Made in France, and in French, by the American-born Bob Swaim. The title refers to that alienated and endangered figure, the police informer, called la balance in underworld parlance for his ability to tip the crime-battle in favor of the police; and the storyline concerns the efforts of the elite …
A worried mother enlists two old boyfriends, not seen in seventeen years, to search for her runaway son, telling each of them that he is the father. The two bump into each other on the trail and join forces, at first not realizing they are looking for the same boy. …
Isabelle Adjani driven by revenge -- driven by it for over two hours, before she finds out she has had the wrong driver all along. She flounces around as if out of whatever is the French equivalent of Erskine Caldwell, wears lots of outfits with ruffles and polka dots, cries …
Diagnosis of this second specimen from writer-director John Sayles is much the same as for Return of the Secaucas Seven. The facile, fast-shuffle dialogue is very much at odds with the shoddy mise-en-scène, and very much outside the capabilities of the amateurish cast. The best delivery of a line (and …
So what connection do you think there could possibly be between UFOs and heroin? You'll never guess -- or rather, you'll never know. Whatever it is that the extraterrestrials need with narcotics (a need that is expressed in the psychedelic optics of the late Sixties), it is satisfied just as …
The plotline concerns the efforts of a Texas oil tycoon to purchase a Scottish fishing village, lock, stock, and barrel, as the site for a mammoth refinery. But plot is not the main thing here. This is a movie of character and, even more, of setting, and of the effect …
Typical Harold Robbins saga of a woman writer's bruising ascent up the Hollywood mountain. She begins (in braids and Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farm frock) as a mere San Fernando Valley high-school girl, an "A" student with an Einstein poster on her bedroom wall, and a prize-recipient for Creative Writing. Her first step towards …
His Texas Ranger commanding officer admonishes Chuck Norris for not having enough "style" -- an accurate assessment, if not exactly in the way intended, of the shortcomings of Norris's cinematic oeuvre. Hence, he has good reason to take, here, a few pages from the Clint Eastwood stylebook (starting with the …
It's been a while since the Southern military academy was taken to task (Jack Garfein's The Strange One, 1957, swims up from memory), and it seems fitting that this should be set in the early Sixties. The time period permits the movie to usher in the James Meredith of the …
Tepid romantic comedy, in the New York style. It wants to take up residence in a certain situation, but doesn't want to do the construction work necessary to put it there. The desired situation is a middle-aged Manhattan psychoanalyst becoming amorously obsessed with a twenty-ish patient, and risking everything for …
The theme is a Yasujiro Ozu favorite, or perhaps one should say a Japanese favorite, the passage from feudal tradition to postwar Westernization. (It is set in the Kyoto/Osaka region just before the Second World War, so right away it is clouded with a sense of perishability.) The sisters of …
Flowers, their cultivation and arrangement, are only one of the obsessions of the protagonist -- a nice cultured middle-aged man' who, in addition, pays a twentyish model once a week to undress to an aria by Donizetti; who then works off his passions on the church organ across the street; …
But perhaps himself more. François Truffaut's lightweight sex comedy of the same name has been turned by Blake Edwards into a showcase for Burt Reynolds - Burt Reynolds, that is, and his waviest toupee, his wolfman beard, his yellow-tinted eyeglasses, his cowboy boots and Levis, his casual jackets and sweaters. …
One of the hard lessons of growing up, we learn at the end of this Erich Segal tearjerker, is that nobody is perfect. But people in Erich Segal tearjerkers come close. The titular man, for instance, is chairman of a university Humanities department, bribes potential drop-outs with guaranteed A's, and …
This could be lumped together with Only When I Laugh and I Ought to Be in Pictures, to form a sort of Generational Estrangement trilogy by Neil Simon. The surface is slick enough, but the fairy-tale storyline -- a drop-out father drops back in after twenty-eight years, bearing a briefcase …