Robert Altman continues to course over salient features of the American Scene with amazing speed and mobility. His leaps-and-bounds progress is made to look effortless, smooth, liquidy because of his habit of skimming, primarily. Here, he and his allies visit Music City, U.S.A., but they arrive there with their ideas …
Single-minded and simple-minded storyline: a hit man's relentless vendetta against the mob bosses (one down, three to go, and so on). Duccio Tessari, the director, endows the various roughing-ups and bumping-offs with some truly imaginative sadism, and his razzle-dazzle editing gives the violence an extra kick. Alain Delon, acting with …
Clive Donner's return to feature films, after too long an absence, demonstrates mainly that decent directing jobs must be hard to come by. This gag on the Dracula genre -- a genre desperately in need of new blood -- doesn't know where to go with any of its ideas, so …
The Ken Kesey novel, which you cannot have avoided without some degree of stubbornness, uses a mental-ward setting to allegorize a 1960s anti-Establishment orthodoxy -- the guardians need watching more than the guarded. Really, the hero figure, Jack Nicholson's McMurphy, is too much a self-interested manipulator to pass inspection as …
To begin at the end: the renowned seven-minute single-take represents a merge, of sorts, of the basic camera movements of two Michael Snow experiments, Wavelength and La Region Centrale, plus a bit of extra hocus-pocus at the precise point of the merge. But whereas Snow's camera movements each had the …
The abrupt, give-up ending almost makes nonsense, or at least futility, of everything that has preceded it: an unpretentious chase thriller that begins in low gear when a quartet of vacationers spy accidentally on a devil-worship ceremony and have their vacation spoiled forever after. It's a good advertisement for the …
As a first principle of comedy, Blake Edwards suggests there is no surer guarantee of laughter than the audience's confident expectation to laugh. This predisposition is primed, in this case, by Edwards's two earlier Inspector Clouseau farces and by his maintaining a schedule of gags as incessant, as punctual, and …
Have moviegoers become so inert that they can no longer provide their our own snarky commentary track for a shitty movie?
The vision of the future in William Harrison's screenplay is afflicted with severe myopia and checkered with blind spots. (Its origin is Harrison's very short story in Esquire, and he'd be damned if he'd spend much more thought on it.) The short-sightedness may account for Norman Jewison's directing the thing …
What do you get when John Wayne dusts off his Oscar®-winning role as Rooster Cogburn only to play Charlie Alnut opposite Katharine Hepburn's 70-year-old virgin? True shit.
Richard Lester, following The Three and The Four Musketeers, perseveres in his creation of two-left-footed swashbucklers. In this mock Prisoner of Zenda, Oliver Reed's and Alan Bates's waxed-mustache Prussian villians are played in the sly comic style of cocked eyebrows, while Malcolm McDowell's British non-hero, a sort of boys'-school mischief-maker …
The improbable cloak-and-dagger activities surrounding Kosygin's good-will tour of Canada are apt, on the off-chance that something might click, to permit practically anything into the mess: an intrepid Royal Canadian Mountie, a shabby Graham Greene-ish secret agent, a dapper Detroit torpedo out of The Untouchables, a stereotyped Karl Marx Brothers …
The glimpses, late in coming, inside the Continental Baths have a certain value as documentary data. But the storyline -- the enlightening homosexual experience of an uptight "straight" pianist -- unfolds with a bothersome educational tone and an awkward, amateurish manner. Possibly this movie knows a thing or two about …
Manic-depressive comedy-drama, in the extroverted Italian style, boorish and mawkish by turn, about a blind army veteran who is assigned a travelling escort with the face and disposition of a choirboy, and then browbeats, embarrasses, and insults this polite young man for the entire length of the movie. Refreshingly unsympathetic …