Buñuel's followup to Discreet Charm is in roughly the same easy stride and the same moderate temperature: subdued color work by Edmond Richard, in warm browns, yellows, blue-grays; comfortable surroundings, tastefully decorated; a script by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carriere that maintains a lulling pitter-patter of surrealist jokes. The movie is …
The Faust-Mephistopheles legend is fitted into the business of star-making in the music industry, and this business is fitted in turn into a Phantom of the Opera plot format. The fittings are not awfully snug, nor awfully comfortable. The project perhaps needed more follow-through in the writing and a more …
The first feature by Saul Bass, after an exceptionally noticeable career as a creator of movie credits sequences (Anatomy of a Murder, A Walk on the Wild Side, etc.), is about an ants' insurrection in the Southwest desert. Comfortably within the conventions of low-budget science fiction, Bass's big effects are …
An Ingmar Bergman soap opera transferred from Swedish weekly television to American art theaters. It has soap opera's virtue of airing private and domestic questions and beckoning the audience into the argument. Very spare; in fact, nothing much to look at except for the exchanged intimacies, the discomforting revelations, and …
Lina Wertmuller's cruel, cackling social satire is at its broadest, and (given the competition) funniest, in the stomach-turning seduction scene, with the fish-eye shot that transforms an already hefty woman into a marauding hippo and an already wimpy man into a shrivelled, hunched-up chimpanzee. Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato.
I dunno. From the trailer, I'd say it lacks the cheerful, gory humor of Silent Night, Deadly Night The '80s were just happier than the '70s, I guess.
Alain Resnais's return to filmmaking after a six-year absence counts as a disappointment only in relation to the director's previous feats and in view of the anxious wait for it. Somehow, it is less cunning than his best work. Jorge Semprun's screenplay about the decline and fall of Stavisky's ill-gotten, …
Ozploitation biker classic starring Ken Shorter as Stone, an undercover cop who infiltrates an outlaw motorcycle gang to investigate a series of grisly killings. He is thrown into the world of the Gravediggers, alienated Nam Vets who live in a fortress by the sea and have their own law, their …
A rubber-tipped assault launched by Yves Robert on the vacant-eyed bumblers who scheme against one another within the French secret service. A good number of lukewarm laughs are had at the expense of clumsy espionage techniques. Fewer but warmer ones are had at the expense of clumsy seduction techniques. Mireille …
Tobe Hooper directs and Leatherface stars in the massacre that started it all.
An arty, ominous start: a black screen interrupted by yellow flashes, barely distinguishable, of fingers, of teeth, of flesh, in advanced stages of decomposition. But after the deceptive prologue, Tobe Hooper's made-in-Texas curio, a cult item on the midnight movie circuit, falls quickly into the bag — and to the …
Tobe Hooper directs and Leatherface stars in the massacre that started it all.
A truckload of "highlights," over the decades, from the MGM musicals. In the heap, there are plentiful pleasures to be found. Notably: Fred Astaire dancing with a hat rack in Royal Wedding, Donald O'Connor running up the walls in Singin' in the Rain, Clark Gable doing a rowdy song-and-dance in …
In Richard Lester's semi-slapstick rendition of Dumas's durable tale, the musketeers carry out their appointed exploits apparently only because the book says they shall and not because they are able. It seems a bright idea to show swashbuckling as a loony, heedless, head-over-heels activity; but the swashbuckling genre has always …
Writer-director Michael Cimino's debut film runs the common course of action pictures these days: no plot until the last half, no seriousness until the last reel. It sits a little more comfortably than it probably should, because of the attractiveness of the cast -- Clint Eastwood, a terribly underrated straight …