Terrence McNally's farce about a Cleveland garbage man hiding from the Mafia in a Fun City homosexual bathhouse flirts constantly with the monster, Bad Taste; but its speed and timing keep it just out of the monster's reach. The movie has something of the crude energy, the exaggeration, and the …
James Goldman's original script must have been -- or otherwise ought to have been -- intended as a rumination on middle-aged malaise in the Middle Ages. Robin Hood and Little John return to Sherwood Forest after twenty years of Crusading with the demented King Richard, and they find all the …
The prizefighting premise — a second-rate Philadelphia pug named Rocky Balboa gets a shot at the heavyweight title — functions very well as a metaphor for the making of this penny-saving, corner-cutting movie — a second-string actor named Sylvester Stallone gets a shot at the Oscar. But the boxing doesn't …
Heavy-breathing translation of the Yukio Mishima novel, the key characters of which are a fatherless boy with an obsession about the sea, a handsome, multi-scarred sailor who forsakes the hardships of a seafarer's life for the cozy bed of the boy's mother, and a bullying schoolmate of the boy, a …
One of the two or three best things Lelouch has done to date. His skill as colorist has never been more in evidence, with a soft and harmonious image pieced together out of yellows, greens, browns. Catherine Deneuve has never looked lovelier, and in the flashbacks is done up in …
The fanciful meeting-of-the-minds concept (patented by Steve Allen, among others) opens the door to endless intriguing possibilities, but the get-together of Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud touches off few sparks in this underdeveloped mystery movie, shot all in yellow, for no good reason. Rather than providing any sort of personality …
The ad campaign gives no credits and slim clues to this movie's identity. It turns out to be by Pasquale Festa Campanile (original title: Conviene Far Bene L'Amore), a vision of Italy in the year 2000, twenty years after the world has exhausted its supplies of gas and electricity and …
A slimy handful of burlesque sketches, one of which features Marty Feldman doing some deft, if half-hearted, slapstick exercises, and which all by itself accounts for the only conceivable reason this Italian sex comedy was ever imported to the U.S. With Sydne Rome, Barbara Bouchet, Giovanna Ralli, and Edwige Fenech; …
An imperious gunman (his creed: "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on"), the last of a vanishing species, faces the prospect of weeks in bed, in pain, and in delirium with a terminal cancer, and decides instead to stage a farewell …
Innocuous takeoff on the Lady Vanishes and Night Train railroad thrillers, executed with little sense of the style of the Hitchcock-Reed prototypes, and replacing the sophisticated fun with a more sophomoric type. The poppycock plot has a movie buff's sure feel for standard cloak-and-daggar situations (the funniest gimmick is having …
François Truffaut's lollipop monument to all the children of the world. The cluster of Leave-It-To-Beaver-style anecdotes, centered around the student body of a boys' school in Thiers, France, is designed for general accord; the content is middlebrow, prosaic, patronizing, and perfectly suitable for consumption by children. The single trace of …
The begining is a carefully crafted chunk of tough-guy fiction; a sorehead just out of the pen, dressed in regulation dark suit and white socks, returns to his hometown, the site of his teenage football heroics, to square off with the sheriff who sent him to prison on drug charges …
Led Zeppelin's Madison Square Garden concert (the distinct bulge in lead singer Robert Plant's pants, on stage, keeps this from being a family show) is reproduced with a high-quality image and high-quality sound. The problem of how to shoot so stationary an event is solved with kaleidoscopic and psychedelic visual …
The twice-told (first by William Wellman in 1937, second by George Cukor in 1954) fame-and-heartbreak tale is told once more, minus the fundamental narrative facility of the earlier versions. The rising star's ravenous ambition and the falling star's sensitive ego are established so negligently that the ensuing spectacle of love, …
The sole survivor — and notorious bad penny — in a family of landed gentry outside Birmingham, Alabama, cultivates an interest in the hangers-out at the grubby Olympic Spa gymnasium, which is bristling with excitement as the resident muscleman, an immigrated Mr. Austria, trains in secret for the upcoming Mr. …