Paul Schrader runs his cultural vacuum cleaner over the rock-and-roll scene -- not at the Billboard Top 100 level, but at the bottom-rung bar scene in Cleveland and environs: fly-by-night bands with names like the Barbusters, the Hunzz, Yogurt Moon (shades of Spinal Tap! -- one of whose members, Michael …
Through the agency of a "brain-transfer serum" from some Southwest Indians, an L.A. surgeon and his high-school son exchange personalities, and have the opportunity literally to walk in one another's shoes — and socks and skin and so on. It is difficult sometimes to keep the situation straight. Dudley Moore, …
Any new James Bond — that is, any new actor in the role — brings with him a golden opportunity to take stock, make changes. And Timothy Dalton, who herewith relieves Roger Moore of duty, certainly talked a good game in advance interviews. But why, if it was deemed a …
If we must have a vampire youth movie (something of a contradiction in terms, isn't it?), then a leather-jacketed motorcycle gang, with a leader fashioned after Billy Idol, seems an all-right idea for the vampires. And a couple of earnest comic-book buffs seem an all-right idea for the vampire hunters. …
Terribly fey romantic fantasy by Alan Rudolph. The opening sequence apparently wants to plug in to the Capra-esque Forties, but, although Timothy Hutton makes a good likeness of Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart, the high-contrast black-and-white is too arty and artificial for total comfort. Then it's straight up to Heaven …
A high-powered P.R. woman, hired to generate some positive publicity and thereby re-generate some public funds for a top-secret android called "Ulysses," sets about to instill some social graces in him. Several roads unfold in front of the movie at this point, most prominently the Pygmalion theme, with the traditional …
Burnt-out secret agent, in nomadic retirement, has car trouble smack-dab in the middle of an American Nazi survivalist empire in rural Oregon. Burt Reynolds broods photogenically over his past, but the plot that unfolds in the present ought to have brought him to outright tears. With Cynthia Gibb, Scott Wilson, …
It begins as a sort of Claude Lelouchian juggling act -- a backlot romance at Cinecittà studios intermixed with the storyline of the film in production, a biography of Italian writer and communist Cesare Pavese. Only it isn't as fast and agile as Lelouch, and the Pavese ball soon gets …
The Ivory-Merchant team, straight from their treatment of E.M. Forster's Room with a View, have moved on to his posthumous novel about a proper English gentleman who gives in to "the unspeakable vice of the Greeks" (or "Oscar Wilde's disease") while at Cambridge in 1909, loses his initiator to a …
A poor man's Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Instead of an all-star cast of accomplished comics, it has a no-name cast of would-be comics. It also has a director, Richard Fleischer, of great experience if not enthusiasm, so it functions all right mechanically; and the writing is not incapable of …
Some cozy sentiments about love, partly shielded behind the abrasive exterior of New York Italians, and some lovely postcards of the moon over Manhattan. Cher, with her hair pinned up and dusted with gray (at least until her big date at the Metropolitan Opera), proves she can lay on the …
Robert Benton, director of Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart, tries to lighten up with a comic thriller that's sort of like Hitchcock crossed with Leo McCarey (or, in short, sort of like Stanley Donen). But he hedges his bet by still retaining Nestor Almendros as cameraman. Photography …
Still trying to make sense of Freddy Krueger, using an important biographical tidbit about him ("the bastard son of a hundred maniacs") provided by a now-you-see-her-now-you-don't nun. (Guess who she turns out to be.) Is it possible that all Freddy wanted was for his old bones to rest in hallowed …