"Scientists predicted a light show of stellar proportions," the full-chested narrator announces at the outset. What the scientists got instead was the world population reduced to rusty dust (except for a lucky few who were insulated at the crucial moment by steel), and the sky turned to peach and strawberry. …
A sixteen-year-old aspiring photographer, with an Ansel Adams-ish bias toward the pristine and the peopleless, shoos an early-twenties aspiring pop singer out of one of his immaculate black-and-white frames. (In stark contrast to the sizzling colors of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.) Only later, in his darkroom, with a blow-up of the …
Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's first film in exile: made in Italy about a Russian in exile. It has every reason to be painfully vivid, including its lentissimo tempo and finely etched photography. But vivid is the last thing it is: in other words, only the climactic walk across the water, …
Bergman and Bogart together again? Not hardly. This Bergman is Andrew and he's the scriptwriter, and this Bogart is Paul and he's the director; and although a line from Casablanca is quoted (perhaps for luck, perhaps by coincidence), it is not really the same thing at all. George Burns plays …
This is a doughy lump of a soap opera pounded out to the specifications of a road movie; its director is an inveterate vagabond asked to do the job of a Mr. Fix-it. The outcome is often beautiful, more often artificial. One does not look to Wim Wenders for much …
A judicious pruning job on E.M. Forster's novel of colonial India, trimming and shaping his slow-turning pages into scenes that will "play." And besides scenes that play, there are also the players to play them: not so much Alec Guinness in brownface, but Victor Banerjee (with darkened skin himself), James …
Two poor gobs, taking part in a World War II experiment in radar insulation, are caught up in some trick photography and dropped down in the Nevada desert, where, by more than the merest coincidence, the same government scientist is conducting a similar experiment forty years later. (will he never …
The anxious question beforehand was whether or not the alleged autobiographical origins would produce something a little more firsthand and free of formula than Robert Benton had given us in the past, something a little more detailed and individual, more expansive and at ease. Or to move a step nearer …
Steve Guttenberg leads a lovable band of misfits into law enforcement.
Malcolm Mowbray directs Maggie Smith, Michael Palin, and a host of English character actors in this story of a desperate attempt to eat well in hard times.
Brassy political satire, shot in unavailingly muted color by William Fraker. A cocktail waitress foils an assassination attempt on a Middle Eastern emir, who then wants to add her to his circle of wives. The State Department, anxious to negotiate a military installation in the emir's homeland, sets the wheels …
Romance between Navy nurse and doctor in the midst of the Vietnam War, though the particular war hardly seems to matter, and indeed you might have thought that the likes of the double-schmaltz ending (Gee, I thought you were dead. Gee, I thought you were dead, too) had not been …
Even though this is only his first movie, rock star Prince is no more equipped to play a show-biz upstart than was Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born. He shows no fear of the camera, but rather supreme confidence that it loves him (him, that is, and his Pepe …
Brazilian historical pageant, of dubious export value: too distant already to bear up under Carlos Diegues's "distancing" devices, and too propagandistic to have much intellectual appeal. It tells of a slave revolt on a 17th-century sugar plantation, sparked by the folk hero, Ganga Zumba, who was also the subject of …
Pointless wallow in American Innocence: teenage romance under the cloud of World War II, aimed, apparently, at the generation of teenagers who just missed out on Summer of '42, Red Sky at Morning, Baby Blue Marine, et al. The boy (Sean Penn, with a good haircut) is a bowling-pin setter, …