"Blues" doesn't quite cover it. "Horrors" would come closer. The thin veil of pity and laughter is ripped aside periodically, however, for some slow-motion surfing footage, some ogling of teenage flesh, and a rousing John Ford-ian beach brawl. The focus of this Australian youth movie is on a couple of …
Another genealogical revelation, very much in the same line as the sole revelation in The Empire Strikes Back. Numerous other pursuits and skirmishes and creatures and contraptions -- again in the same line as those that came before. The third and final chapter in the adventures of Luke Skywalker and …
Another genealogical revelation, very much in the same line as the sole revelation in The Empire Strikes Back. Numerous other pursuits and skirmishes and creatures and contraptions -- again in the same line as those that came before. The third and final chapter in the adventures of Luke Skywalker and …
Gowan McGland is what might be, and undoubtedly has been, described as a Brendan Behanesque (i.e., drunk as a skunk, randy as a goat) poet: he has not composed a poem in five years, and ekes out instead a meager existence on the lecture circuit (or as his estranged wife …
Here is New Orleans. "Now" is August '83. Subjects include drugs, drunkenness, marriage, Africa, and public toilets. Laughs are not significantly fewer than in prior Pryor concert films. Audible audience backtalk is irritatingly up. Directed by Pryor.
Science-fictionalized Arabian Nights, or Arabian Nighted sci-fi -- it's hard to know which. In any case, Princess Lyssa is kidnapped by The Slayers on her wedding night and taken back to their master, The Beast, headquartered in a mobile mountain called The Black Fortress. Prince Colwyn, her espoused, sets out …
Why go to epic lengths — a three-and-a-quarter-hour duration, a sixteen-year time span, a $27 million budget — and not also go to epic heights? Or to ask it another way: who wants to see a smart-ass epic? Philip Kaufman's portrait of the first American astronauts does not want to …
A when-the-cat's-away youth comedy: boy meets callgirl and turns the family home, in his parents' absence, into a brothel for his schoolmates. Less vulgar than most youth comedies, but "vulgar" is still applicable. And although a decent battle is put up against implausibility, it is a losing battle all the …
Francis Ford Coppola's second adaptation of an S. E. Hinton novel has embraced the legacy of German Expressionism all the way to the black-and-white photography, a bit further, in a sense, than he went in the first, The Outsiders. Ostensibly the black-and-white takes its cue from the character of The …
Brian De Palma follows the standard rise-and-fall gangster storyline from the 1932 opus of the same name. Resettlement of it, however, in the Cuban cocaine underworld in southern Florida has sanctioned the director to give the thing a Godfather slant — the immigrant gangster as American Dreamer — as well …
Brian De Palma follows the standard rise-and-fall gangster storyline from the 1932 opus of the same name. Resettlement of it, however, in the Cuban cocaine underworld in southern Florida has sanctioned the director to give the thing a Godfather slant — the immigrant gangster as American Dreamer — as well …
Most people who will be interested in a movie about the anti-nuke martyr, Karen Silkwood, will be braced for the end. The more interested among them, however, would do well to brace themselves additionally for the tiptoeing -- or ought that to be pussyfooting? -- around the hard issues en …
Ray Bradbury's Faustian fable is, on the one hand, a little conventional in imagination, and, on the other, a little flighty. That first hand is best exemplified by the Booth Tarkington setting of the tale, and the second hand by the diabolical travelling carnival that starts the tale in motion. …
The Dorothy Stratten story, fed into the Bob Fosse automatic slicer-dicer and salad-tosser: back and forth in time, after-the-fact interviews with participants, lots of marginal detail of marginal interest. The method does not make great sense of the slaying of the ex-Playmate of the Year by her sleazoid husband. And …
Moral outrage is unbecoming in a fantasy, perhaps in any fiction. But just as in his Capricorn One, Peter Hyams has hypothesized a preposterous situation so as to allow himself to act indignant about it. The situation here -- nine Los Angeles County judges who have set up a "Court …