Comedy-thriller in the Sleuth mold, similar to the aforesaid down to having a writer of thrillers as its devious protagonist, and to having its origins undisguisably on the stage. It would be difficult to foresee every tricksy plot twist, and yet it would be difficult to be truly surprised by …
The title might raise hopes that the director of the underrated Culpepper Cattle Company had returned to the Western genre. Any such hopes would quickly be dashed, although a certain amount of Western flavor creeps in through the Frontier Town tourist trap, the late show on the motel TV, and …
Charles Bronson continues to run in bad luck. Now resettled in Los Angeles (perhaps he would have done better to select Minot, North Dakota), he has his pocket picked, his home invaded, his housekeeper gang-raped and murdered, and his daughter, still in shock from her earlier mugger encounter, abducted, raped, …
Barry Levinson's very "personal," yet very derivative, portrait of young manhood in Baltimore, 1959. The production is unstinting in its collection of period cars and haircuts and toggle-button jackets and what-have-you (and are those pink-flamingo lawn decorations a sly tribute to that other cinematic bard of Baltimore and fellow pop-culture …
Flashy but extremely untidy comedy-thriller. A state of confusion is, perhaps, to be expected in a movie that juggles opera and white slavery, that juxtaposes the most wildly disparate settings, that buries its people beneath junkpiles of unrevealing quirks and knickknacks. And it is only fair to acknowledge the deliberateness …
Late-17th-century murder mystery, to which no solution is set forth. For us to be kept in the dark as to who did the evil deed seems admissable if our point of identification is meant to be the man who is framed for it. And insofar as this character -- the …
Cheerfully sick comedy (not as sick as John Waters, but the same disease) on such subjects as the American Dream, "fabulous Fifties furniture," and kinky sex in Los Angeles. The self-conscious aspiration to create an Instant Cult Classic reduces the need for technical competence, and indeed the erosion of all …
Nothing more ought to be required to dismiss Steven Spielberg's pretense of sweetness and innocence, or to dismiss the movie in toto from respectful consideration, than a glance at the death-scene of the monogrammatic spaceman. This sickroom spectacle is milked for all it is worth, with the normally cigar-colored creature …
Nothing more ought to be required to dismiss Steven Spielberg's pretense of sweetness and innocence, or to dismiss the movie in toto from respectful consideration, than a glance at the death-scene of the monogrammatic spaceman. This sickroom spectacle is milked for all it is worth, with the normally cigar-colored creature …
Nothing more ought to be required to dismiss Steven Spielberg's pretense of sweetness and innocence, or to dismiss the movie in toto from respectful consideration, than a glance at the death-scene of the monogrammatic spaceman. This sickroom spectacle is milked for all it is worth, with the normally cigar-colored creature …
A you-too-can-make-a-movie movie. All you need is a camera, a willing group of college kids, a makeup kit, and a familiarity with a few horror movies that had no more to work with. This one, which has a better stocked makeup kit than most, and which describes itself as the …
Despite the publicity drummed up by Cameron Crowe, Undercover Teenager,
One of the minor side effects of the Soviet Union's continued bad behavior in public is that, despite the moral chaos introduced into spy fiction by John le Carré and others, it is still possible to paint Cold War tensions in terms of straightforward melodrama. It perhaps requires someone as …
A purgative for Vietnam veterans' feelings of rejection. Jack Starrett is back in the same role — sadistic law officer — in which he used to aggravate whole gangs of Hell's Angels into tearing apart peaceful small towns; here he gets the same results by aggravating only a single ex-Green …
Herzog's second Peruvian expedition provides as severe a test as ever devised of the spectator's ability to dissociate the on-screen movie from what he knows of the off-screen one. Some of the director's fabled adventurousness, endurance, and what-have-you is in fact apparent on screen. The colonial city of Iquitos, the …