On Valentine's Day, someone always loses their heart. Twenty years ago, this small town lost more than that. When supervisors abandoned their posts to attend the town's annual holiday dance, a tragedy claimed the lives of five miners. The sole survivor, Harry Warden, was institutionalized, but returned for a vengeful …
Conversation is served up, along with apéritifs, soup and pattée;, roast quail entrée, and after-dinner drinks, as a spectator sport rather than as a participatory one. (As spectator sports go, neither conversation nor food consumption is to be ranked among the leaders.) This two-hour tête-à-tête between playwright Wallace Shawn and …
There's a preface to this movie, surely some sort of first in cinema history, composed of critical blurbs of the Thomas Berger novel. These tip you off that what you are about to see is, among other things, "a comic nightmare." The Bill Conti background music, all throughout, relentlessly stresses …
A contrast is started to be set up between the methods needed to combat New York street crime and methods needed to combat political terrorism, but this is never carried through to any illuminating degree. You could easily lose some of your respect for Wolfgar, the lone-wolf terrorist, when his …
The first screen teaming of Henry Fonda with Katharine Hepburn (as well as with, in a much smaller role, his daughter Jane) has stirred up some inordinately sentimental responses in some quarters. But it is questionable whether this couple — Fonda the stolid, board-stiff, slightly tormented Midwesterner, Hepburn the blissfully …
Neil Simon has reworked his Gingerbread Lady for Hollywood, in roughly the same way that he may have reworked the original play between Boston, say, and Broadway. Time, maybe, to give it up as a bad job. It generates more warmth than most Simons, and gets no small boost in …
One of the most squirm-producing TV interviews that Barbara Walters ever conducted was one in which Burt Reynolds poured out his heart about his desire to father a child. (It might have been interesting to see his female fan mail the week after broadcast.) Paternity would appear to be a …
Bold, original, innovative, extraordinary, unprecedented -- these are some of the adjectives we have been programmed to apply to this Depression-period musical. They all do apply, though only to a moderate degree. Make that, on second thought, a minimal degree. The main areas of applicability are (a) the gimmick of …
Problem picture concerning juvenile crime in Brazil, and centering on a ten-year-old contributor to the problem. The first half (after a prologue in which the director, Hector Babenco, stands in front of the camera, above a Sao Paulo slum, to spell out some facts and figures) takes place in a …
A free-thinking, long-striding, hair-flowing, healthy specimen of modern youth, and incidentally mistress of a middle-aged bureaucrat, decides to teach her unpampering lover a lesson by throwing herself at literally "the first man who comes along." The one she chooses (or accepts) is a Left Bank book worm who promptly pushes …
The tireless accumulation of production values threatens to stop cold the crazy lurches and jounces of the James Cain storyline. Every inch of the way, along a street called Memory Lane, one is aware of the care, the research, the expense, the no stone that went unturned. Everywhere one looks …
Not even outright loathers of D.H. Lawrence, much less his merely temperate or lukewarm admirers, will be apt to let their doubts about his work mushroom into doubts about his worthiness as the subject of a screen biography. But Christopher Miles, cinematic executor of The Virgin and the Gypsy and …
Factual story of a New York narcotics cop, a member of the overprivileged and undersupervised and consequently very corrupt Special Investigations Unit, who turns informant on his fellows. This story must be true to life, we are evidently meant to feel, because it is so nearly incomprehensible. The thinking seems …
The starting point is the factual case of an extortionist under the alias of D.B. Cooper who, with his loot, parachuted out of a commercial 727 and disappeared without trace in the wilds of Wyoming. From there, this comedy-adventure goes on to hypothesize a fictional chase with the smiling outlaw …