Thoroughly preposterous, and almost as thoroughly appealing, story idea about an investigative reporter who drags along his twelve-year-old son on a probe of fishing-boat disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, and falls prey to a ragtag band of island outcasts carrying on in the glorious tradition of the buccaneers, or as …
Considering all the cuteness afoot in Girl Friends, it could hardly be expected that Claudia Weill's first film for a major Hollywood studio would curb the trend. There is a certain amount of naturalistic filigree around the unconvincing lovers -- a female math professor and a retired baseball player -- …
Jazz never sounded like this -- and as long as they were going to drop Mammy from the original cast of characters, they could just as well have dropped, or changed, one word of the title. Neil Diamond, with his hair sculpted in the shape of a set of headphones, …
Hard-shell romantic comedy about a billionaire wheeler-dealer (Alan King, who throws a good tantrum or two or three) and a gold-digging careerist (Ali MacGraw). They are both represented as having genuine feelings for one another, while the viewer is asked to have none for them. This situation ought to loosen …
This would be a formidable entrant in any cinematic beauty contest. The rich, dark, earth colors and heaven-sent lighting effects frequently bring to mind one or another of the Old Masters (Caravaggio or Zurbarán or some other), only unlike them Kurosawa can make you look at his images exactly as …
Enemy agents, multiple stiffs, and a missing microfilm capsule are not apt to strike fans of the earlier movie as constituting the most logical sequel. Still, these fans should get their fill of forced sentiment and silliness on the subject of two aging homosexuals who fit in with no one …
The subject of child molestation sentimentalized and glossed over to a point where you can no longer be sure that that's what the subject indeed is. You would not have to be a bluenose, only an interested spectator, to wonder about such things as what else this reclusive mute gardener …
The subject of marital separation and divorce is eyed without much comprehension (a running gag lumps divorce together with such other social viruses as "police strikes, women's lib, gay lib, condominiums"), but with a good deal of furrowed-brow concern. The movie seems a decade or so late, either a little …
François Truffaut's entry in the parade of sorrowful and pitiful movies about France under the Occupation is really more of a companion piece to his Day for Night, except that whereas the latter proposed a toast to movie people, this one is addressed to theater people, and only incidentally to …
Two teenage girls from opposite sides of the tracks enter a virginity-losing contest at summer camp. Mostly vulgar and vacuous, saddening and soiling. But Kristy McNichol, merely matching Tatum O'Neal stride for stride through the first several laps, suddenly puts on a burst in the stretch and runs away with …
"Eric blown to smithereens, Colin carved up, a bomb in my casino -- and you say 'nothing unusual'!" An empire-building British gangster, who envisions himself as the spearhead of London's emergence as the new capitalist capitol of Europe, unwittingly makes an enemy of the Irish Republican Army and is tremendously …
The gimmick of this umpteenth retelling of the Jesse James story is the casting of real-life brothers in the main roles -- David, Keith, and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger, Stacy and James Keach as Frank and Jesse James, Randy and Dennis Quaid as Clell and Ed …
Malcolm Leigh's documentary of Hindu ritual was made under the auspices of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to accompany an exhibit of the same title. How well it "reflects" and "explores" the Hindu precepts sketched out in a terse verbal prologue is hard for the outsider to know. But he …
Director Jonathan Demme and writer Bo Goldman tell you almost nothing about the strange case of Melvin Dummar and the $156 million left to him by Howard Hughes in the disputed Mormon Will, cramming all of that to-do into the final fifteen minutes and offering instead a friskily affectionate portrait …
Originally titled La Derobade, which, whatever the correct literal translation (The Evader or something like that), holds no promise of the Fanny Hill rompishness hinted at in the American re-titling. There is one authentically rough scene in which a couple of gangster brothers are forced at gunpoint to perform an …