James Dearden's remake of a 1956 quickie (Gerd Oswald, director) isn't so much modernized as deliberately old-fashioned. Specifically, Hitchcock-fashioned. Not, in fact, since early De Palma has anybody labored so hard to emulate The Master. And the result is a veritable feast for Hitchcockians: the indoor stage-set passed off as …
Another Jacques Rivette marathon (four hours long: not a personal high), a marathon for strollers, naturellement, across an arid and a frigid terrain. Roughly a novella's worth of material has here been so stretched out as to lose all meaningful contour: exactly the opposite of what we want from a …
Cerebral French comedy about a jilted lover who plots a seduction as a revenge against womankind -- but only as a literary stunt. (The nasty old publisher who proposes the idea is named Costal, evocative of Montherlant's famous misogynist, Costals.) The randomly selected target of seduction is viewed by her …
He's done the aviator (Top Gun) and the race-car driver (Days of Thunder). Now Tony Scott, the new traditionalist, turns to the seedy and smart-aleck private detective. (Giving him a faithless wife and a foul-mouthed teenage daughter was a decent idea. Allowing him to incapacitate his foes with a stream …
Steve Martin as the would-be Woody of Los Angeles: or in other words, daring at last to poke his head out of the closet of eggheadism. The sole scriptwriter on the project, Martin has a fund of observations on the lifestyle thereabouts, embellished (and befogged) with exaggeration and fantasy, and …
Two guiltless fugitives (brothers-in-law: the married one's surname is Husband) fall into the sympathetic clutches of Dr. Chilblains, a cryonics crackpot who takes them out of their difficulties by flash-freezing them. They are awakened twenty-nine years later to different difficulties, in 1991. The debatable decision to make both men dimwits …
True story, crime story, sob story, about an epileptic halfwit (mentally damaged in the Blitz?) who falls in with a bad crowd, takes part in the murder of a London bobby. (When he yelled "Let him have it," he meant "Give the copper the gun," not "Plug him with it.") …
There is not here as rich and as varied (nor as incongruous) a cast of characters as in the same filmmaker's High Hopes, limited as it mostly is to one working-class family of four ("I won't tell you again about using my cotton-wool balls!") and a few friends. But once …
As near to philosophy as Mel Brooks gets: "It's good to be alive. There are so many things you can't do when you're dead." The richest man in the world (Brooks himself) takes a bet to live among, and as, the homeless, and acquires there a new set of values, …
A don't-worry-be-happy movie. Complacently anti-intellectual, and a fount of comfort for the low achiever, it tells the tale of an ulcerous child prodigy named Fred (what would you expect him to be named? Chad? Eric? Trevor?), whose talents range from poetry to the piano to math to physics, so as …
Black Pride fairy tale about an Atlanta "homeboy" whose dream comes true: he lands a job as a local newscaster, only it has the nightmarish drawback of turning him bit by bit into a white man. There's a chastening moral to the tale, and a contradictory (or amoral) happy ending. …
Well-packaged trash, sent over from Spain, consisting of the concupiscent widow, the chaste maid, and the callow young man in the middle. The hot parts are moderately warm; the cooling-off parts are lengthy; Maribel Verdú is highly believable and touching in the stereotyped role of Señorita Priss. With Victoria Abril …
Grand passion in the Parisian gutter: the love of a broken-legged acrobat for a half-blind artist, sharing a stone bench on the Pont-Neuf during its closure for restoration. ("Love takes bedrooms," philosophizes a fellow bum, "not windy sidewalks.") The bicentennial fireworks and the frolicking beneath them are something to see, …
So it's come to this. Claude Chabrol, one of the original New Wavers, those enemies of "prestige" cinema and of literary cinema, is reduced to doing a tasteful, well-mounted, and sparsely narrated treatment of one of the (truly) Great Books. Well, Jean Renoir, one of the New Wave's spiritual fathers, …
Robert Mulligan takes up his special cross-to-bear, the Sensitive Youth Movie: To Kill a Mockingbird, Up the Down Staircase, Summer of '42, et al. The youthful performances here are, as ever, expertly coached and coaxed. And Reese Witherspoon, as the fourteen-year-old heroine, looks ready to take the baton from such …