As sequels go, this puts much more distance between itself and its predecessor than most. But what is there that need, or prudently can, be said about it? The expected resurrection of Spock is ingenious in conception and suspensefully prolonged, with a brand-new baby Spock hatched out of his coffin-cocoon …
A concert movie and nothing more, and as narrowly focussed a one as ever was: little of the live audience, nothing of the backstage, only the on-stage. In fairness, the movie (directed by Jonathan Demme) is probably better to look at than most concert movies, and the concert (staged by …
A concert movie and nothing more, and as narrowly focussed a one as ever was: little of the live audience, nothing of the backstage, only the on-stage. In fairness, the movie (directed by Jonathan Demme) is probably better to look at than most concert movies, and the concert (staged by …
A concert movie and nothing more, and as narrowly focussed a one as ever was: little of the live audience, nothing of the backstage, only the on-stage. In fairness, the movie (directed by Jonathan Demme) is probably better to look at than most concert movies, and the concert (staged by …
Life imitates art, even in Fifties Hollywood: here it's the leading man and leading lady of a low-budget boxing melodrama whose off-screen relationship takes uncannily after their on-screen one. The film-within-the-film, and presumably the title of the film-without, is modelled on Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss, and the parallels of this …
Independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch gets a little out of a little. His film stock is the grainiest black-and-white, and his soundtrack sounds hollow. Each scene is shot in a single take (a common time-saving device), with blank frames in between. There is a brief reference to Yasujiro Ozu, but the …
A fanciful and fascinating hybrid, directed by Walter Hill. Although superficially this would appear to be a return for Hill to the street-gang turf of The Warriors, it, even more clearly than that other, is a transplanted Western. Where the narrative pattern of the earlier movie was the simple passage …
You have to accept the central plot proposition on faith. A large, pasty, unbaked doughgirl, who works as a cosmetician in a mortuary, sets her cap for a lanky passive subway conductor. Aside from her girth and his sweet tooth, these two Fassbinderian outcasts haven't much in the way of …
A Third World movie which, despite denunciations of "whitey," exudes serenity rather than anger is bound to broaden its base of support; and in fact this pulling-oneself-up-by-one's-bootstraps story, about an orphan boy and "brilliant student" whose grandmother will do anything to ensure he doesn't end up alongside her in the …
Exactly that and no more. The Sunday is somewhere in the calendar year 1905 or thereabouts, and the country is French, more precisely that patch of it owned by a venerated artist whom artistic fashion has long since left behind, and who struggles now with the big decision of whether …
It has been well publicized that Luchino Visconti was the first filmmaker, some twenty years previous, to have been approached by producer Nicole Stéphane to adapt Proust, and though that arrangement would not be hard to imagine, it is hard to imagine that the outcome would have been as arid …
Or Goldie the Riveter, for those who need Goldie Hawn and marital fidelity to perk up the documentary Rosie the Riveter on the female work force in World War II. And even Goldie, in an effort to show how her character grows and strengthens into a feminist paragon, is less …