Three senior citizens aim to augment their meager pensions with armed robbery, though not having much of either time or energy left to enjoy their spoils. A hearty dish of morbidity nearly ruined by smothering the characters in an attitude of pure sugar. The somber direction of Martin Brest, an …
His screen presence is pretty puny, his voice is uncultivated, and yet Chuck Norris, the martial-arts maestro, has an authentic machismo that could go to good use in a movie less slapdash and short on action than this one. A fair indication of its seriousness is that when murder and …
It's a sort of poetic injustice that this foppish, effete, fourth-generation specimen of the "caper picture" should crib its title from Edwin S. Porter's hardy pioneer, dated 1903. With Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, Lesley-Anne Down; written and directed by Michael Crichton.
There is a big difference between making this sort of WWII romance in 1943 and making it in 1979, much bigger than simply the difference (big in itself) between, say, Tyrone Power and Joan Fontaine on the one hand, and Harrison Ford and Lesley-Anne Down on the other. It is …
A teenage girl from Grand Rapids, Michigan, disappears in the course of a Christian youth junket to Knott's Berry Farm, and her father (George C. Scott, very good on the externals of a God-fearing Midwesterner) tracks her around the porno-prostitution circuit of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. Writer-director …
Somewhere it has been said that this is an insult to Jack Kerouac. But except for that, there is not a lot to recommend the movie; and even that would seem a stronger point if one could be surer that Jack Kerouac would have been pervious to insult. The not-a-lot …
Double agentry in Her Majesty's Secret Service, taken from a novel by Graham Greene, which means that conscience gets put on the rack. That British knack of remaining chipper and polite even while doing the most ruthless things is engagingly portrayed by the likes of Nicol Williamson, Richard Attenborough, Robert …
A cast of abundant charm and talent, whether or not one agrees to count Giancarlo Giannini, can do little with this dim romantic comedy in which a slap in the face acts as an infallible aphrodisiac, and goodness in bed is an excuse for anything. Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, and …
Arid and affected Camp treatment of a Maltese Falcon-like treasure hunt, headed by a couple of very bad actors in the roles of twin magicians, willingly conforming to one of the foremost homosexual stereotypes. They might be more bearable if their lines were anywhere near as amusing as their self-pleased …
Alan Arkin is a finely tuned comic reactor, in a style that might be described as freeze-dried hysteria, but he is severely overtaxed in a ridiculous spy spoof that subjects him -- a Manhattan dentist, home and family in New Jersey -- to a harebrained CIA agent, an excess of …
Teenage runaway to doddering old vaudevillian who has just suggested she go up to his bedroom and pick out something to wear: "How do I know you're not some kind of pervert?" Doddering old vaudevillian to teenage runaway who has just emerged from the trunk of his Pierce Arrow stark …
A variation on the theme of The Champ, much more mundane but not much less maudlin, about a women's-lib widower raising a child on his own when the mother goes off to Find Herself and the custody fight that ensues when she returns eighteen months later as a Whole Human …
A large number of largely unknown actors and musicians (it's fairly easy and interesting to distinguish which are which) are plunked down in front of a camera to talk to it about their pursuit of the Hollywood success dream, with a lot of abrupt cutting in mid-thought, from one person …