Clear attempt by the Disney people to produce something in the It's a Wonderful Life area; something that might reappear yearly and make the studio a tidy little Christmas bonus; something that might disseminate annual ennui and inspire a few extra seasonal suicides. Certainly more time and conviction go into …
An Agatha Christie mystery of no great consequence (if that isn't tautologous), with neither Marple nor Poirot in the detective role, but rather an American paleontologist named Calgary, trying to clear a dead man's name and his own conscience. Donald Sutherland handles the sense of justice and sense of guilt …
Isak Dinesen's life as a coffee grower in Kenya, before, during, and after World War I, is almost the stuff of an Edna Ferber novel. The adapters' leeriness of vulgarity (but not of sheer bulk) prevents it from being that, and prevents it from being very exciting or eventful in …
Clint Eastwood has been able to pick up the Western genre right where he left it, nine years earlier with The Outlaw Josey Wales. Where he left it, though, was on its sickbed, and what comes entirely natural to Clint Eastwood might well have seemed teeth-gnashingly self-conscious and pretentious to …
The moviegoer's first introduction to Pee-wee Herman, and both of them should be very happy about it. Jerry Lewis would seem to be the comedian's closest screen cousin, at least in measurement of time, but he even bypasses Lewis in likeness to their silent-era forebears, with his complete and unalterable …
It took nerve to call a movie Perfect, especially when perfection is the movie's subject-matter (never mind its stylistic attainment) only part of the time. The "perfect" part has to do with how a typical Southern California health club called The Sports Erection -- er, Connection -- has replaced the …
The story, from the David Hare stage play, concerns a representative British subject named Susan Traherne, whose life peaks early in her term of service to the French Resistance in World War II, and whose inability ever to match that experience, and whose discontentment with mere "plenty," will make the …
Jackie Chan’s comedies have an innate worldwide appeal. Who doesn’t love Jackie Chan? Passive until pushed, he’s nice to small children and animals and only kicks people when they ask for it. Not since Buster Keaton had a comedic performer literally broken bones to earn our laughs. (Count the bruises …
Jackie Chan’s comedies have an innate worldwide appeal. Who doesn’t love Jackie Chan? Passive until pushed, he’s nice to small children and animals and only kicks people when they ask for it. Not since Buster Keaton had a comedic performer literally broken bones to earn our laughs. (Count the bruises …
British social comedy, more fearlessly ill-mannered than the old Ealing Studio ones it has widely been likened to, centered around the post-war food shortages and austerity programs. A small-town milquetoast chiropodist ("Mrs. Roach's ingrown toenail seems to have turned the corner"), egged on by his social-climbing wife ("I want a …
Richard Condon's comic novel of love and "family" loyalty inside the Mafia has a long and tortuous plot, taken at a very slow walk by John Huston (and, even so, with some very wide and wobbly turns). The pace allows you plenty of time to admire the design of the …
A staged documentary about a women's body-building competition sponsored by the filmmakers in order that they might film it. (The staging hits its low point with the "spontaneous" marriage proposal on which the camera somehow manages to eavesdrop.) There was the potential here for a sort of Werner Herzog meditation …
A movie by, but not with, Woody Allen. And the inevitable question to ask with any Woody Allen movie -- who's the inspiration this time, Fellini or Bergman? -- can be answered as follows: Fellini, specifically The White Sheik, the one about the provincial honeymooner who gets to meet in …
Science fiction of the subgenre Last-Man-on-Earth. Or at least on New Zealand. The "Man" in this instance is an Auckland scientist who, in league with "the Americans," may or may not have had a hand in "the effect," as it comes to be known, that has seemingly removed all trace …
This sequel advances into territory already occupied and overpopulated: the post-Vietnam War MIA rescue operation. (The director of the earlier film, Ted Kotcheff, got into that territory first, with Uncommon Valor.) Still, there is plenty of lively action, helped along by Jerry Goldsmith's thundering music and Jack Cardiff's gleaming photography. …