The world's five greatest detectives, modelled in Mad Magazine-style after famous fictional sleuths (Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett are overly in evidence, each contributing two to the quintet), are invited for dinner and murder at a spooky mansion in rural England. A mystery composed of all detectives and no suspects …
This bombardment of big business, television, and the entire boob-tube generation, is not awfully unlike the "underground" comedy of Bob Downey, Mad Magazine, and the Saturday Night Live group. It begins with a far-fetched "what if..." premise (in this case, an on-the-air nervous breakdown of a network newscaster) and then …
Paul Mazursky's recollection of his days, in the early 1950s, as a struggling actor, idolizing Brando, in Greenwich Village. There's a nice feel for the places, rooms, halls, cafes, even though the image, in the prevalent New York style, tends to be dark and blue; and there's a nice feel …
Peter Bogdanovich, in the ranks of contemporary American directors, may be the foremost movie fan or the foremost movie plagiarist. Throughout this reminiscence of the early days of the business, he is making reference to this or that in film history (the "wild man" character from James Agee's essay on …
Herman Raucher, the scriptwriter, has fleshed out the bare-boned, impressionistic song by Bobbie Gentry, and in the fattening process he has changed the feeling altogether. The song was nothing if not homely, whereas the movie is nothing if not huggable. The people are all witty and sympathetic: no coldness, no …
This is Instant Legend about the apotheosis of a Johnny Reb on the vengeance trail of the Attila-the-Hun union officer who massacred his wife and child. Along the way, the avenger picks up an odd assortment of travelling companions (the most amiable among them is the droll Chief Dan George …
A fine script, with deceiving middle-class civilities and formalities, with puzzling evasions in the dialogue, and with the subtle construction of a foolproof trap, written by the young Mexican filmmaker Jaime Humberto Hermosillo; an elegant, icy performance by Martha Navarro; and between them, they create a perfect specimen of la …
When a man appears in her life, a young woman of traditional manners who lives with her godmother suffers a deep and unusual transformation. Directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo.
The Inspector Clouseau series has gone the way of the James Bond one, and just as fast; it has gotten involved in topping itself, and it has quickly gotten out of hand. Simply put, the Clouseau character, a severely limited personality, doesn't inspire much plot invention; and while the individual …
The filmmakers have a good nose for the rites of youth, but the larky, pop-song tone they impose on the movie hardly gives American high-school kids credit for their imaginative capacity to behave, pretentiously, as if they were participants in grown-up melodrama, athletics, and pornography. With Robert Carradine, Jennifer Ashley, …
Documentary on the body-building phenomenon, done in a sort of CBS 60 Minutes style, a bit disorderly and catch-as-catch-can, and heavy on the human interest. It doesn't make any real inroads into the subject, and it doesn't approach it from many angles. But it gets ample footage of the athletes' …
David Cronenberg follows They Came from Within with more of the same: the same venereal-disease plot development, the same nauseating special effects by Joe Blasco, the same plasticky color that makes an actor's skin look like that of a rubber doll, and the same scattered satirical touches. The incomprehensible premise …
Written by Thomas McGuane and directed by Frank Perry, an absurdist Western about modern-day cattle rustlers who conduct their business with a pickup truck and a chainsaw. Some of its nicest irony comes out of William Fraker's evocative imagery of the majestic Montana territory, where the skies are sumptuously cloudy …
The resumption of the Dorothy Johnson tale, without her continued cooperation, is not as well structured as the original. It has an interesting take-up point: the English nobleman, John Morgan, yields to his hot-blooded romanticism, stifled too long within his gilded palace, and returns to America to find the Sioux …
Cliff Robertson stars as Buzz Aldrin in a made-for-TV biopic directed by Jud Taylor.