Directed by visionary sci-fi animator René Laloux (Fantastic Planet) and designed by the legendary Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Mœbius), The Time Masters is a trippy, visually fantastic foray into existentialist space adventure. After his parents are killed on the dangerous planet Perdide, young Piel (voiced by Frédéric Legros) survives by maintaining …
A late-comer in the line of movies to use the Pachelbel Canon as background music -- and use it and use it and use it and use it. Interspersed between these uses, in equal proportion, is Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine." This two-tune playlist gets a little silly -- not …
Or by the long way, anyway. The trip is divided into two parts, each with its own title: "Niya, a Test-tube Human" and "Guardian Angels of Space." The initial situation -- the Starship Pushkin discovers a derelict vessel of unknown origin and destination, with one survivor, a female humanoid of …
The persistent problem with the Inspector Clouseau series is that Blake Edwards does not know when to leave well enough alone. That he would persevere even past Peter Sellers's death reveals this problem in a rather ghoulish light. The out-takes from earlier Clouseau efforts, insofar as they can be identified, …
Disney's leap into the artistic future is also into an artistic void. Computer-generated movie images have plainly come a long way (one way or another, outwards if not forwards, breadthwise if not depthwise) from the 1960s avant-garde abstractions of the Whitney brothers, John and James, and on back to the …
The focus of this David-vs.-Goliath courtroom drama is on the plaintiffs' attorney (the David figure) in a morally straightforward medical malpractice suit. What we have here is no extraordinary lawyer in the Perry Mason mold, nor even an ordinary one. What we have instead is a walking-talking wreck. The setting-up …
The third in R.W. Fassbinder's "trilogy" on post-war Germany, and the first of them to be filmed in black-and-white. Its palette of pale, luminous grays is quite evocative of the bygone cinematic era in which the movie is set, although the actual cinematic technique, notwithstanding the array of antique wipes …
This Gary Sherman shoestringer, rooted much more solidly in a verifiable reality than either his Dead and Buried or Raw Meat, undertakes a semidocumentary rummaging through the streets of Hollywood at night, and it firms up its sense of veracity with a gritty, grainy, abrasive image (John Alcott, who worked …
This Blake Edwards piece carries on in the unblushing manner of his preceding two, S.O.B. and 10: movies that appear to have been made on orders from the director's psychiatrist. Derived from a 1933 German movie and a 1935 British one, the premise here deals with, in the words of …
Documentary by Jim Brown on the musical rise, political fall, and Carnegie Hall reunion of the McCarthy-era singing group The Weavers, who helped pioneer the folk boom of the Sixties. It is hardly more than a home movie, really. But it is humorous, engaging, and inspiring, to the degree that …
Gentle woman among rough men, cattlemen to be exact, in the Australian bush, around the turn of the century: "hundreds of miles from the nearest companionship and thousands from the nearest civilization." She must prove herself to the men one by one, and as there are quite a lot of …
Sam Fuller has not lost any audacity in choice of subject matter: Romain Gary's novel about a stray German shepherd who turns out to have been trained from birth to attack black people. (Paul Winfield is the deprogrammer on whom rests all hope for reconciliation between the races.) In his …
By one of those flukes of fate so dear to Truffaut, a happily married woman (Fanny Ardant, long of nose, large of mouth, thick of eyebrows and of eyeliner, and generally quite striking) moves into the house adjacent to that of her former lover (Gerard Depardieu), himself now happily married. …
Just the thing for the person who couldn't get through the book and wondered how it came out. They're all laid out here, all those unforgettable and unbelievable and unstomachable moments from the novel. They possibly seem a little flatter on the screen, partly due to the absence of John …