This follows the -- or a -- standard operating procedure for science fiction: start from a base of reality, the more au courant the better, and take off on a logical extension of no matter what length. The base of reality here is Virtual Reality. "Falling, Floating, and Flying," summarizes …
Aimless days in the company of inarticulate Brooklyn street toughs -- and then one of them gets shot. Nick (Didn't Martin Scorsese Start This Way?) Gomez trains a cinéma-verité camera on the faces of his principals, and takes little interest in their surroundings. The unknown actors are very confident and …
Glistening vein of ore uncovered in sports history: the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed when the boys were away for World War II, and continuing for ten years after the inaugural year chronicled here. Unhappily, the pickaxe is in the hands of Penny Marshall, with her penchant for forced …
An Elmer Gantry updated for the age of the portable computer and the rock tour. En route to Topeka, a truck in a revivalist caravan breaks down outside Rustwater, Kansas (a little heavy-handed maybe, but it could have been worse; could have been Jerkwater), the "Corn Relish Capitol of America," …
The title tells too much. Or rather the rest of it tells too little else. An abused housewife and an earthy waitress (no, not Thelma and Louise but Marianne and Darly) head out on a picaresque odyssey to Alaska, cheered along by some tinkly (and thump-thumpy) New Age jazz, but …
This series is an anomaly among movie series in that it has altered its original course radically. What started out as something to do with a suicidal loner cop who was coaxed back to humanity with the help of his new, family-man partner has by now become an out-and-out comedy …
Paul Schrader once again explores the spiritual dimension of an unlikely prospect: not this time a gigolo or a rock musician or a New York cabbie but a limo-riding drug trafficker who caters to an upscale clientele ("Twice the price, twice the safety"), offers them sympathetic counseling when indicated ("Personally …
A feminist yarn of personal oppression and liberation set against a background of large-scale oppression and liberation: the Mexican Revolution. (A distant and dim background, most of the time.) The youngest of three daughters, bound by family tradition to stay home and care for her mother till the day one …
Amateur Night at the Movies. But would it ever have been exhibited even then -- would there ever have been such a night in the first place -- if the movie couldn't have been subsumed under the banner of the New Gay Cinema or the Gay New Wave or the …
Possibly a one-hundred-percent accurate portrait of the drug-culture riffraff of the Notting Hill district, but given the dialect, the slang, and the quality of the recorded sound, no more than seventy-five percent of it comes through as comprehensible. And the scope of the portrait is, in the first place, narrower …
Terence Davies's followup to his autobiographical Distant Voices, Still Lives. Although every bit as severely stylized, it is not so much the mere repetition of the earlier film as the absolute perfection of it. The monstrous father is now well out of the picture, and there's no sizable antagonist to …
The big question: Is Nick Nolte's Italian accent enough to ruin the movie, or is it not enough? The big answer: Not enough. And Susan Sarandon and Kathleen Wilhoite as his redheaded ("Murphy-haired") wife and sister-in-law do heroic damage-control. The true tale of a couple's search for a treatment for …
Lizzie Borden, of Working Girls, paddles into the mainstream with a sex thriller about a smarmy scam artist (Patrick Bergin) who poses as a world-renowned photographer -- the David Hanover of Vogue magazine -- in order to get women to pose for his camera. His modus operandi is intriguing and …
Dallas's biggest JFK fan, fashioning her clothes after Jackie's (though her hair after Marilyn's: does she know something subliminally?), sets off on the Greyhound, against her husband's express wishes, to attend the Presidential funeral in Washington. An uncontrollable motormouth with no concept of privacy, she takes an interest in her …
An album of coffee-table erotica in illustration of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about the affair of a French schoolgirl and a well-heeled Chinese outlander in Indochina, 1929. The basic situation — forbidden love, interracial love — casts in retrospect some interesting light on Duras's seminal screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour, …