Newspaper heiress slain! The husband, editor of the aforesaid newspaper and outspoken critic of the District Attorney, is indicted. A retired criminal prosecutor (and highly attractive divorcée) agrees to handle the defense as a way to even her personal score with her former boss, the D.A., and she is soon …
Some movies lend themselves less to sequels than others, and Romancing the Stone, a real-life romance visited upon a mousy romancer, would appear to be one of the "some." Unaccountably, the heroine's earlier adventure in South America has left her with a weakened belief in romance. Discontented with her current …
"One of the great names in espionage history", we are told, is Philip Kimberley, not to be confused with Kim Philby, although he followed the same ignominious route from England to the Soviet Union. The Soviets have now sent him back in the other direction, with a new face and …
Based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, and directed, like his Duddy Kravitz, by Ted Kotcheff: on the apparent principle that if lightning came close once, it might come closer next time. Instead it came further. For all the period production and powdery-smeary photography and leaps in time and place, …
Father and daughter, who are all each other has, are separated in mid-Depression by fate and by no fault of their own. The daughter, played with impressive sobriety by Meredith Salenger, takes to the rails to rejoin her father in the Washington timberland, aided at various times on her trek …
After Richard Gere was chosen (or anointed) for the title role, director Bruce Beresford decided to take no more unnecessary risks. And there is so much hair, so much blood, so much "realism," that all fun, along with all Hittites, is threatened with extinction. But there is still Goliath, of …
The basic situation is a combustible one. A political prisoner named Valentin shares a cell with a homosexual pederast named Molina in an unnamed Latin American country. The homosexual, who is eventually revealed to have been bribed by prison officials to worm information out of his cellmate, but by then …
Wagnerian comic book: a primeval forest (with Maxfield Parrish-ish atmospherics), a pair of unicorns, pointy-eared elves, pointy-nosed agents of darkness, and naturally "a champion, bold of heart and pure in spirit." It's a thing to delight the very very innocent and a thing to depress the even very slightly sophisticated. …
No, not the legend of an American tennis star, nor of the heroine of a Michael Jackson song, but rather of a Texas teenager who, in trying to collect $608 to repair her brother's "trashed" scooter, finds herself on the wrong side of the law but on the right side …
Sergei Paradjanov's (and co-director Dodo Abashidze's) gorgeous illustration of a Georgian folk legend -- and about as purely, loftily, inspirationally cinematic a use of the cinema as you are likely to run across. To say that it is dreamlike is both over-obvious and insufficient, so we must push on at …
There is nothing essentially new about an alliance of aliens and vampires (see Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, among lesser examples), but the effects of this alliance have never spread faster nor ever deeper into sexual nooks and crannies. The germ of the story, and a lot of the …
A classical stage actor (Christopher Plummer), whose great regret is that he never hit it big on screen, sees his last chance in the latest script by his wife (Maggie Smith). But the part calls for a sensitive European, and she doesn't think he's right for it. So he dips …
Something seems to be missing here, as compared with the earlier Albert Brooks movies, Real Life and Modern Romance. Not laughs, surely; at least not in significant numbers. And the basic idea -- of a young Establishment couple who, with the dim pre-Established memory of Easy Rider as inspiration, renounce …
A bust. The secret to the hidden gold of Chili Verde is tattooed on two different women's bottoms: a gimmick very similar was tried in the spaghetti Western, The Stranger and the Gunfighter. Whether this movie has matched that one by design or by coincidence, its aim was very low. …