Robin Williams as a disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio in Saigon, ca. 1965, where he fights for the Beach Boys, James Brown, Martha and the Vandellas, and against Lawrence Welk, Ray Coniff, Mantovani, and intersperses machine-gun bursts of light patter: "It's oh-six hundred. What's the 'oh' stand for? 'Oh …
The central premise seems interesting enough: a nine-year-old Parisian boy is packed off to the provinces for the final weeks of his mother's pregnancy, there to stay with a couple of combative family friends who themselves lost their only child at birth, and who, at war about everything else, vie …
Chuck Berry, celebrating his sixtieth birthday, a lot for a rock-and-roller, is in good form, and in good company, and even in good photography, but not in especially good cinema: the conventional mix of concert and interview, plus a couple of real sparks in rehearsal. The place -- the Fox …
Chilly tribute to "our boys" in Vietnam -- chilly because the message is made plain that if you weren't there yourself, you're nowhere, man. (This would seem to include, among others, the director of the movie, John Irvin, who's English.) Except for that standoffishness, it's an altogether modest and formulaic …
Euphemism for Hao Lo prison, and bugs, lizards, rats, cats o' nine tails, stocks, manacles, electroshock, and minutes that pass like hours. The physical frailty and emotional quaveriness of Michael Moriarty, as an eight-and-a-half-year occupant of the place, are quite affecting; but the absence of any personality in him or …
Director and co-writer William Dear joins the ranks of Steven Spielberg's Trucklers and Lackeys, Inc. Can a Seattle suburban family adopt Bigfoot as a pet -- or better, as a member of the family? Will they be willing to cut meat out of their diet and take down the hunting …
Disturbing opening scene, with a most uncharming display of machismo, male chauvinism, and downright drunken meanness from Burt Reynolds (who is he, after all, to make jokes about anyone's toupee?) — but all this is undercut by the "explanatory" scene to follow. A very nervous-making scene, later on, with the …
And not only heaven, but God, love, death, and hell -- as envisioned in archival film footage and man-on-the-street interviews. Actually, the men (and women) on the street have been taken off the street and put into Expressionistic sets, shadows, colored lights; and many of the film clips have been …
The contented suburban housewife of an ambitious plastic surgeon chokes to death on a South Korean chicken ball, and her sister, a dabbler in the occult who has come into possession of a copy of The Wisdom of Catagonia, raises her from her grave a year later -- not as …
The directorial debut of Clive Barker, touted as the Stephen King of England. It's something to do with a fleshless man who occupies the attic above his brother and sister-in-law; he's been reduced to that state by some dough-faced ghouls called Cenobites, who can be summoned by a sort of …
Fresh on the heels of Robocop comes a sort of Robo-robber (with a Robo-G-man in hot pursuit) -- only it's not actually a robot but an alien parasite who inhabits human bodies and is impervious to bullets (although the host's body isn't). The photography, by Jacques Haitkin, is crisp and …
Jon Cryer, too old to go on playing high-school students, is also too old to be playing a young stockbroker who disguises himself as one. (He has to lie low from the Mob, and the motivating violence, portrayed very straight, postpones the movie's arrival as a comedy.) Annabeth Gish, of …
Slight, retiring, wallflowery movie with a stout, commanding, towering performance by Judy Davis as a hard-drinking, bottom-rung "entertainer" who must confront the daughter she long ago abandoned. Some nice tacky atmosphere, though an air of bookishness too (short-novel-ishness, to be more exact). Directed by Gillian Armstrong, who provided the same …
A custom vehicle for black actor Robert Townsend, produced, directed, and co-written by him. It casts him as an aspirant for the lead role in a street-gang epic for Tinsel Town Pictures, and by means of the TV knob and some Walter Mitty-ish fantasies it allows him also to play …