interest in the dynamics of power, and his predilection for claustrophobic enclosure. The climax features as cool and deliberate a mistreatment of the …
When its theme of the artist's responsibility to society doesn't get in the way of its Forties décors and narrative conventions, this Third Reich period piece is possibly an orgy of giggles and squeals, sighs and sniffs for the Fassbinder flock. The quite lavishly scaled-up production, closer to a Fox …
A too deeply submerged mystery movie by Michael Crichton. It's evident immediately that something funny is going on, but it takes exasperatingly long to find out just what. Mind-control through TV commercials turns out to be Crichton's primary bone to pick -- a well-picked bone, of course, long before he …
Genial counterculture comedy centering around a commune of Long Beachniks and an East German Communist who "infiltrates" the group. For Paul Morrissey, after his Sherlock Holmes venture in England and his Frankenstein/Dracula ventures on the Continent, this represents a throwback to his less polished Warhol Factory work -- in other …
Self-consciousness must surely be the keynote of the Mad Max sequel, which would appear to have been made in astonished response to the popular and critical approval heaped on the unassuming forerunner, and which, as a result, appears to be much more scrutinizing of itself, much more full of itself. …
For anyone who retains warm memories of the early, baroque efforts of Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda -- Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds, in particular -- and has had no access to any since, the dishevelled look of Man of Iron is apt to be a bit of a jolt. A …
No other German actor, not even Conrad Veidt, moves so expressively, comes the praise from the London Times critic, when the provincial actor from Hamburg begins to make his mark in Berlin. And indeed he does move expressively, even exaltedly, when throwing himself into a dance routine; but this is …
The supremely silly person played by Albert Brooks (who also wrote and directed, with admirable detachment and unconcern to show his character in flattering lights) is a Hollywood film editor trying for the umpteenth time to break up with his girlfriend, embarking on a today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-my-life, self-help program by buying vitamin …
Agnes Varda's pictorial essay on outdoor L.A. murals of all types, from the political and community-educational to the strictly commercial, plus a running commentary by her, plus interviews with the artists. Varda gets a very good image: bright and clear. Her Leftist sympathies, though, oblige her to take a rather …