The first part of this Soviet film, during which you will probably get your fill of sun-dappled impressionistic images long before the director has gotten his, closely resembles Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, with its broad caricatures of stock silent-movie types (the temperamental prima donna, the masculine matinee idol with a falsetto …
With characters called The Bandit, Mr. Big, and Sheriff Buford T. Justice, you might anticipate allegory, but you get nothing more than Southern-fried Keystone Kops. Sally Field, as a chipper chorus girl fleeing from a shotgun wedding, has a natural sense of humor that gives her role an air of …
With characters called The Bandit, Mr. Big, and Sheriff Buford T. Justice, you might anticipate allegory, but you get nothing more than Southern-fried Keystone Kops. Sally Field, as a chipper chorus girl fleeing from a shotgun wedding, has a natural sense of humor that gives her role an air of …
Formerly titled Day of the Animals. The prologue is an alarm-ringing editorial against aerosol spray cans, and the remainder of the movie is a pedestrian fantasy about wildlife running wild when the earth's ozone layer is thrown out of whack. The characterizations have a disarmingly primitive quality: every time one …
William Friedkin's remake takes half an hour to get to the starting point of H-G Clouzot's Wages of Fear, and he takes advantage of that half-hour to accumulate a dozen corpses. (This early action looks good in the Coming Attractions trailer. Friedkin, it seems, will go to any lengths to …
A housewife and a homosexual, two slighted types in virile Fascist Italy, have a one-day fling in their evacuated tenement, as everyone else in Rome is thronging the streets to take part in a big reception for Adolf Hitler. There's some good stage business about the uncomfortable host-guest relationship between …
A crime melodrama that comes across more like its opposite genre -- farce. The exasperating plot complications develop around a bank robber's attempts to recover a bag of loot stashed idiotically in a streetcorner mailbox, and they are stretched out to ninety-minutes only because the characters behave with as much …
A scrapbook of earlier Bond escapades. It takes the skiing chase from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the underwater stuff from Thunderball, the fight in the train compartment from From Russia, with Love, the supposedly unassailable criminal fortress and the commando takeover of same from You Only Live Twice. It …
George Lucas's homage to Flash Gordon embraces, too, some of the beloved clichés of cowboy, swashbuckler, and aviator movies. The story is set in a remote galaxy in the remote past, so that it can't be mistaken as a reflection of anything in modern-day society except Hollywood hokum, and it …
George Lucas's homage to Flash Gordon embraces, too, some of the beloved clichés of cowboy, swashbuckler, and aviator movies. The story is set in a remote galaxy in the remote past, so that it can't be mistaken as a reflection of anything in modern-day society except Hollywood hokum, and it …
George Lucas's homage to Flash Gordon embraces, too, some of the beloved clichés of cowboy, swashbuckler, and aviator movies. The story is set in a remote galaxy in the remote past, so that it can't be mistaken as a reflection of anything in modern-day society except Hollywood hokum, and it …
A mesmerizing start — a magical nightmare journey through a gleaming modern airport, through a torrential downpour, and through some inexplicable colored lights. And along the way, some teasing, ominous episodes that do not actually come to anything. One in an underlit, indoor swimming pool is fraught with voyeuristic menace, …
One of those humdrum caper pictures, filmed on automatic-pilot, whose only excuse is the opportunity it affords its participants to do some European sightseeing. With David Janssen, Senta Berger, Elke Sommer; directed by Jack Arnold.
Don Siegel's Cold War comic book imagines that there are Russian fifth columnists planted all across the U.S.A. as good, solid Middle Americans, who may be hypnotically activated as saboteurs upon hearing a line from Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." (One caricatured KGB agent to …