Your basic basic-training movie, with a hard-nosed, dedicated drill sergeant (played with gusto by Lou Gossett) bulldogging would-be Naval aviators through thirteen weeks of Officer Candidate School. It's something of a puzzle why a movie in this day and age would take so long going over these fundamentals, but then, …
Sentimental Soviet film, with a few affecting moments, about a post-WWII waif who grows up into a one-man campaign to maintain the image of Russian somberness (he's a writer). Most of the film takes place within flashbacks to the immediate postwar period, and it seems at first immured in a …
Low-budget independent film, produced in Minneapolis, with pretty professional standards. The central figure is the Twin Cities' answer to Woody Allen: thinning hair, owlish spectacles (contact lenses for special occasions), wry wit, even a Bogart imitation. His pursuit of romance through the classified ads is milked for a couple of …
A sort of "Video Jukebox" selection, but on a very large and very lavish scale, even allowing for the vast amount of footage run through more than once. Blood, dangling telephone receivers, pig-faced masks, more blood, vomitous animation sequences, frenzied camerawork and cutting, more blood, and so on, are meant …
In what has been billed as "the first real ghost story," the titular poltergeist is somehow allied with ghosts of the white-sheet variety, with zombies and skeletons, with Satan himself and various sub-demons, with animated dolls, with octopus-like trees, with God knows what all. There is no connection, no logical …
In what has been billed as "the first real ghost story," the titular poltergeist is somehow allied with ghosts of the white-sheet variety, with zombies and skeletons, with Satan himself and various sub-demons, with animated dolls, with octopus-like trees, with God knows what all. There is no connection, no logical …
Short for Quetzalcoatl, a prehistoric winged serpent of Aztec mythology, now nesting atop the Chrysler Building, and as if it weren't doing enough damage on its own, several diehard worshippers of the beast are conducting ritualistic human sacrifices to it and then (a more repulsive effect than any of the …
Homoeroticism in sailor suits, in hardhats, in motorcyclist leather, and in the sort of artificial colored light better suited to a musical fantasy like Carousel -- except that the image is so dim (and perhaps just as well) you can hardly make out what's happening. Fassbinder's swan song proves to …
Based on fact, this case of disputed identity in provincial France is set in the 16th Century, and no pains have been spared to re-create accurately the look of an era prior to the invention of Palmolive soap and Tide detergent. And prior to the invention of the movie camera, …
Alan Bates is brought back from the French trenches to his baronial estate, unable to remember anything of the past twenty years. That includes his wife, Julie Christie, but not his lifelong adoring cousin, Ann-Margret. He thinks he is still in love with the old flame of his youth, Glenda …
Self-consciousness must surely be the keynote of the Mad Max sequel, which would appear to have been made in astonished response to the popular and critical approval heaped on the unassuming forerunner, and which, as a result, appears to be much more scrutinizing of itself, much more full of itself. …
The problem for Sylvester Stallone is how to preserve Rocky Balboa's adorable underdog persona, now that he wears the heavyweight championship belt, has reeled off ten successful title defenses, and enjoys the good life as magazine cover-boy, American Express Card spokesman, celebrity guest on The Muppet Show, etc., etc. The …
George T. Nierenberg's modest documentary on gospel singing, or what Willie Mae Ford Smith calls "anointed singing." The principal occasion is a sixtieth-anniversary tribute to Mother Smith in St. Louis. But the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses is a big occasion too, and there are domestic scenes and …
Don Bluth, disgruntled secessionist from the Disney animation division, attempts to uphold the old traditions. That's not always possible or always good. The principal characters, ranging from drably drawn rats and mice to an unrecognizable owl, are the principal problems, and some of the more easily identifiable voices (Dom DeLuise's, …
An anonymous young man, admitted to a comic-strip mental ward after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, enters into immediate competition with another of the inmates as to which of them is the real Jesus Christ. The failed suicide soon begins to manifest some actual power: an uncontrollable telepathic ability to transmit …