John Boorman's autobiographical film about a London family in the Blitz — with himself running wild as a small boy in a fabulous rubbled playground — has gotten hearty congratulations for what it is not. It is not Mrs. Miniver and The Battle of Britain and stiff-upper-lip and There'll Always …
Steven Lisberger, whose first feature was the high-technology, low-humanity Tron, has herewith lowered the technology without appreciably heightening the humanity. John Cusack, bouncing back from a flunked chemistry exam, a missed plane, a stuck car, a storm at sea, a Third World prison cell, and finally impressing his girlfriend's father …
Bill Forsyth, the Scottish filmmaker of Local Hero and Comfort and Joy, has quitted his native land for someplace else with plenty of weather, the Pacific Northwest. And he has packed along most of his sense of humor and of his sense of magic. The story he tells, from a …
A "caper thriller," if we must classify it, about a team of con artists and the female psychologist (and best-selling author of Driven: Obsession and Compulsion in Everyday Life) who becomes involved in their schemes as scientific observer and then as participant. Stiff, sterile, strange and unreal, suppositional in logic …
They've stolen the idea from Fantastic Voyage -- a manned vessel microscopically miniaturized and injected into a man's body -- but then they've run with it in so completely different a direction as to escape prosecution. The trouble (not to say crime) is that this different direction is too far …
The case of fifteen-year-old Sonny Wisecarver, alias The Woo Woo Kid, who created a small scandal in the last years of World War II by running off with two older married women (aged twenty-one and twenty-five) in succession -- a true story, told with the oleaginous inflections of a blue …
A contentedly conventional comedy, and to all appearances a properly modest one (never mind the staggering budgetary reports), it updates the old "Road to" formula with Dustin Hoffman more or less in the Bing Crosby role (oily, guileful) and Warren Beatty more or less in the Bob Hope one (oafish, …
Bittersweet comedy (nine-tenths sweet, one bitter) whose basic strategy is to have a thirty-one-year-old woman behave as if she were seven. Since she holds down a secretarial job in a very "now" Toronto art gallery, the results of this are more often embarrassing than funny. The idolatrous fixation of a …
Literary cinema at its most numbingly loquacious, most crampedly illustrational. Because the D.H. Lawrence novel is autobiographical, you get not just a piece of literature by him, but him himself -- under the pseudonym of Richard Somers, and in the form of Colin Friels, looking as much like Lawrence as …
The Chicano cultural background, abundantly detailed, adds some unusual seasonings to the familiar tale of the singing star extinguished in his prime -- in the same plane crash, in this case, as Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. (There are also brief impersonations of a couple of other members of …
An historical epic whose stupefying beauty is surpassed only by its stupefying dullness. The life of Pu Yi, emperor of China at age three and an average Communist citizen at his death, affords plenty of material for a movie; and Bernardo Bertolucci's stated fascination with "the metamorphosis of a man …
Homosexual love triangle orchestrated by Pedro Almodóvar, a-bubble with campy passions, and tricked out with some plot complications more tantalizing than finally satisfying. Eusebio Poncela, Antonio Banderas, Carmen Maura.
What a bummer! A college freshman returns home for Christmas vacation to find his best high-school friend on a downhill slide of drugs and debts and sexual degradation, and his ex-girlfriend being dragged down behind him. ("You don't look happy," he tells the girl, who promptly corrects his priorities: "But …
Perfunctory male bonding between new cop partners (one of them's suicidal, the other is fifty, gray, and domestic), but some energetic action near the end, not counting the hand-to-hand stuff, confusingly shot to cover up Mel Gibson's physical limitations. The star, as a matter of fact, finishes a poor fifth …