Case history of a singles'-bar swinger, chronicled in full from Irish Catholic virginity to Sexual Revolution martyrdom. Richard Brooks, the writer-director, crams the movie with teasers of various types and of dubious merit. He noncommittally offers up several large clues to the heroine's self-destructive, self-debasing nature, plus, for added "psychological …
French-Israeli collaboration about a former prostitute and concentration camp prisoner who makes do in her dotage by babysitting for prostitutes' children, including one in particular, an Arab boy called "Momo," who is her special pet. This bit of dowdy humanism takes a chucklesome approach to Jewish-Moslem differences, but it is …
François Truffaut's sitcom about a compulsive skirt-chaser begins with a funeral attended by a Busby Berkeley all-girl chorusline dressed in black, and it continues throughout its lengthy length as a girl-watcher's cavalcade of slim calves and pert faces. If cuteness can ever reach a level of lewdness, Truffaut will probably …
Dick Richards's intrepidly anachronistic Foreign Legion adventure has some good people in it -- the eternally smoldering, quirky Gene Hackman, the puckish, bright-eyed Terence Hill, and the wan, ghostly Catherine Deneuve, who glides about the screen in droopy hats and flaccid dresses. It has some good intentions, too -- an …
Vampirism in Pittsburgh. The culprit is a sexually repressed teenager who facilitates his dirty work with the modern conveniences of syringe and razor blade, and who disburdens his guilts over the phone to a radio talk-show host who dubs him "The Count." George A. Romero's always promising but never satisfying …
A mock version of the Watergate scandal, set in a Philadelphia nunnery. There isn't enough detail or surprise to warrant its going on at this length, and the joke doesn't seem to cut both ways (the nuns, aside from the easy tone of irreverence they generate, might just as well …
An uncomfortable blend of Hollywood artifices, circa 1945, and bitter feminist truths, circa 1970. New York, New York is superficially a musical pastiche, incorporating bits and pieces of Big Band memorabilia, Love Me or Leave Me backstage soap opera, MGM's musical fantasies, and the Judy Garland cult. But its Big …
The Almighty decides to reaffirm His presence in the universe (the last time He intervened in earthly affairs was to assist the Mets in the 1969 World Series), and selects an agnostic grocery-store manager to be His messenger. Discourse between mere mortals and the deities has been a comic convention …
A runty basketball phenom from Colorado, all smiles and yes-sirs, stumbles starry-eyed into the ruthless world of big-time college athletics (UCLA, thinly disguised). In reality, hayseeds like this fellow do not come from Colorado, but come only from Frank Capra movies (his teammate slips him one pep pill during practice …
This feminist testimonial and sisterhood singalong coincides with a couple of other female "buddy" movies, Julia and The Turning Point, to signal a kind of backlash to the proliferous male "buddy" movies. The principle of "separate but equal," evidently. The friendship here, sustained mainly through postcards and long-distance well-wishing, is …
The outlaw mystique in country-western music is dipped into, not in the serious and relatively realistic way of Baby, the Rain Must Fall, but more in the flip, wish-fulfillment way of the reggae musical, The Harder They Come. This is a show for folks who always have a ready, friendly …
Sloppy but amiable movie about how a schizophrenic girl is taught to accept her fractured self by a doubly fractured female impersonator: "First there was Joan Crawford in Possessed, then Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, and now 'Liza Connors' in Schizo Forever." Hollis McLaren, first seen running …
The Taviani brothers' -- Paolo and Vittorio's -- Cannes festival award-winner, a parable of oppression adapted from Gavino Ledda's autobiography about his ascendancy from Sardinian shepherd to linguist. The hero's moments of enlightment -- his discovery of music, his instruction in Latin -- are truly inspiring, but the moviemakers dwell …
The making of a philanderer. The degenerative process begins unforeseeably, one morning, with the chance sighting of an unknown woman in red who steps into a powerful updraft, and from there it leads the moonstruck hero downward into a sticky residuum of 1950s bourgeois guilt. The search for laughs never …