Moralistic romantic comedy about a middle-aged concert pianist who is overextended in his amorous pursuits. Plot complications and bits of comic business that are devised for the sole reason of irritating one or another of the characters stand a good chance of irritating the spectator too, and the chance in …
Richard Quine has suffered long and unfairly from comparisons with his friend and frequent collaborator Blake Edwards, and his comic version of The Prisoner Of Zenda seems certain to cause renewed suffering -- partly because of Edwards's earlier use of a Zenda subplot in his The Great Race, and partly …
A free reworking of Random Harvest by scriptwriter Garry Michael White, who cannot be held accountable for the unerodable bedrock of absurdity in the thing, but only for his own doctorings, chief among which is the use of plastic surgery in place of amnesia as the gimmick that separates two …
Sermonizing sci-fi allows director John Frankenheimer to show his knitted-brow concern for liberal causes (housing problems in the urban ghettos, Indian rights, industrial pollution), while he amuses himself with the lunacies of this Field and Stream nightmare (a frenzied raccoon, an overinflated tadpole, and a murderous fifteen-foot-tall mutant that looks …
The cultural warfare between the Mods and the Rockers in early-Sixties England takes a backseat, most of the way, to the more traditional warfare between the younger generation and their disapproving elders, which tends to blur this movie's identity with any number of Angry Young Man and Swinging London movies …
Robert Altman looks into the future through a frosted window. What he sees is a snowbound civilization, bands of well-fed dogs devouring human carcasses, and the last survivors dressing in Renaissance costumes and entertaining themselves with an unfathomable game called Quintet, which may be played either with a game board …
Albert Brooks, his first time as a director, casts himself as a first-time director, a brash Hollywood enfant terrible who immodestly sees himself as taking the next epoch-making step in cinematic art, starting from where the public-television documentary An American Family left off, and ascending to a higher plateau of …
First, this is a feast of Americana, located largely in Kansas, and at times reminiscent of John Ford, with Ellen Burstyn talking to a tombstone, Eva Le Gallienne supplying the ham, and Richard Farnsworth, as a grizzled Last Chance Gas proprietor, softly singing "Come-a-ti-yi-yippie-yippie-yay" and showing off his two-headed snake …
It's not a movie in the largest sense, but it's a lot of laughs however you slice it. This live-in-concert, one-man performance, not even especially well filmed or edited, lets Richard Pryor be more himself than he can in any fiction film, lets him say more than he can on …
The Zero for Conduct of rock musicals (no need to worry about flattering a movie that is already in a delirium of overconfidence). The Ramones, appearing as themselves, are branded by the adult world as corrupters of America's youth; and the defense of them, and of the right to hear …
As silly and sanitary a view of America's youth as any since the Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach movies. The lead female role, a Beverly Hills brat who ascends to the delirious pinnacle of winning a roller-disco trophy before she resigns herself to her sad fate as a Juilliard flautist, gives …
However much this movie owes to the particulars of Janis Joplin's life, it surely owes more to the generalities of the musical-biography genre. These are given such a convincing documentary veneer that you don't really mind such stuff and nonsense as the romance with the AWOL soldier, the lesbian relationship …
Hard to figure why anyone, even one as square as Stanley Kramer, would be interested in making this movie in any year later than 1931. On trial for the murder of a vivacious young nun (Kathleen Quinlan), a self-defrocked priest (Dick Van Dyke) reveals in a series of flashbacks the …
Peter Bogdanovich trespasses on Graham Greene territory, a story of life in exile, a wallow in waywardness, and an undoubted treat for the alienated and the sullied. The narrative exposition in general, and the badly recorded Orson Welles-ian dialogue in particular, is like slush, but the movie achieves a certain …