Director Michael Winner must be the closest thing in the 1970s to a 1930s-style, Michael Curtiz-style mass-producer of movies. Each of his quickly-turned-out action movies, starring either Charles Bronson or Burt Lancaster, gains weight from its membership in a fast-growing, muscle-bound body of work.This one, a Bronson-as-dirty-cop vehicle, pauses for …
Pretty entertaining black film, a voodoo vengeance tale about a Caribbean bargirl who, with supernatural aid from a white-haired swamp woman and a rag-tag band of zombie cutthroats, delivers hideous punishments, one at a time, to the thugs who beat her boyfriend to death in the nightclub parking lot. Paul …
This has to do with the assassination of critics, but the implied threat therein (or the implied flattery) is no excuse for the favorable reviews it has been accorded. The yarn, or yawn, about an oversensitive Shakespearean actor who is somehow world-famous although he has never gotten a good notice, …
Extramarital flinging. The locales switch between the London business world and the Malaga vacationland, while the human behavior switches between the unlikely and the unimaginable. It's all in the modest cause of soliciting laughs, and there are several gotten. The slightly bitter flavor, overall, is an effect of the color …
A cowherd and a university student want to kick the crummy dust of Senegal off their shoes and head to Paris. Djibril Diop Mambéty directs what many historians consider Africa's fist work of avant-garde cinema.
An army deserter in Second World War England hides out as a woman, in padded bra, on the farm of a lone POW's wife. It is not, as a brief synopsis may suggest, a female-impersonation comedy. (The alternate title, Soldier in Skirts, gives no clearer an idea). Adapted from a …
A hymn -- no, nothing so exalted -- a bellow, rather, in praise of youthful libido and its acrobatic, button-bursting, zipper-popping expression. After ten minutes of watching these blond beauties cavort at their Pepsi-generation pace, you might decide that they could be better occupied sitting quietly and reading Stendhal. And …
A People Magazine cover shoot masquerading as a movie. The film has everything going for it — interesting story, precise period detail, a big budget, and even bigger stars — but it can’t overcome a director (Sydney Pollack) who has no feel for the time and place. The leads move …
Moonshine country, where they sing "Bringing in the Sheaves" while toiling in the kitchen, and they play "Rock of Ages" while grieving at a funeral, and they make no fine distinctions between commies, Yankees, the NAACP, and them damn hippie freaks. Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty; directed by Joseph Sargent.
Ambitious thriller, with a small cult following. And deservedly so (deservedly small, that is). A devout Christian copper from the Scottish mainland visits a pagan island to investigate a girl's disappearance and finds disturbing (to him) goings-on there. Disturbing is too strong a word for what most viewers will find. …