A faded, laundered memory of the notorious Storyville, New Orleans red-light district and of the mysterious photographer, E. J. Bellocq, who diligently captured the working girls of the district on film. The movie seems frozen in the same way that a still photo is frozen, and it "develops" hardly more …
Joan Rivers's directorial debut, a situation comedy whose untenable situation centers around the world's first pregnant man. Rivers, herself a mother, surrounds the two birth scenes with unexpectedly reverent invocations of God and Country. Most of the time, though, her cinematic style closely copies the breathless, blurting delivery of her …
A throwback to the Joan Crawford tough-broad melodramas of the Forties, with the spindly and delicate Geraldine Chaplin as an ex-con with a firm determination to upset her ex-husband's domestic bliss. Director Alan Rudolph serves it up "extra extra dry," like the martinis the heroine orders, and trims it with …
Bob Dylan's four-hour home movie of interviews, concert-tour footage, and costume-party make-believe, is ultimately an endurance test to separate the true disciples from the doubters in his audience. Lucky are those who do not give two hoots about Bob Dylan and may stay at home with an untroubled conscience. Featuring …
Its plotting and pacing are reminiscent of primitive 1930s serials, but this overcute movie otherwise lacks their Spartan charms (Christopher Lee, as the resident mad scientist, was better off in his Fu Manchu movies). On the plus side: Kim Richards is a paragon of juvenile virtues (that is, of adult …
Robert Webber, Robert Loggia, and Paul Stewart carry with them the strong masculine smell of the straight gangster movie, and Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau trails after them, skunking up the air as though armed with perfume atomizers and deodorant aerosols. His most direct and telling blast at gangsterdom comes when …
Bernard Slade's two-character play about an adulterous motel romance carried on one weekend a year for twenty-five years. Robert Mulligan orchestrates it in basic two-shots, smooth, easygoing. Part of the reason it doesn't bog down is that the characters undergo such drastic changes during the five-year skips in the action …
The one and only Billy Shears (multi-platinum recording artist Peter Frampton) and his best friends the Hendersons (Rock and Roll Hall of Famers The Bee Gees) are four young men from the quaint little town of Heartland. With superstardom calling, this fabulous foursome leaves Heartland – and Billy's beloved Strawberry …
Aboriginal puissance pitted against Anglo effeteness, for the umpteenth time, with Alan Bates, back from the Outback to Mother England and in possession of a magical death shout that has a wipeout radius comparable to that of an atom bomb, representing the threat to English gentility. Jerzy Skolimowski's image of …
The crisp, clear images seem to be desirous of, and deserving of, some happenings a little livelier than the discreet high-finance hanky-panky written by Peter Stone (Charade, Mirage). Three or four chuckles over the course of two hours; about as fun as a businessman's lunch. Michael Caine, Louis Jourdan, Cybill …
Comedy-romance concocted from an old Tracy-and-Hepburn recipe, about two sensitive Manhattanites who both have the local habit of talking to themselves until they eventually discover each other. The woman (Anne Ditchburn) is a rabidly aspiring ballet dancer, driving her frail body to an early wheelchair, and the man (Paul Sorvino) …
Farrah Fawcett-Majors, in her first topline movie role, gets rudely upstaged by Jeff Bridges, whose pushy yet klutzy charm as a Macy's toy-department clerk is the single agreeable element in this apparent copycatting of a patented Hitchcock formula: one part unthrilling thrills, four parts comedy "relief." Directed by Lamont Johnson.
A case of a movie trapped by its own devices. In spite of such visual ploys as the sepia flashbacks and the mellow brown-red color scheme, this all-talk movie doesn't disguise, but even flaunts, its theatrical origins: both the intermittent presence of Trevor Howard as a sort of BBC "host" …
Deterministic crime movie, remarkably but not totally dour, honest, and life-sized. Dust-bin Hoffman, who sports mangy sideburns and mustache, blends very well into a nicely detailed lower-middle-class shabbiness. The lugubrious lighting poured over everything is a touch much, perhaps. And at the center of the movie is an ill-defined romance …
Tedious hedonism. The drabness of the production does nothing to sell the disco lifestyle, and the ravenousness of the sexuality is sufficient to make anyone head for the hills and establish residence as a hermit. Joan Collins has her sister Jackie to thank for such sniggering lines as, when she …