Following up First Blood, Ted Kotcheff convenes another post-Vietnam therapy session. This one, about a POW rescue operation in post-war Laos, addresses the specific feeling that there is "unfinished business," or, as it is put elsewhere, that the books are still "in the red" (pun intended?). Certainly the Vietnam experience …
"I don't take sides; I take pictures." So says the self-interested photojournalist on assignment in Nicaragua in 1979. And he is true to his word, too, at least until he changes his mind: "I think I finally saw one too many bodies." And then, in the face of countless black …
Renovated Manhattan brownstone invaded by "super-rat." Conditions of normalcy before the invasion and outside the brownstone are meticulously observed, and some alarming rat statistics help fight implausibility. But the extermination effort itself, unlike the similar one in the rat segment of Nightmares, is both overdrawn and over-drawn-out. With Peter Weller …
Martha Coolidge, who made a semi-autobiographical, semi-documentary film on rape, called Not a Pretty Picture, is a serious filmmaker. And one does not have to look hard to discern here a serious interest in social documentation: an interest, that is, in the lifestyle of the San Fernando Valley teenager, the …
Semi- or quasi-satirical science fiction, to do with TV violence and mind-control and other old-hat subjects. Considerable interest and tension build up, however, on the way to ultimate incoherence and irresolution. And unstomachability. These qualities, together with the morally neutered, brainwashed hero and unidentified villains, produce a rather chilly emotional …
Doomsday thriller neatly adapted to fit the home-computer and video-game craze. A high-school low-achiever (the highly likable Matthew Broderick) attempts, from his bedroom keyboard, to tap into the intelligence center of a video-game company, but unwittingly taps into the missile defense system instead. The opposing computer, nicknamed "Whopper," offers him …
This Pamela Yates documentary chronicles "the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan Indian population of Guatemala."
A hymn to indomitable motherhood, in the form of a missing-persons search for a six-year-old boy who sets out for school one morning and never gets there. It has much in common with slick women's-magazine fiction, particularly in the unconditional benediction it gives to the heroine, even when she is …
The old story of the objective reporter learning to get involved. In this particular telling, the setting is Indonesia, 1965, on the eve of Sukarno's showdown with the Communists. The telling itself is uncommonly muddy: i.e., hard to make out, easy to get stuck in and spin your wheels in. …
As Barbra Streisand has gotten more ambitious, more powerful, not to mention more old, she has not gotten any more disposed to incorporate these characteristics into her coltish screen persona. We are asked to accept her here not only as an adolescent, but as an adolescent who, with a haircut, …
Woody Allen's documentary parody on a fictitious celebrity of the Twenties and Thirties, known as the "human chameleon." Allen owes something to his own earlier documentary parody, Take the Money and Run, something -- a lot, actually -- to Citizen Kane (the newsreel facsimile), something to Dead Men Don't Wear …
Concert film with David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust for the last time ever at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973.