Three of them, directed at low intensity by Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. No one would accuse Scorsese, for his part, of holding anything back in the way of technical virtuosity: you get slow motion and fast cuts; you get low angles and high ones; you get a …
At around the 30-minute mark, Martin Scorsese and his young daughter appear backstage after a concert at Madison Square Garden for an audience with the boy band sensation. Marty speaks of how He and Francesca exchange music and then proceeds to offer the group His personal dispensation. With a forced …
A lunkhead of a movie about an apparent lunkhead of a man, former middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta. Despite a number of Expressionistic and lyrical outbursts, a dull-minded realism rules this movie. And even the lyricism is dull-minded: the use of slow-motion to heighten the impact of the pulverizing …
The Coen brothers, in their second movie, have taken great personal strides. No longer trying to walk the thin line between pastiche and parody that so held them back in Blood Simple, veering off instead into the woolliest wilds of their combined imaginations, they — director and co-writer Joel and …
A deep salaam to American jazzmen, with a bit of bootlicking thrown in, by French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier. The venerable Dexter Gordon, with a ponderous raspy speaking voice and a mellifluous supple saxophone (as well as an artful method of blowing out a birthday candle), plays a fictional composite of …
“Every musician in the world loves Link Wray,” observes Black Keys singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach. “I don’t know why the rest of the world hasn’t figured that out.” Add to that a film that shares its title with Wray’s influential instrumental, and you’ve got me primed to settle in for a …
Sophisticated but smug comedy of midlife crisis, a not-too-far-from-the-mainstream directorial debut for painter David Salle, about a small-scale wheeler-dealer from provincial Florida who, under the spell of self-help self-hypnosis, wants to leave his mark on the world, wants to do something of permanent value, wants specifically to make a film …
Back in the day, New York’s 75th Precinct was the deadliest cop house in the land. These particularly “true blue” boys in blue were more dangerous than the scum they were hired to serve and protect, so dirty they made Harry Callahan look clean. When asked if he was a …
Subaqueous computer animation; or, Finding Nemo's Sunken Treasure. Not only is the plasticky animation done by computer, but also the plotting, scripting, casting, everything. We have here, plugged in as variables in the formula, hip-hop fish (voice, and lips, of Will Smith), Mafia sharks (voice and facial mole of Robert …
Entrée to a Rolling Stones benefit concert at the intimate Beacon Theatre in New York City. If Martin Scorsese weren’t visible in several minutes of Raging Bull-ish black-and-white footage pre-event, you’d never imagine he was behind the cut-cut-cut hackwork. Old, old interspersed interviews of young, young Mick stimulate meditation and …
“Disturbing” would be one word, maybe the best word, for Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Fifties-period Dennis Lehane detective novel. Nothing, let’s be clear, in the list of ingredients — the Alcatrazzy asylum for the criminally insane, the locked-room mystery of a vanished female inmate, the dreamland visitations from the …
Martin Scorsese’s over-inflated cross-cultural Catholic history drama focuses on a pair of fledgling 17th-century Jesuit priests, Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garrpe (Adam Driver), who embark on a mission to Japan, hoping to rescue their absentee mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Apparently, at 74, and with almost 60 features, …
The moviemakers, director Martin Scorsese and scriptwriter Paul Schrader, have started with an old-style Warner Brothers working-man premise and tried to cram their learning into it: existentialist philosophy from Sartre and Camus, homages to Bresson's Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest, lyrical sketches of New York After Dark styled …
Its fictitious director, Marty DiBergi, only too happy to subscribe to the journalese du jour, labels this movie a "rockumentary." We might suggest in that same spirit, and in that same Time Inc. style, that its actual director, Rob Reiner, describe it as a "mockumentary": a put-on (or -down) of …
An ordinary documentary on an extraordinary subject, William A. Wellman. The ordinary part, ascribable to writer-director Todd Robinson, is the methodical bead-stringing of still photos, home movies, a kinescope of a 1954 episode of Ralph Edwards's This Is Your Life (James Cagney, John Wayne, among the surprise guests), videotaped reminiscences …