Marlon Brando's fifteen-minute portrait of a Human Rights lawyer at work on a hopeless murder case in South Africa is a welcome dose of caginess in an otherwise artlessly direct protest film, with its burning gaze hardly wavering an inch from The Problem. (The lawyer's fondness for flowers in spite …
A musical spoof about aliens in the San Fernando Valley, which looks very much like a musical spoof by aliens in the San Fernando Valley. In a sense, it very much is. The documentable alien in command is British director Julien Temple, whose well-known music-video credentials will perhaps make the …
He not only lives, he ages at about one-fifth the rate of the rest of us. But his music (that is, the John Cafferty music he lip-syncs to) has not stayed ahead of the times into the Eighties; it's still imitating Springsteen. The instructional value in this is precisely as …
The situation, straight from the I.B. Singer novel, is instantaneously interesting: that of Holocaust survivors in New York after the war, specifically that of one who is leading a double life, with a subliterate new wife and a cultured mistress on the side, and then suddenly a triple life when …
Pythonization of Norse legend, not unlike the similar "-ization" of Anglo-Saxon legend in "Jabberwocky". Seasickness jokes and the like. Gray, grubby, and dull. With Tim Robbins, Mickey Rooney, John Cleese, Eartha Kitt, and Terry Jones; directed by Jones.
Something to do with the grooming of handsome young homosexuals to service the needs of a privileged class of Australian legislators and judges. The secret-society aspect, with its strict hierarchy, initiation rites, and arcane symbols, certainly appeals to the imagination whether or not to reason. It appeals, anyway, to the …
The Exiles chronicles a night in the life of a group of 20-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. The film is a narrative feature with a script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects.
Music-making on the show-biz fringes: the hotel lounges of the Pacific Northwest. A sibling piano duo, a sort of fraternal Ferrante and Teicher, have been making a go of it for fifteen years. One of them (Beau Bridges) tries hard to keep up appearances; the other (real brother Jeff, with …
Three-wheeled vehicle, with one big wheel (Sean Connery) and two little ones (Dustin Hoffman, Matthew Broderick), about three generations of thieves who throw in together, over the initial objections of the middle-classified middle one, on a million-dollar caper. The situation is highly contrived (all the way to the ethnic mix …
WWII adventure from John Milius, about an American deserter who becomes a tribal leader in Borneo and is conscripted by the British to battle the Japanese. Based on a novel by Pierre Schoendoerffer, himself a filmmaker, and an artist of finer sensibility -- a sort of junior Conrad -- than …
A dud about the bomb. The top-secret doings at Los Alamos are understandably not understandable, and they seem to roll along without assistance while the actors coil for the next big polemical haymaker: "It's all about ass, isn't it? Ya kick it or ya lick it." The biggest wallop, however, …
The Twilight Zone, or something very like it, in Iowa. A disembodied voice, more precisely a stereophonic and cyclonic whisper, prevails on a transplanted city man (Kevin Costner) to carve a baseball field out of the cornstalks — and onto it come "the great Shoeless Joe Jackson" (batting from the …
What if they remade A Christmas Story, except with more pratfalls? Lots more pratfalls. And meaner humor. With Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Randy Quaid; directed by Jeremiah Chechik.
Gloomy news indeed. The intensely dislikable newspaper reporter, I.M. Fletcher, as played by the dislikable Chevy Chase, is back -- smirks, batted eyelids, disguises, aliases, and all. Now, something called Fletch Dies might just be something to see. Then again, it might not. Directed by Michael Ritchie.
Quite literally, Son of the Fly. And sure enough he's a chip off the old slimeball, inheriting his father's eponymous disease, Brundle's Accelerated Growth Syndrome (BAGS). In addition to which, he suffers from megalomaniac scientists, sadistic security guards, a total lack of culpability, and a happy ending -- in sum, …