The making of a boy into a man (and a man of some magnitude, too), as it was done in the Australian High Country in the 1880s. Peripheral figures all have been carved out with well-used cookie cutters: loony old gold prospector (Kirk Douglas, false-bearded and wigged, peglegged, and strapped …
Woody Allen's ethereal variant on Ingmar Bergman's earthier Smiles of a Summer Night. Can Allen have expected anyone to be terribly interested, when he himself was evidently not? On the one hand, the material tends to be a bit academic, with much sport made of a university pedant, author of …
A solar eclipse descends on Cupang. The heavens have yet to completely blacken, and already several of the more backward barrio locals begin to kiss civilization goodbye. One person’s Armageddon is another person’s cottage industry, which is precisely what the town emerges as after Elsa (Nora Aunor) envisions in the …
Irrespective of the slow-to-emerge (but much-publicized) thesis about American collaboration in the death of an American journalist during the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government, there is plenty here that is believable. Much of that "plenty" is crammed into the tense first half-hour, which re-creates a Latin American military coup …
Political thriller directed, produced, written, edited, and acted in by Iranian expatriate Parviz Sayyad. A bit raw psychologically, to say nothing of cinematically. A trenchcoated and sunglassed assassin on assignment in New York (some nice mundane details of the zealot's adjustment to his surroundings: which way is Mecca? is the …
Rather retrograde British comedy, the intended cheekiness of which is thoroughly stifled by the familiarness and outmodedness of its targets: dotty clerics, dotty gentry, dotty menials, dotty anybodies, in Edwardian England. The familiarness is not entirely without benefits, such as, for example, the supreme ease with which the various comic …
This is your chance, if you ever wanted one, to see a Catholic priest dance the jitterbug, fire a machine gun at Nazis, lure the Vatican into the black market, strike deals with a Mafia chieftain, seduce a postulant, say "Damn it!" A couple of old-time Hollywood screenwriters, Abraham Polonsky …
A study of power on a small scale. Four Polish laborers, sans work permits, are in London on a Laurel-and-Hardy construction job, when the military back home cracks down on Solidarity, and the foreman of the crew, the only one of them who speaks English, tries to keep the knowledge …
1954 is it; television is in its Golden Age, comedy is king, and nostalgia runs chest-deep. The character who prefers this year over all others is a squirrel-cheeked staff writer (Mark Linn-Baker) for a live variety hour, and the guest star one week is his lifelong idol, an Errol Flynn-like …
Not all the dreariness of this true-life escape adventure can be attributed to the quality of life in East Germany. The arduousness of constructing a do-it-yourself hot-air balloon to hop over the Iron Curtain (and then, after an unsuccessful maiden flight, another, bigger one) must be hard to make interesting …
Old and familiar the material in this movie surely is. The odyssey of a splinter group of Tuscan villagers, through territory murderously patrolled by German troops and diehard local Fascists, to meet up with the advancing Americans, takes us back at least to Open City and Paisan, even in such …
Hard-working but not very creative comedy about a prostitution ring operating out of the City Morgue. Ron Howard's direction, in only his second feature, starts out with a surge of unchanneled energy, but soon levels off, and later on summons up only an occasional flutter. Similarly, newcomer Michael Keaton lets …
Feminist documentary on the pornography trade. As if the samples of the stuff were not sufficiently off-putting on their own (and these, although graphic, are doled out in too stingy a manner to give any enjoyment even to people who crave it), the didacticism of the movie squirts additional cold …
The night in question witnesses the arrest of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette near the French border, and the movie closes in on that event in the illustrious company of Restif de la Bretonne, Casanova, Thomas Paine, and others, who are trailing along in the king's tracks. Overlong and overtalky, …