Another genealogical revelation, very much in the same line as the sole revelation in The Empire Strikes Back. Numerous other pursuits and skirmishes and creatures and contraptions -- again in the same line as those that came before. The third and final chapter in the adventures of Luke Skywalker and …
More embarrassment than an innocent onlooker should have to endure. Granted that a sequel to Saturday Night Fever was in the cards -- but who would envision Tony Manero, weekend disco whiz, achieving Broadway stardom in an all-dancing, no-singing, no-talking extravaganza called Satan's Alley? What sort of comprehension would that …
Isn't there an old adage, 'Once stung, twice shy,' or something like that? Well, there should be. Jackie Gleason, Mac Davis, Teri Garr, Oliver Reed, Karl Malden; written by David S. Ward; directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan.
The resuscitation of Dirty Harry Callahan, after seven years' peaceful slumber, is the first of Harry's adventures over which Clint Eastwood has deigned to take directorial command, thus disrupting the pattern whereby Eastwood has tended to direct his most interesting projects himself, while the obligatory moneymaking ones -- the Every …
The third Superman movie is made up of three Superman plots, plus a Richard Pryor plot that converges eventually with the Superman ones. None of the separate plot strands -- Clark Kent's reunion with his high-school heart-throb Lana Lang; the pernicious effects on Superman of a glob of computer-formulated synthetic …
The preludial music, Gov. Huey Long's "Every Man a King" as sung by Randy Newman, sets the tone for this smart-ass social comedy. It starts out being about economic hard times and then expands its horizons smoothly and surprisingly, but also improbably, to include other types of hard times: "The …
Restrained tearjerker: restrained in that it doesn't work too hard at jerking tears (come what tears may). It works hard at other things, though. It thoroughly, for example, scouts out the people, activities, and amenities aboard a luxury Mediterranean cruise liner (the sightseeing stops are more perfunctory: the Roman Coliseum, …
For scriptwriter Horton Foote, this is a return to the milieu of Baby, the Rain Must Fall, a movie that conveyed to perfection the sensibility and the storyline of a country-western ballad -- and long before it was fashionable to do so. But Foote has whittled away at the plot, …
James Brooks's first feature seems somewhat presumptuous, or maybe just overgeneralized, about the bond between a single mother and an only daughter (Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, respectively), as though no special insight were called for. None is called for very often, in any event, since the movie chooses to …
As remakes go, this one seems more purposeful than some. We are not surprised, certainly, that the choreographer of the "Springtime for Hitler" number in The Producers -- Alan Johnson -- would jump at the chance to break into the director ranks with an encore of Ernst Lubitsch's nose-tweak of …
Pleasant enough, but a rather politic appeal to both the country-western fan and the boxing fan. The musical element, however, is much overwhelmed by the pugilistic, as an aspiring singer enrolls in an amateur Toughman contest in order to bankroll his career. These are unfortunate proportions, because Dennis Quaid, who …
The Prince and the Pauper set in modern-day Philadelphia and without the gimmick of the two social opposites being physical duplicates: the princely figure, to the contrary, is a WASP financial wizard and the pauperish one is a ghetto black, and they trade places through no choice of their own, …
Four twenty-minute episodes (plus a prologue), three of which are adapted from episodes of the same-named Rod Serling TV show, and the other an original. Together, they re-evoke the heavy moralizing and ironizing and sentimentalizing that marked, and marred, the entire series. They do not re-evoke the cumulative richness of …