A live-action Road Runner cartoon, faithful to the formula all the way down to the business of painting a tunnel on a sheer rock face, setting up a detour sign, and then watching the would-be victim disappear into the painted tunnel, with Kirk Douglas as a human incarnation of Wile …
Tall tale, told flat, about a cardshark and a barely pubescent Grand Ole Opry aspirant following a crazy old prospector's treasure map to a gold mine in the Grand Canyon . It takes little effort to imagine how this, with slight retailoring, could be made over into a Disney film. …
An Italian street gang in the Bronx ("Oh-h-h, I'm the type-a guy who-a likes to roam aroun'...") is treated with a degree of excess characteristic of the Italian cinema, the Fellini division — over-inflated caricature, dreamlike geography, dizzy camerawork. If you doubt the seriousness of writer-directer Philip Kaufman's elegy to …
Looking back on the heady teenage days of 1963 from the sophisticated vantage point of 1979. Directed by Philip Kaufman.
Walter Hill's unrealistic, or anti-realistic, street-gang movie has an obvious kinship with the hostile-territory branch of action films, including both the Stagecoach-type Western and the Objective Burma-type war story. It also owes a special debt to the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa for its conception of the feudal clannishness of …
John Huston was arguably not the wisest choice to direct the Flannery O'Connor novel about a street-corner religious fanatic in the rural South. Seemingly a bit bone-weary, as in Fat City, he takes the most convenient shortcut to the most conventional notion: still photos of rubber tires and such behind …
War and its impact reduced to the small scale, the homefront, the subjective viewpoint. Andre Delvaux's surrealist predilections are not altogether absent, but are stilled somewhat in this tidy, precise, straight-ahead narrative about a Belgian housewife's long hard road to personal independence. A nice alternative to the sprawling and stumbling …
A faithful rendition by Werner Herzog of the Georg Buchner play, which means that Herzog's customary protest-rallying is done here under the banner of a "classic" and in several stretches of dialogue much higher-grade than we are used to hearing in a Herzog movie. But trust Herzog, who has never …
The British homefront in the Second World War, invaded by an army of Americans who appear to have nothing to do with their days but pursue leisurely romances with the abandoned wives, fiancés, and girlfriends of limey soldiers. It's rather nice, as cautious and slow-to-develop as they are, how much …