The parade of crime-scene corpses at the outset combines gore and cheesecake in a way reminiscent of the illustrations in True Detective, but active violence — the deed itself as opposed to the bloody result — is kept off screen for a surprising length of time: long enough so that …
Michael Moorcock (or someone in that clan) meets MTV. Sword-slinging demigods, centuries old, come together in contemporary New York -- what has been prophesied as "the gathering" -- to decide the fate of the world. They do so amid warped and rubberized images, billows of steam, shafts of light, bolts …
Extremely unpleasant suspense film. C. Thomas Howell, drowsy at the wheel of a Chicago-to-San-Diego drive-away, pulls over and picks up a rain-soaked hitchhiker, Rutger Hauer (pretty unpleasant right there, you might think, but there's more). The passenger's conversation, occasionally punctuated by switchblade, consists of stuff like: "You wanna know what …
Penelope Spheeris was the director of the punk-rock documentary The Decline of Western Civilization -- a rather hysterical and hyperbolic documentary, but a documentary nevertheless -- and because of that, one tends to give her the initial benefit of doubt on a fiction film ("based," to be sure, "on actual …
To her already multi-media stage show, Laurie Anderson has added some movie cameras out front, to record it for posterity -- it and her white shoes and dimples and all the rest. But the mere servant status accorded the cameras ensures that the cinema will be low medium on the …
One of the more likable entries in the post-Rocky sports-film boom, a fact-based story about a little nowhere on the Indiana map named Hickory whose high-school basketball team got all the way to the state championship game in 1952. Much of that likableness is due to the restraints of temperament …
This one had been high atop my must-see list, ever since Scorsese dubbed it his favorite film of the ‘90s. (Though made in 1985, it took some time for it to wash up on American shores.) And for years, it was available only in botched pan-and-scan video transfers. According to …
Meticulous character study of a homely, uneducated, nineteen-year-old virgin from the Brazilian Northeast, working now as a below-minimum-wage typist in São Paolo ("She wouldn't take the job if she were smart"), and an awfully slow and sloppy typist at that. The details are as excruciating as they are convincing: her …
Unfrightening horror laced with unfunny comedy and sprinkled with unrevealing glimpses of the Vietnam War -- an unbeatable combination. Still, after so many psychopaths and dropouts and whatnot among Vietnam vets, it was about time for a ghost. With William Katt and Kay Lenz; directed by Steve Miner.
The three-foot-tall Marvel Comics hero (three feet, two inches, by his own reckoning) comes to the screen. Would that he hadn't. It may have sounded like a funny idea when someone was drunk or stoned, but after he or they had sobered up, and before they had gone too far …
People who saw the original Invaders from Mars as children tend to have been indelibly impressed by it. People who see it again (or for the first time) as adults tend to find a lot to laugh at. Director Tobe Hooper would seem to be one of both of these; …
One of those movies that makes you embarrassed to be an American (but glad, at the same time, no longer to be a teenager). An Air Force fighter pilot, on routine maneuvers, is forced down by an unnamed Arab nation and sentenced to hang. Surely the President will do something …
The first of Claude Berri's two-part adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's two-volume novel, L'Eau des Collines. (The second part, Manon of the Spring, was shot simultaneously but released separately.) Unquestionably it's a quality production -- one of the discreet ways of saying, or avoiding saying, a somewhat dull and conservative one. …
Richard Pryor's pseudonymous autobiography: drugs, liquor, multiple marriages, boyhood in a brothel -- all that. It begins with his infamous free-base accident (well, first it begins with an R&B; vocalist chanting "I'm the ruler of my destiny./ I can determine what becomes of me"). And then in the hospital, an …