A film noir by John Cassavetes, who, as he has little feel for atmosphere and tension and the like, is not particularly cut out for the job. But as he has much feel (and outright embraces and chummy punches on the upper arm and so forth) for actors, he enables …
The third in a sort of trilogy of road movies by Wim Wenders goes a good deal further than its forerunners (Alice in the Cities, Wrong Moves), and not just in actual length. (On that point, however, it should be said that Wenders makes a positive value of length, stretching …
An exhibitionistic display of phallic symbols (a toy tank and cannon, a sausage, an electric carving knife, etc.) as well as of Gerard Depardieu's real thing. Authentically sexy if one can stomach the sterile, whitish lighting that makes the acres of exposed flesh look like laboratory specimens, and, more importantly, …
Led Zeppelin's Madison Square Garden concert (the distinct bulge in lead singer Robert Plant's pants, on stage, keeps this from being a family show) is reproduced with a high-quality image and high-quality sound. The problem of how to shoot so stationary an event is solved with kaleidoscopic and psychedelic visual …
At thirty-two, the lifelong lifeguard faces the question, indelicately phrased by his father, "When will you ever grow up?" The crisis comes in concert with his embarrassing fifteen-year high-school reunion and a prosperous old pal's tantalizing offer of a job in a Porsche dealership. The movie arrives, by and by, …
A predominantly female audience, apparently welded to their divans, drowse their way through a piano recital, but it’s Count Egano (Massimo Girotti), seated center-frame and the first to exit, who draws our attention. He’s followed by Teresa (Jennifer O’Neill), who interrupts her hostess to bid an early farewell, but not …
In the prosecution of a Catholic-school music teacher for the rape of an alluring lipstick model, the defense attorney manages to touch on a prococative question: Can't a woman, groomed for sex appeal, be held culpable for her own rape? That's a question for another movie, however. In this one, …
A simple after-the-holocaust premise: a 23rd-century domed city where the passive citizens are uniformed in colors of either raspberry or lime sherbet, and where nobody is permitted to live past thirty. And a simple chase plotline: two lovers, fleeing their inevitable fate, outrun the official executioners (called, coyly, "Sandmen"), outbattle …
Claude Sautet's portraits of the French bourgeoisie are sometimes accused of being rather more celebratory than critical of "the good life," but the truth is he's not interested in propagandizing one way or the other. The compassion in his point of view is a measure of his refusal to divorce, …
An interplanetary traveller with pale skin and orange hair touches down in spooky New Mexico, "The Land of Enchantment," and on the strength of several electronics patents he skyrockets to the very heights of high finance ("I want you to begin negotiations with Eastman-Kodak immediately"). The elliptical narrative style tends …
William Goldman's concept of a mystery story is one in which the audience hasn't the foggiest notion what's going on. The eventual elucidation doesn't really put everything in place, but simply throws a blanket of approval over the many senseless outbursts of murder and mayhem. Along the way, though, the …
One might have hoped that if anybody could discipline Liza Minnelli, it would be her father. Unhappily, he only indulges her, giving her preposterous dream scenes and handsome escorts and gowns cut deep to the bust of her pudgy, rubber-doll figure -- the very things he gave to Barbra Streisand …
Another of Satyajit Ray's contemporary problem pictures, this one focussed on the glutted job market. There is an Ozu-esque sadness in Ray's vision of white-collar urban life and of the adulteration of old values in the modern world. What makes the vision convincing -- and more, disarming -- is the …
Thomas McGuane's Westerners get plenty of weird, dislocated effects into their speech. They use stiff, formal, four-dollar words ("eligible," "effective," "mechanically minded," "the brain pan"), and they use images that represent a rather fanciful notion, on the author's part, of the picturesqueness of American language ("as slick as snot on …
Joseph Losey's consciously Kafka-esque thriller about a well-heeled art dealer in Nazi-occupied Paris undertaking a manhunt for his Jewish alter ego. Alain Delon, in nondescript overcoat, hat, and gloves, cuts a figure which closely resembles his persona in Jean-Pierre Melville gangster movies, and which thus puts you in mind of …