Many consider this to be spielberg's finest film. The 1972 poster art from Gone With the Wind used in a film set during World War II leads one to believe otherwise.
Sure, characters from TV series have been able to make the leap to the big screen: the crew of the Enterprise, the men from U.N.C.L.E., the Muppets. But characters from TV commercials are another matter. And Ernest P. ("Know-What-I-Mean?") Worrell, the geeky handyman with the large mouth and a lot …
An undercover Western by Walter Hill, with Vietnam vets doing duty as old-time cattle rustlers, train robbers, renegade Apaches, or whatever, and a white-suited drug kingpin standing in for the self-anointed south-of-the-border generalissimo, or neo-Confederate diehard, or United Indian Nations messiah. For all the heavy technologizing of the Western, what …
Like the same director's Le Bal, Ettore Scola's genealogical saga spans most of the 20th Century. Where Le Bal, moreover, was limited to a geographical scope scarcely broader than a dance floor, this one stays within the confines of a spacious second-floor apartment, whose transformations from era to era are …
A powerful deterrent to adultery, or indeed to meeting anyone new in any circumstances whatever. Its basic premise -- to do with the casual sex partner who afterwards refuses to make herself (or himself, it could just as well be) scarce -- is rooted deeply enough in emotional reality that …
If Eddie Murphy could get away with playing a cop, maybe Whoopi Goldberg could get away with it too. A big if, and a definite maybe-not. She wears funny clothes, makes funny cracks (or would-be funny: "You know, guys like you are the reason abortion's legal"), punches people in the …
Pierce Brosnan, having lost out to Timothy Dalton for the 007 role in The Living Daylights, had to console himself with this. It's the better movie, if that's any consolation. In it, he plays a KGB agent who's assembling an atom bomb in England, with a scheme to disgrace the …
A match made in heaven (or in that corner of it in charge of pestilences and poxes): the brassiness of director Bob Clark and the abrasiveness of actor Judd Nelson, combined for a comedy about a yuppie lawyer who won't let either youth or professionalism stand in the way of …
A rather barren opening stretch of forty-five minutes or so in Marine boot camp, photographed in a shade of algae-green, trimmed with mildew-white, to ensure that the viewer's eyeballs have no pleasanter a time of it than the enlistees' bodies. After that, there is a marked improvement, all the way …
Francis Coppola's heart-on-sleeve Vietnam movie, set in the late Sixties and among the Old Guard at Fort Myer: ceremonial "toy soldiers" charged with burying the dead at Arlington National Cemetery. Whether the maker of Apocalypse Now was motivated here by genuine contriteness, hypocritical and trendy conformism, broad-minded desire for a …
An uprooted tree in a suburban backyard opens the portals for "the Old Gods" — those pre-Biblical demons who've been lying low and awaiting their chance to establish Hell-on-Earth. And on a weekend when the grownups have gone out of town, too! The liner notes of a heavy-metal rock album …
How did I live to be this old not knowing that G.I. Joe is the code name for a special missions force, not an individual or a 12 inch action figure? Prior to this, my familiarity with the character was limited to William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe, an …
For all those in despair over the quality of language in American films, all those unconvinced that what Sam Shepard writes is "poetry," all those who periodically stretch their arms out at their sides and cry to the heavens in Job-like tones: "Why, oh why, doesn't someone do a definitive …
The initial situation is plenty serious. A friendship is struck up between two men of different social levels but otherwise in the same, or a similar, boat: each recently separated from his wife and small son. The one in the higher income bracket finds an outlet for his own sloshingly …
The Taviani brothers' homage to D.W. Griffith, in the story of two immigrant siblings who come to Hollywood to find work on the set (quite literally on the sets) of his Intolerance. The re-creation of the embryonic film industry is lovingly, and wonderingly, done, but the effect is a little …