A pampered Jewish-American Princess, at wit's end after her brand-new bridegroom perishes from a mid-coital heart attack, is conned by a fork-tongued Army recruiter into signing up for a three-year hitch, and this proves to be a character-building experience, exactly as always advertised, once she gets over the initial shock …
A lunkhead of a movie about an apparent lunkhead of a man, former middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta. Despite a number of Expressionistic and lyrical outbursts, a dull-minded realism rules this movie. And even the lyricism is dull-minded: the use of slow-motion to heighten the impact of the pulverizing …
Director Jerry Jameson, having previously been assigned to retrieve a crashed airliner from the ocean floor in Airport '77, and having handled the job none too badly, is here given the heftier task of resurrecting the long-lost Titanic, and he's not quite up to it -- or down to it. …
John Sayles's characters are the Ivy League student activists of the Vietnam War years, who, a decade later, have found niches for themselves in such "meaningful" lines of work as high-school teacher, Vista volunteer, drug counselor, singer-songwriter manquée, and chief speechwriter for a U.S. Senator (Democratic, of course). A similarity …
Much swaggering and slapping of palms, even long before an unemployed reggae drummer of undemonstrated skills wreaks revenge on his oppressors. The music creates the occasional impression that this movie has more hop to it than it has in actuality. It's filmed as if the Jamaican setting is expected to …
The verbal comedy is a little lackadaisical, but Neil Simon is much more adept at that than he is at the creaking physical stuff: the continual pratfalls of Chevy Chase , the hiding under beds, the drunken butler, the pack of dogs stampeding into the courtroom and the mammoth St. …
Martin Mull serves as a strait-laced straight man to the, it seems, universally mellowed-out, consciousness-raised, and fad-mad citizens of Marin County. One might have thought that stick-in-the-mud conservatism would not provide the securest base from which to launch a satirical attack (even at a target as eminently satirizable as Marin …
The movie starts out as if it is going to be about the psychic powers of a little boy with an imaginary playmate named Tony nesting in his mouth and transmitting messages to him through his index finger. Before long, however, an irreversible shift from the boy's powers gets underway …
Five government-funded think-tank scientists, actually conducting themselves more like gag writers for a TV variety show, set in motion a whopping practical joke whereby an assistant professor at Columbia University is brainwashed into believing himself an extraterrestrial and is passed off as such onto the gullible world. This poor patsy …
Romantic fantasy in the vein of William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie, Henry Hathaway's Peter Ibbetson, possibly Tay Garnett's One-Way Passage, three oldies that won the support of first-generation surrealists for their vision of the libido as clawing its way over all material obstacles, breaking through such inhibitors as manacles, prison …
As almost all critics have said, and have trouble thinking of anything else to say, this is Woody Allen's 8 1/2 (actually his 9 unless you want to give him half credit for What's Up Tiger Lily? and make it his 9 1/2). It is the same style applied to …
Two fugitives from the Broadway rat race run afoul of the law (alternate spelling: afowl) when two Arizona bad men steal their woodpecker costumes and stick up a bank. As the two innocent prison inmates (oh, of course: jailbirds), Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor come across as equally hysterical -- …
The subject is illusion and reality and the blurred borderline between those states, and the lesson is conducted at an easy introductory level, geared perhaps for the audience of Hooper: Illusion and Reality Made Simple. The smarty-pants treatment of this matter is pretty strictly limited to what we might agree …
Actress Lee Grant's adaptation of a Tillie Olsen novella, chronicling an old immigrant couple's cross-country odyssey during the wife's terminal illness, is her feature-film directing debut, and she works hard to strengthen the myth of the woman's eye and woman's touch: everywhere you look, you find a lovely blanket or …