One acceptable scare scene takes place in the nocturnal ocean, with an overly mascaraed Italian actress lifted bodily out of the water by an emotionally disturbed octopus. Those tenacious grippers on the octopus's arms are identified, in this otherwise uneducational sea movie, as "suckers," a flexible term which also takes …
Adapted from the Pierre Louys novel, La Femme et le Pantin. The story, in its fifth incarnation on screen, tells how a suave, sixtyish Frenchman becomes pathetically and inextricably hooked on a Spanish flirt named Conchita, and how she keeps the old buzzard in a constant dither with her teasingly …
From Robert Altman, a bona fide American art movie, replete with symbols, Polanski-ish grotesqueries, mirror images, fantasy-reality obfuscations, and the like. It is supposedly based on a dream of Altman's, dealing with two Texas women in the California desert; but his inspiration evidently comes also from Bergman (Persona) and Antonioni …
Another numbing action picture for the redneck market, with an inexhaustible interest in cars ("That same ultramarine blue Caprice Classic is on our tail again") and an inexhaustible supply of down-home colloquialisms ("Sweet kidneys of Christ!"). David Carradine and Kate Jackson, a personable pair, both carry on in the style …
The title refers to that moment of truth when two friendly rivals, female, went their separate ways one into the Ballet, the other into the Bourgeoisie. Now, when it's too late to change, each is looking enviously at the other and wondering whether she didn't make the wrong choice. The …
Robert Aldrich plays politics with a TV-movie-of-the-week plot about the takeover of a Montana missile base by a quartet of escaped convicts. By his string-pulling, he transforms this pulp thriller into a turbulent confluence of political undercurrents extending over an entire generation: the bomb fears of the Eisenhower era, the …
At bottom a murder mystery, but not so as you'd notice. Russ Meyer's steady barrage of throwaway titillations, throwaway gags (when the narrator says "but," Meyer gives you a shot of a bare behind), and throwaway nothings, prepares you for pretty much anything; so the "surprise" solution to the mystery …
Ken Russell lets you know early that he will be operating at his customary level of crassness (he shows you the funeral parlor employees boarding up windows with coffin lids in order to protect Valentino's body from the crush of admirers); the chief difference between this and Russell's other artist …
Alan Rudolph appears to be very much the dutiful protégé of Robert Altman, his producer, with this multi-character merry-go-round situated in the "city of the one-night stands." One has the feeling that the characters have been squashed ruthlessly in order to fit them into Rudolph's mosaic style and his reductionist …
The story and social commentary are lifted from Lina Wertmuller's Seduction of Mimi, relocated in California, and smothered in John Alonzo's trademark golden light. This project, neither more commercial nor more star-conscious than the Wertmuller, gives Richard Pryor three separate roles, and gives him a lot of latitude to show …
An art Western about Wild Bill Hickok, suffering from syphilis, light-sensitive eyesight, and recurrent nightmares, teaming up with Crazy Horse, his sworn enemy, to hunt down a man-killing albino bison (actually a 4000-pound mechanical toy designed by Carlo Rambaldi). Each of them is travelling ashamedly under an alias (Wild Bill's …
Old-fashioned inspirational piece about a lonely schoolteacher's love affair with the educational ideal. The homemade look of the movie gives it a modesty and fragility that serve as a shield against any possible irritation you might feel about the formularized story incidents, each one designed to illustrate the fish-out-of-water feeling …
Romantic eyewash, of doubtfully feminist persuasion, set around the turn of the century. When a free-thinking and loose-living attorney (Marcello Mastroianni) goes into hiding from the police and is presumed dead, his fragile and frigid wife (Laura Antonelli) takes charge of his affairs, and is conducted by his trusty and …
Science-fiction cartoon about a cosmic struggle between the forces of Magic and those of Technology (the former a group of Peter Pan and Tinker bell-like elves and fairies, the latter a group of Nazis and reptiles). At best the conception is rather sappy. But its mythic possibilities are brought even …
A skittish, inconsistent comedy about a starstruck rube from Milwaukee who travels to Hollywood in the 1920s ("Hollywood!" he shrieks from his hotel window. "Lillian Gish is in those hills!"), intent on launching himself on a new career as a Matinee Idol. Gene Wilder, a Chaplin-is-my-idol, quintuple-threat moviemaker (actor, director, …