Brazilian historical pageant, of dubious export value: too distant already to bear up under Carlos Diegues's "distancing" devices, and too propagandistic to have much intellectual appeal. It tells of a slave revolt on a 17th-century sugar plantation, sparked by the folk hero, Ganga Zumba, who was also the subject of …
Pointless wallow in American Innocence: teenage romance under the cloud of World War II, aimed, apparently, at the generation of teenagers who just missed out on Summer of '42, Red Sky at Morning, Baby Blue Marine, et al. The boy (Sean Penn, with a good haircut) is a bowling-pin setter, …
Uncommunicative version of the Somerset Maugham novel, done in big, pallid, flabby images that have the general consistency of bread dough. Bill Murray's suppressed smirk, upward-floating irises, and nerdlike sloping shoulders amount to a highly coy substitute for Maugham's post-WWI seeker of enlightenment. Indeed, so determined is Murray to avoid …
John Milius's envisionment of a Colorado small town occupied by Allied Communist Invasionary Forces starts out in a genuine nightmare vein; but it soon seems to wake up and to enter a controlled daydream vein, a conscious conjuration of the Good Old Days of the Minute Men and the Green …
A "different" movie comedy, with a real feel for life at the fringe (a public bus is bound for someplace called Edge City), where everybody subsists on only generic brands (a tin can labelled "Food" and a pop-top labelled "Drink") and says "Fuck you" a lot. An automobile repossession outfit …
Can Dolly Parton turn the next "normal" person she meets into an authentic country-western singer, even if the next person is Sylvester Stallone and has a speaking voice like a rusty gate, or will she lose the wager and be obliged to sleep with her obnoxious manager (played by the …
The sweaty Western action, for openers, is not everyone's mental image of a "romance novel" — more suitable, one might think, for Spicy Western ca. 1937. (The accompanying strains of Alfred Newman's How the West Was Won awaken a thirst for something other than a spoof — not to be …
Cops-and-robots thriller by Michael Crichton, in the slightly futuristic vein favored by him. There are a wide variety of domestic, industrial, and criminal robots, highlighted by a "poisonous spider" model, plus a few other gizmos such as a guided-missile pistol, a "floater camera," and moving-picture mug shots -- but the …
Dottily old-fashioned desert romance, set a year after Rudolph Valentino's death, when it would have been old-fashioned already. Brooke Shields, disguised in a mustache such as to make her look like Young Howard Hughes, molested and seduced by Arabs, terrorized by scorpions and large cats, cleansed in an oasis waterfall, …
When people talk about how bad movies were in the '80s, what they really mean is how awesome movies were in the '80s. A brilliant commentary on the emasculation of Santa Claus, who has seen all his terrifying judgment stripped away by the Coca-Cola corporation. Viz. France's "Father Spanker," or …
The directorial debut of comedy writer John Hughes, a movie for and about teenagers, and with their same impatience and exaggeration: I'll simply die if I don't get a laugh in the next five seconds. And the next and the next and the next. Anthony Michael Hall, as a socially …
Problem picture, concerned less with interracial discord than intraracial, though some of both. The setting-up of the problem is intriguing. Fort Neal, Louisiana, 1944. The tough black sergeant (and baseball coach) of a segregated army platoon culled from the Negro Leagues has been murdered. A black captain, the first black …