The people are called things like Auntie Entity, Scrooloose, The Collector, and Master-Blaster. The last-named is actually two people, a dwarfish genius who rides piggyback on his masked bodyguard, and together they rule the Underworld (or power source) of Bartertown. Auntie Entity, who rules the rest of Bartertown, wants to …
Squarely in the line of those semi-documentary exposés of the Fifties, Captive City, Phenix City Story, New Orleans Uncensored, et al., although the emphasis has shifted, as the title would indicate, from How Shocking That Such Things Could Happen Here to How Amazing That Anyone Would Do Anything About It. …
The veteran Miami crime reporter is on the brink of burn-out: "I don't want to see my name in the paper next to pictures of dead bodies anymore." But his handling of a serial murder story so impresses the perpetrator that the latter phones him up and nominates him as …
A piece of light persiflage, too playful to be truly provocative, addressed to the opposite sex by a woman writer and director (Doris Dörrie, more facile as writer than director). The situation of a cuckold becoming the apartment-mate of The Other Man, incognito, has some real possibilities. (The woman in …
The task of tailoring the time-travel theme to the teenage market has led to, besides such concrete accessories as skateboards and electric guitars, an inordinate dwelling on anachronisms, with a contemporary teenager plunged (much like an addict of TV's Happy Days, only deeper) into the Fifties. It's as though the …
The lighter side of Martin Ritt: a romantic comedy set in the sort of Western small town where everyone knows everyone else and where the lone movie theater -- the Spur -- is open Thursday through Sunday only. The screenplay by the husband-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, …
Something a bit different, a bit out-of-the-way. And mere differentness, though a separate matter entirely, can go a good ways to offset deficiencies in strictly artistic areas. To be given entrée into the Pakistani community of South London -- to observe firsthand the readjustment of the foreigner and the resentment …
What is it? The refurbished remnant of an alien spacecraft, the rest of which was destroyed by personal order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the engine of which has collected dust in an Air Force graveyard since 1957. When hooked up to a car battery or plugged into an …
There is plenty of room for more farcical or more satirical a treatment of the American abroad than, say, the inimitable Dodsworth. And plenty of justification for one, too. But such a one should neither be guided nor discouraged by this feeble effort: driving on the wrong side of the …
Wait a second. Didn't Freddy get his revenge the first time? This time out he seems only to want to recruit the newest teen occupant of Elm Street as his helper. Why? Or to pose the broader question: So what? When you can't tell dream from reality, you can't much …
And an old and durable story, too: the radicalization of a complacent bourgeoise, namely an Argentine history teacher who comes to suspect that her adopted five-year-old might be one of the desaparecidos -- missing children of political prisoners, sold for profit into good homes. The climate of complacency is set …
Virgin blood appears to be hard for a vampire to come by in the late Twentieth Century. This is unfortunate (to say nothing of unbelievable), because it mires the movie in sniggering teenage sex comedy. Lauren Hutton, and her black-and-gray color scheme, brings some real class (if not quite nobility) …