Teens: don't have sex.
This is the first John Cassavetes movie that could seriously be contemplated in terms of a possible TV series spinoff: the continuing adventures of a crusty but tender-hearted retired gun moll and a spunky but vulnerable Puerto Rican orphan in their relentless private war against the New York criminal syndicate …
A modest charmer from South Africa, written, produced, directed, "filmed" (photographed?), and edited by Jamie Uys. A Coca-Cola bottle, chucked out of a passing airplane, lands in the midst of some Kalahari Bushmen, causing unprecedented possessiveness and dissension. The tribal leader resolves to walk to the ends of the earth …
Originally released as The Ace, a portrait of "a warrior without a war," a Marine pilot who is something of a patriot, something of a practical joker, something of a family man, and something of a bully, and who has no satisfactory way to burn off his excess energies in …
The naked truth about Rev. Jim Jones and his Jonestown colony, or at least the truth scantily clothed in such pseudonyms as Rev. James Johnson, the not especially euphonious Johnsontown, and so on down the line. One could justifiably describe it as a surprisingly tame, though in no sense a …
The number of people that have played Xaviera Hollander on screen has not surpassed the number that have played, say, Tarzan; but at the rate of her first half-decade of screen life, another decade would be all that's needed. This outing, about the cutthroat struggle for film rights to her …
Jerry Lewis's first movie in a decade, not counting the aborted The Day the Clown Cried. This one itself hardly seems a finished and polished and publicly presentable piece of work. Plenty of the gags in it could be transplanted in old Jerry Lewis movies without positively contaminating the surrounding …
Robert Powell as a sort of Australian Mary Poppins, but with political, mystical, metaphysical tendencies too, besides just curing and cheering up a leukemic child. The corn potential of this role is almost fully fulfilled. Directed in frosty style by Simon Wincer. With David Hemmings, Carmen Duncan, Broderick Crawford.
If Anna Thomas is anxious to establish a reputation as a filmmaker separate from that achieved by her authorship of vegetarian cookbooks, it might be perceived as unwise to start off her first film with shots of vegetables. One is inclined to extend to her the charity normally reserved for …
Floyd Mutrux, in desperate search of the youth audience, plunges into an abyss of unscrupulousness and unoriginality, leeching mostly off American Graffiti (the one-long-night duration, the incessant goldie-oldies, the drive-in, the drag races, the high-school dance, the ominous shadow of Vietnam), with the actual gags lifted more often from Animal …
Collegiate comedy about a discombobulated film student who receives direction from a Svengali-ish visiting professor (Kirk Douglas) on how to avoid being "a bit player in your own life." To call it sophomoric might mistakenly indicate a satisfactory level of achievement. Better to call it pitifully unfunny, and leave nothing …
The Intermezzo musical triangle relocated in country-western country, and making a prized sex object out of Willie Nelson, that easy alliance between the redneck and the hippie, whose physical attributes might have been thought to make him a closer cousin to Gabby Hayes than to Leslie Howard. The flimsy narrative …
Steve McQueen as a modern, urban version of Josh Randall, the Old West bounty hunter he played on TV in the late Fifties. Some eccentric characterization modelled on real-life skip-tracer Ralph "Papa" Thorson, but the movie finally seems a little short on that, and long on action scenes that give …
These are the denizens of Max's Bar in Oakland, the crippled, the blind, the maimed, with nothing to hang on to but their dreams. And their story is a sort of Iceman Cometh warmed up and wearing sweatsocks. The moral of it seems to be that dreams are fine and …