The race to the North Pole via balloon in the 1890s seems to have had some of the same intensity for Sweden and Norway that the race to the moon had, somewhat later and by way of somewhat swifter vehicles, for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. To make a Swedish …
The beginning is such a mess -- what with the two separate flashbacks, the ill-written narration ("Hong Kong is like a slap in the face that makes you feel good"), the superfluous sightseeing tour, the credits that come in two distant installments, and the slow-motion, silhouetted kung-fu fight that looks …
Things are pretty exciting for a while for young Frances Farmer of Seattle. There is the atheistic high-school valedictory, the theatrical tour to Communist Russia, the Hollywood contract, the triumphant and defiant homecoming for the premiere of Come and Get It, the involvement with Harold Clurman's Group Theatre and the …
The project that Richard Attenborough tried to bring to fruition for twenty years turns out to have gotten done in the style of twenty years earlier, the style of a David Lean roadshow: there are no reserved seats, actually, and no musical overture or souvenir program, but there's an intermission, …
Lowbrow French sex comedy (the jokes derive from such things as a slipped disc, a toupee, crossed eyes, and a chicken bone caught in the throat), which not even subtitles can elevate in class. The only apparent reason for American importation is to introduce Clio Goldsmith, who has a pair …
Many parents of teenagers might gladly be willing to trade places, or at least trade teenagers, with the parents herein. The comic euphemism for the real, recognizable fact of life -- quite a nice change from the comic vulgarism so prevalent on the screen -- is the essence of the …
No, the boogeyman is not back again, but in his place is a small army of suit-and-tie types who look like door-to-door Jehovah's Witnesses but have the strength of The Incredible Hulk and make use of it to mete out the most gruesome deaths imaginable. For much of the way, …
No, the boogeyman is not back again, but in his place is a small army of suit-and-tie types who look like door-to-door Jehovah's Witnesses but have the strength of The Incredible Hulk and make use of it to mete out the most gruesome deaths imaginable. For much of the way, …
Wim Wenders's trickle-paced thriller is no doubt intended as a paean to Dashiell Hammett, though its orientation is much more toward the movies adapted from, or in the genre of, his work, than toward the work itself. The Forties-ish studio sets, the Venetian blinds, the shadows, and the gallery of …
Pairing up Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner may make a kind of sense to a dating-service computer, but mere humans are apt to find it a strain on the eardrums, if not on credulity. Plugging this pair into a Hitchcockian thriller formula provides the credulity-strain. Richard Widmark, Robert Prosky, Kathleen …
A shrewish Bordeaux housewife pitches out the window while hanging drapes. Either the henpecked husband, who was near enough at the time, pushed her or he didn't. Not a lot there for detection. So let's make the detective a middle-aged widower too, for a bit of hunter/hunted personality transference, and …
Community opposition to an urban renewal project in Sydney receives a setback when its spearhead, the editor of a radical newsrag, disappears without trace. Her closest associate tries to fill her shoes and at the same time to pick up her trail. The socio-political concerns never derail the movie from …
The sure sense of emphasis, never heavy, never lingering too long, is just what's wanted with the picaresque plotline, charting the odyssey to Nashville of a country singer, his teenage nephew, and a couple of tag-alongs. Nothing in this fluid and flexible movie is overweighted: not the Depression period and …
Well-directed (John Hough's standard array of wide-angle shots and shock cuts, and the worst of the violence occurs discreetly off-screen) but not so well-plotted horror movie, from a Ray Russell novel. Two-thirds of the tale is allowed to roll by before a grisly series of sex crimes is begun to …