Marlene Dietrich, past the age of eighty, agreed to be interviewed but not photographed for a documentary on her life by Maximilian Schell; and even the interview, riddled with epithets like "kitsch" and "rubbish," turns out to be not all that agreeable to her after all. The results are nevertheless …
Hey, why not make a comedy on bigamy? Well, why not make the plot mechanics less mechanical while you are at it? Why not make bigamy believable instead of just a given? Some of the verbal wit is actually quite lifelike, which is to say, not very funny. And Blake …
A drive-thru bank teller's casual liaison with a free-lance tennis instructor and dilettante dope dealer opens the door to a world unknown. And the selection of locales in various parts of Los Angeles is fresh enough that even the avid moviegoer might feel he doesn't know a thing or two. …
It is not unreasonable to imagine that a better movie than Uncommon Valor could be made about Vietnam veterans returning to the scene to rescue unreleased POWs. It is perhaps unreasonable to imagine that Chuck Norris would be in it. Here the martial-arts master, once again motivated by vengeance (and …
Paul Mazursky's movie about a Russian circus musician who defects in Bloomingdale's is his most thematically, even ideologically, tangy to date. In the long run, it is perhaps too intractably thematic in conception. But not in the short run, nor even in the middle-distance run. It goes along quite well …
The actual "incident" on which this is based occurred in 1901, but the visual style harks back nearer to Rembrandt -- and Rembrandt, at that, covered with three centuries of dust, and examined at dusk without the lights on. Illumination of some sort is sorely needed. Why would the prison …
Two cops. One a veteran, a slob, a freeloader, a horse-player, a bit of a "rogue." The other fresh out of police academy, natty in suit and tie, a careerist, a teetotaler, a straight arrow. There is the requisite amount of time spent on establishing their differences, the requisite amount …
One must of course be willing to go a certain distance, however grumblingly, with the movie's chosen premise: the mixture of baseball lore and Arthurian Romance preserved from the Bernard Malamud novel. But the road downward from Arthurian Romance to the latest issue of Baseball Digest is not short and …
Anime fantasy adventure written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki from his 1982 manga of the same name.
Hayao Miyazaki adapted his own manga for this tale about healing the rift between man and nature in a post-apocalyptic jungle.
Hayao Miyazaki adapted his own manga for this tale about healing the rift between man and nature in a post-apocalyptic jungle.
The adult might well appreciate the plug put in for novels (versus video games) as a source of children's entertainment, and might also appreciate the elementary lesson dished out at the climax about the audience's vital role in the creative process: more or less what Coleridge had in mind with …
A troubled boy dives into a fantasy world through the pages of a mysterious book.
A troubled boy dives into a fantasy world through the pages of a mysterious book.
Intriguing idea: a group of American teenagers share the same dream, from which they wake up dead. Why and how this is happening, especially at this particular time, remains obscure to the end, and the mention of Balinese "dream skills" is no help. (And speaking of obscurity, the photography throughout …