Peter Delpeut's compilation of film fragments ca. 1905-15 (no big names or faces) from a cache discovered in the attic of the Cinema Parisien in Amsterdam in 1955. Though arranged into several loose categories — "Looking," "Protagonists," "Passion," "Dying," etc. — this is a most un-Chuck-Workman-like creation. Individual clips are …
This three-hour-and-twenty-one-minute movie has no reason to be that long other than by the kind of thinking that equates size with significance. Director Spike Lee himself has suggested that his abecedarian "biopic" is in the vein of a David Lean epic, but the only similarity you are apt to be …
Notwithstanding the Pulitzer Prize pedigree of the Oscar Hijuelos novel and the New York art-world patina of first-time director Arne Glimcher, this is at best a nightclub-crawl through 1950s tropical kitsch, an affectation of (and a show of affection for) a style, a sense of style, a stylishness, a lifestyle, …
A test of stomach-strength: cold-blooded serial murder, a vat of gore, a bucket of vomit. Any takers? The story is told through the lens of a low-budget documentary film crew (grainy black-and-white), following the killer on his rounds. The complicity of the filmmakers-within-the-film and the personality of the protagonist -- …
Too calculatedly offbeat romance between a seedy guard-dog trainer and a classical soprano: raggedy bits of charm, humor, social comment are all steamrolled beneath rampant unbelievableness. It represents a more-than-twenty-year reunion of the director, writer, and star of Five Easy Pieces -- Bob Rafelson, Carol Eastman, Jack Nicholson -- but …
Light-hearted romantic adventure about losing the cure for cancer in the vanishing Amazon rain forest. Lovely scene of playing technological Tarzan, swinging through the treetops by a complex system of ropes and pulleys. Tiresome badinage (Scottish accent vs. Bronx) between an eccentric, reclusive, pony-tailed scientist and an abrasive female assistant …
A selectively serious and selectively silly hybrid of Wells's invisible man and Matheson's incredible shrinking one: what the titular memoirist gets from the latter is his unwilling participation in a government experiment gone awry. The silliness tends to dominate, or more accurately tends not to be overcome by eye-dropper doses …
World War II movie conceived on the small scale and small budget of the likes of The Desert Rats, Attack, Hell Is for Heroes: half a dozen survivors of a Reconnaissance and Intelligence squad are holed up in a strategically placed chateau in the Ardennes Forest. Its contemporariness, its separateness …
Or the Bad News Bears (or Wildcats) (or Ladybugs) on ice: a winless Pee Wee hockey team whose new coach is a hot-shot attorney, nabbed for DUI, who must work off his debt to society with 500 hours of community service (while exorcising the demons of his own childhood athletic …
Juzo Itami's rotating satirical turret, having blasted at Japanese burial customs (The Funeral), gastronomy (Tampopo), tax evasion (A Taxing Woman, A Taxing Woman Returns), now takes aim at the intimidation and extortion practices of yakuza. For his trouble, he was knifed after the movie's release by three gangsters less leery …
Mira Nair, director of Salaam Bombay, pursues her calling as a cultural documentarian -- Idi Amin's eviction of Asians from Uganda in 1972, the proliferation of Indian-run motels in the American South ("How many times I got to tell you? They're not that kind of Indian!") -- in this romantic …
Not the final word on artistic compromise in the New Hollywood, but a good distance toward it. A down-on-his-luck producer picks a script (The Darkness and the Light) at random from his dead-letter pile, and tries to finance it with money from investors who only want to secure roles for …
Infantile sci-fi spoof, with lots of low-priced toys in the playpen. Teri Garr, Jeffrey Jones, Jon Lovitz, Eric Idle; directed by Greg Beeman.
A filmed record of a live-in-concert monologue by Spalding Gray, a sort of sequel to Swimming to Cambodia, on his attempts to complete a semi-autobiographical novel while visiting Los Angeles, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, and a classical Freudian psychoanalyst. In other words, whatever else it is -- the distilled essence …