A blackmail scheme in Raymond Chandler's territory -- unseemly hotels, friendly neighborhood tavern, all-night laundromat, bus depot, and brick-walled Beverly Hills mansion -- is of scant interest, although the dialogue has a proper cheesy tang, and all the characters have catchy names like Pesco, Procane, Boykins, and Frann. Charles Bronson, …
Kung-fu comes to the spaghetti Western. Who in hell's idea was this? A diminutive master of the martial arts searches for a long-lost Chinese fortune on a Wild West treasure hunt, the clues to which are tattooed on various ladies' bottoms. With Lee Van Cleef; directed by Anthony Dawson.
Alexander Kluge's lizard-eyed satire about the chief of security at a besieged factory: the laughing-stock central character has a bratwurst physique and a Germanic mania for order and preparedness. Kluge displays so much cool detachment from his subject that the crystalline images (photographed by Thomas Mauch) seem to float slowly …
The olden days of the buccaneers are revived by out-of-trim actors in slushy, churning action scenes; the irresolute camera seems to be never in the right place. It's conceivable that Hollywood simply doesn't know how to make this type of movie anymore, even at the luxurious budget of ten millions; …
The moviemakers, director Martin Scorsese and scriptwriter Paul Schrader, have started with an old-style Warner Brothers working-man premise and tried to cram their learning into it: existentialist philosophy from Sartre and Camus, homages to Bresson's Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest, lyrical sketches of New York After Dark styled …
A meek Parisian clerk takes over an apartment whose previous occupant leaped out the window, and he gradually comes to suspect there is a conspiracy among his neighbors to drive him out the same window. It is tempting to see Roman Polanski's black comedy of urban paranoia as a companion …
A witty satire by Nelson Pereira dos Santos (adapted from a novel by Jorge Amado) on the rediscovery and official canonization of a forgotten Brazilian miscegenationist whose work in his own lifetime got him nowhere but into jail. This is a closer companion piece to the director's colorful and comical …
It was predictable that a second selection of highlights from MGM musicals would look somewhat dimmer than the first. But the impression of scraping-the-bottom is needlessly underlined by padding Part II with irrelevancies: an homage to the unmusical team of Tracy and Hepburn, Garbo's clumsy dance in Two-Faced Woman, a …
The opening is full of promise. Behind the credits, the secluded setting -- the swank Starliner apartments -- is established with a parody of a real-estate advertisement: a slide show of the Starliner's many amenities (tennis courts, boutique, medical and dental clinics, and on and on) and a narration spoken …
A Montana cowboy's search for his runaway sister, under the brown skies of Los Angeles, covers some interesting territory -- Chicano barrio, crisis house for teenagers, call girl's posh apartment. But the movie takes so many shortcuts in getting from one place to another that it piles up a lot …
It is 1985 and the president of an avant-garde TV network has been called before a Senate committee to defend the licentious programming policies that have captured an eighty-five-percent share of the viewing audience. The evidence shown to back up this conceited prelude proves to be nothing but run-of-the-mill TV …
This unscrupulous thriller lifts its basic premise — a sniper at a Super Bowl game — straight from Bogdanovich's Targets, and sprints into the movie marketplace a hair ahead of Frankenheimer's Black Sunday. As in the Bogdanovich, the mass murderer is shown to have a taste for Baby Ruth bars; …
A kill-crazy Vietnam veteran is summoned home to protect the local yokels from a horde of oil workers, who have besieged the town in Atilla the Hun style. He abuses his new authority by requisitioning machine guns, grenades, and bazookas ("We've got enough fire power here to re-take Saigon"), and …