Michael Apted was only a subordinate member of the filmmaking team that interviewed fourteen British seven-year-olds of varied backgrounds for a 1963 Granada Television program called 7 Up, but it was he who thought to keep up with the group thereafter, tracking them down and shooting them at seven-year intervals …
The premise, pretty much deducible from the title, features three unmarried male apartment-mates in Paris who have to baby-sit an illegitimate infant (one of theirs) for six months. This same general situation came out funnier, sweeter, touchinger, everythinger, when it was done with John Wayne in Three Godfathers. The situation …
Collective New York phobias -- fear of involvement, fear of strangers, fear of break-ins -- are enacted by way of a comic nightmare in which an Upper East Side word processor, lured by the prospect of a hot date, gets marooned in SoHo without a dime (well, actually with ninety-seven …
A young nun in a provincial Canadian cloister has given birth to a baby, soon found discarded in a waste basket. A true innocent, she may or may not have known she was pregnant, may or may not know who the father is, may or may not have strangled the …
So you think you want more movies about real people with real problems, really talking about them the way real people really do, and without any unreal heightening and tightening. Henry Jaglom's home movie on the dissolution of his marriage to Patrice Townsend should cause you to think twice. Jaglom …
Steve Tesich, who wrote Breaking Away, is back in the bicycle seat again. Two estranged brothers, one a prosperous doctor, the other a med-school dropout, join up for their first bicycle race together. And their last: one of them is dying of cerebral aneurysm. The race -- billed as Hell …
Poland in wartime, with few actual Nazis in evidence, but with collaborators, resisters, fence-sitters, and a beautiful fur-coated married Jew who jumps off one of the death trains (much like the ones, and in much the same countryside, featured at length in Shoah) and hides out in the cellar of …
Young wholesome clean-cut American couple competes with old depraved whiskered Britisher for the Scientific Find Of The Century: a brontosaurus family (papa, mama, and little baby) in Darkest Africa. The creatures — as light on their feet as marionettes, but as lubberly in movement as if they all slept wrong …
The task of tailoring the time-travel theme to the teenage market has led to, besides such concrete accessories as skateboards and electric guitars, an inordinate dwelling on anachronisms, with a contemporary teenager plunged (much like an addict of TV's Happy Days, only deeper) into the Fifties. It's as though the …
The task of tailoring the time-travel theme to the teenage market has led to, besides such concrete accessories as skateboards and electric guitars, an inordinate dwelling on anachronisms, with a contemporary teenager plunged (much like an addict of TV's Happy Days, only deeper) into the Fifties. It's as though the …
Youth comedy, slightly loonier than most: teenage suicide as a running gag, anthropomorphized hamburger buns, a Living Dead horde of paperboys. And, with a couple of direct lifts from Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, loftier in artistic aspirations, too. But no funnier, for all that. And there is still the …
Big surprise is that John Cassavetes would want to direct so conventional a Hollywood project: a reunion of the stars of The In-Laws, Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, with pretty much the same personas, but this time in a comic twist on Double Indemnity (with a dash of Les Diaboliques). …
More than ten years and $25 million in the making, and at those figures, rather a large disappointment. The Disney studio's attempt in the Eighties to reassert itself in the animation field seems to have an eye as much on George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as on Pinocchio or Peter …
The time-setting of this “Orwellian” (as we have all been instructed to call it) future is identified at the outset as “somewhere in the Twentieth Century,” and it is in fact both forward and backward from the present, laden with 1940s clothes and appliances, but further advanced into bureaucratic decadence …
Improbably heterogeneous group of high-school students at an improbable all-day (Saturday) detention hall, improbably unsupervised. A detention hall, without all the improbabilities, would not seem to have much chance at drama. But with all the improbabilities it does not have much chance at Albee-esque group therapy, either. And in point …