Insufferably hip piece of science fiction. The hero, an American-Japanese crossbreed, as his name would indicate, is a world-renowned neurosurgeon, part-time rock-and-roll musician, and, in his first screen adventure, explorer of the Eighth Dimension (i.e., inner space; i.e., the empty space inside solid matter). No wonder he is already celebrated …
Few people can be put out with Ingmar Bergman for having not kept his promise that Fanny and Alexander would remain his last movie. Still, Bergman has felt obliged to argue, with perhaps an overrefined sense of integrity, that inasmuch as After the Rehearsal was made originally for Swedish television, …
The remake of Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past needn't detain anyone longer than to diagnose it as part of the Hollywood grave-robbing epidemic, and to paint a large red cross outside the theater door. What would seem to have been an untransportable Forties storyline has, as in Body Heat, …
Comic Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner hash over roughly the same idea of their previous The Man with Two Brains. The beautiful body with the ugly personality remains constant, except that the body in this case is Victoria Tennant's instead of Kathleen Turner's. But the beautiful disembodied brain has …
An Ohio housewife (Jobeth Williams) dashes off 2000 words in the style of the "Rebecca Ryan" series of suspense novels, and takes first prize in a writing contest. Her reward is a trip to Paris, with an unexpected bonus of a bump on the head in a traffic accident. When …
So lifelike and human are the members of the 404 series of robots that they eventually enter a period of adolescence, with all the troublesome accompaniments: a taste for video games and rock-and-roll, an awakening sexual curiosity, an increasing recalcitrance, a tendency to get in with the wrong crowd. (The …
Moscow, 1983. Wheelchair-bound Guy Bennett (modelled on homosexual British defector Guy Burgess) settles in front of a tape recorder to tell his story to a reporter from the West. What can have caused him to sell out his country? This question is a heavy load to place on a portrait …
An almost (not quite) totally nonverbal tour of the works of the great Catalan architect, the works of some of his contemporaries and predecessors, and his general cultural surroundings: it's the sort of pictorial essay which the experimentalists, avant-gardists, montage theorists of the 1920s would have wisely kept to under …
Youth musical, as essentially innocent and wholesome as an old Garland-Rooney vehicle, about a clique of kids from the Bronx whose talents run high and in many directions (break dancer, rapper, graffiti spray-painter). There's a naturalistic texture to the environment, but the action goes by at such an unrelenting blur …
The consuming ambition of this movie, whatever else it might be up to, is to pass off Eddie Murphy as a black Clint Eastwood. The Dirty Harry series comes first to mind, propelled there by the plainclothesman's independent ways, his catastrophic results, and his snippiness to his superiors in the …
Quits being a drooling travelogue just often enough and long enough to be a drooling sex comedy. Two middle-aged fathers take their full-grown daughters on holiday; one of the fathers has an affair with one of the daughters (not his own). This comes about (Dad blame it!) because the daughter …
This, the first feature of Minnesota-based independent filmmaker Joel Coen (who co-wrote the script with his producer, and brother, Ethan), has something of the old B-movie spirit at its most lofty: that groaning desire to find out how much can be achieved on how little, how near to Francis Ford …