Musical fantasy from the Disney people, featuring imbecilic hillbillies and a melodramatically mustachioed huckster as villains, a carrot-topped waif as a hero, and a too-cute, teardrop-shaped, pink-green-and-lavender cartoon dragon. There's also Helen Reddy, a movie debutante, as the steadfast, spiritual lighthouse-keeper's daughter, a sort of mythical Lady of the Lamp. …
Trying to get thrills out of this missing-persons case, dated Valentine's Day, 1900, is like trying to get blood from a stone (or better, in this case, from a rock). A brooding, inert mood piece, often reminiscent of a skinless David Hamilton photo essay in its slavering over Camay-complexioned teenage …
Not an out-and-out farce like the two previous films which united Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier and were directed by the latter. Rather, a more-or-less straight caper picture, with social consciousness and a light touch, about a pair of con artists who are blackmailed into social responsibility by an ex-cop …
Another of Alain Resnais's examinations of the creative powers of the mind. The specific subject is a dying novelist's rather nasty fictional world and the richly ambiguous relationship of that world to the real one; and the treatment is marked by Resnais's patented juxtaposition of an icily elegant surface and …
Disney feature-length cartoon about the International Mouse Prisoners' Aid Society (motto: "We never fail to do what's right") coming to the rescue of a homely orphan girl held captive in a Louisiana bayou. It has some engaging characters (a dragonfly named Evinrude who bears a faint resemblance to Ben Turpin; …
Chase thriller about a smug extortionist who bombs rollercoasters merely to show that he means business and who is credulously portrayed as a man of almost superhuman cunning and resource. He appears at a hotel room door in a busboy outfit, wheels in a cart of complimentary food, and plants …
The initial half-hour develops a sharply observed contrast between the upright public postures and the crumpled private lives of POWs returning from Southeast Asia. Paul Schrader, the angry young scriptwriter, obviously has something to say about the lingering aftereffects of the Vietnam War, but he is not about to come …
While the Bulgarian-born artist, Christo, was nursing along his project to build a Twenty-four-mile nylon fence in Sonoma County, the Maysles Brothers were on the spot to record it all on film. As in any Maysles movie, you shouldn't expect any brain-testing discussion of the issues. They know their movie …
A softened, popularized version of the Mean Streets topic: the hell-raising of Italian Catholic buddies in the New York boroughs. You can also see traces of Rocky in the awkward, inarticulate boy-girl romance, and in the Sylvester Stallone poster that hangs on the hero's wall alongside the best-selling posters of …
It would appear that Michael Ritchie had his heart set on doing a spoof on consciousness-raising, and he wasn't going to be deterred, or detoured, by the fact that he'd contracted to shoot Dan Jenkins's novel about the professional and private lives of football players. The satirical tone is loud …
There isn't a lot of it, but the scary stuff in this cold-blooded horror movie is unusually nasty. It isn't the special-effects gore that is so hard to take; it is the infinite insincerity underneath. The crowning touch is when director Michael Winner, never touted as a humanist, but never …
If there were any compelling reason for Ingmar Bergman to lend his hand to the cycle of movies, traceable back to Visconti's The Damned, dealing with the Nazi evil, this reason should have been expressed in terms other than left-over, reheatable metaphors of Nazi Germany as "hell," a "trap," and …
From the Miguel Pinero play about prison etiquette. As with any Shakespeare play, it takes a while to attune your ear to the language (though this is otherwise not much like any Shakespeare play). You never do get acclimated to the prison routine, but, with careful attention, you can glean …
Ray Harryhausen's animated beasties (triplet demons, a brass minotaur, an oversized walrus, a troglodyte, a gigantic saber-toothed tiger) are enjoyable, as ever; but Sam Wanamaker's discombobulated direction (a How Not To handbook on composition and editing) renders all the minutes in between Harryhausen's show-stoppers unendurable. With Patrick Wayne and Taryn …
A bush-league hockey team seems a likely prospect for one of George Roy Hill's buddy-buddy movies, but Nancy Dowd's script gives it a different slant. Under her jaundiced eye, the male characters are fair game for mockery — their swinging single's sportsclothes, their toupees, their tempers and head-knockings — while …