John Irving's stomach-upsetting mixture of anarchic comedy and sententious philosophy has put director Tony Richardson into his rompish Tom Jones mood: fast-motion for humorous effect, music by Jacques Offenbach, Daumier-esque caricature. Irving might well feel flattered, though he is hardly well served, except perhaps by the visualization of Susie the …
Rip van Winkle multiplied by 2,000. And the product (to use the proper mathematical term) is a God damned Neanderthal,' preserved in the ice for 40,000 years and revivified by an Arctic research team violently divided on what to do with him. The situation is engrossing from the start, despite …
The note of campiness, carried over from the previous Spielberg-Lucas collaboration, is sounded here first thing, and with full Bette Midleresque force: the Paramount logo fades into a bas-relief design on a Chinese gong (joke), and the camera moves over from that to the smoking mouth of a papier-mâché dragon …
Echoes of Best Friends: a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team writing a script about a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team. And here as there, the result contains plenty of "insider" stuff for the movie buff: the hero's graduate thesis, for instance, is called "A Semiological Analysis of Sexual Overtones in the Early Films of …
One wondered how crude a movie would have to be in order for the National Lampoon people to remove their trade name from the title, although one had hoped that, with a female (and more or less feminist) director such as Martha Coolidge, the question would be not "How crude?" …
Or: I Was a Teenage Rocky. John G. Avildsen, the director of the original Rocky, tries to whip up some of the same emotions, and again enlists Bill Conti to supply the music, in the story of a nice, gentle, olive-skinned kid from New Jersey who has sand kicked in …
The narrative premise, of a foreign correspondent caught up in a country coming apart at the seams, might ring a few bells from very close-by cinema history. But the unstagy staging of crowd scenes, the vivid impressionistic detail, the fine sudden jolts of violence, the prolonged stretches of confusion and …
George Roy Hill's minimalist treatment of the John le Carré espionage novel, about an actress of Leftist and particularly pro-Palestinian leanings who is recruited (and virtually brainwashed) by Israeli intelligence to help flush out a terrorist kingpin. In truth, the heroine's initial motivation is not well established, or anyway the …
The death of Jamie Lee Curtis's mother, and the obligatory sifting-through-belongings, turns up a packet of letters, tied together with the customary faded ribbon, from a secret lover. These, read aloud on the soundtrack in the sotto voce style which silly actors fall into when reciting Emily Dickinson or Robert …
With John Cassavetes, it is often easier to like the man than his movies; and it is easier in this case to like his movie because the man himself is in it. He has great screen presence, so called, with a stance that suggests his shoes have been nailed to …
Maudlin apologia for the Japanese in World War II, set prudently just after truce. Certainly, children make a good symbol (or even good definition) of innocence, and a Little League baseball team makes a good symbol of the future. (How is it, though, that a team that's no match for …
Radu Gabrea's film à clef on the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, called here E.V.A., and played by one of his former repertory actresses, Eva Mattes. That's right, actresses. The casting helps point up his bisexual ambiguity, although the actress's shortness of stature throws in a perhaps unwanted hint of Napoleonism. …
Soviet émigré Andrei Konchalovsky (Siberiade etc.) comes to America and goes back in time to post-WWII, and his vision, or his photography anyway, is unrelievedly cold, damp, and dreary. His story, however, is evidently intended to be full of ardor. The fantasy of being married to Nastassja Kinski had kept …