Ana Carolina's feature film debut offers a broad, joky, Buñuelian brand of surrealism, including a do-it-yourself surrealist practical joke that calls for a razor blade to be inserted below the surface of a bar of soap. Norma Bengell, the lead actress, and one of the leading actresses in two decades …
A deserted lot on the outskirts of town may seem an odd place to begin a sinister character study, but it is here —alone and in mid-downpour — where door-to-door salesman Franck Poupart (Patrick Dewaere, the apotheosis of Thompson’s durable neurotic crumblers) outlines the day’s events through shadow-boxing. Like all …
The plot defies easy summary, or easy swallowing, but it has to do, basically, with a cat-and-mouse game played between a sadistic bank robber and an embezzling bank teller, after the latter short-changes the former and pockets the difference himself. A sort of cut-rate imitation of a Patricia Highsmith thriller …
A potentially risky movie to see for timid high-school girls who are reluctant about leaving home for college, or for protective parents who are reluctant on their own account about their girls leaving home for college, unless on both sides they are willing to take it in the proper spirit …
Claude Sautet's fifth movie with Romy Schneider, seemingly a sort of apology for giving her so small a role in Mado and none at all in Vincent, François, Paul, and the Others, is the by now familiar roundelay: an abortion, separation, a weekend in the country, an afternoon at the …
Paul Verhoeven's memorial to the Dutch resistance movement in World War II — a big, sloppy, tasteless blockbuster. The director's special predilection for the physically disgusting is apparent as early as the freshman-hazing scene which opens the action, or at least as early as the moment in that scene when …
The creator of Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, again gazes into the future, and sees there a nebulous labyrinthine Zone that can be crossed only by a special class called Stalkers. Indeed the Zone looks and feels like nothing we are now familiar with, and it has few handles on which we …
This Cinecittà space opera plays the same joke as George Lucas's Stars Wars, and with many of the same spaceships and costumes (plus a couple of skimpy feminine things that appear to have been picked up at an s-m specialty shop). But by making the joke more transparent, it serves …
Modern romance with a "smart" outlook. The jokes seldom seem to occur in the normal course of things, but instead necessitate swerves, detours, and pit stops. Better than usual attention to how personal tastes (in music, in clothes, in home furnishings, in behavior) intrude into relationships, but still plenty of …
The reunion of the TV series cast, after ten years, is doubtless a dream come true for fans of the show. For nonfans, the reunion aspect is not too bothersome, and even contributes a strong sense of character to a very suspenseful and, in a literally hair-raising resolution that points …
Nicholas Meyer, who in The Seven-Percent Solution introduced Sherlock Holmes to Sigmund Freud, here unites H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper, and packs them off in a brazenly bejeweled time machine to modern-day San Francisco, where Wells the socialist, the pacifist, the feminist, is discovered to be less a man …
Selected scenes from the massive Gunther Grass novel about a tiny-tot social protester in Hitler's Germany who, by force of will, stops growing on his third birthday. The bare storyline, shorn of the Gunther Grass prose, advances a rather sentimental Peter Pannish notion of the moral superiority, and every other …
A delicate Chekhovian tale of aging and memory is given a reading in the blustery Italian style, with the emphasis on pungent details like the stream of urine that emanates from a heart-attack victim and the splatter of blood across the windshield when the car speeding for medical help runs …
Elementary-grade horror movie, a sort of crossbreed of the first two Tobe Hooper movies, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Eaten Alive. Repetitive scenes of three scantily clad and subhumanly stupid girls being terrorized in a dark woods and in a lonely house, by a masked maniac who is endowed …