Young love, French love, crazy love. Well, one of them's crazy at least: the one who throws things out the window ("Your pad will look very Zen now," a neighbor remarks), and who sets the house afire on moving out, and who stabs a pizzeria patron with a fork, and …
Terribly confusing action-comedy, set in and under San Francisco's Chinatown. ("You know what this is?" poses an eye-witness news reporter, not too helpfully. "This is like some radical Alice in Wonderland.") Not just the mumbo-jumbo about Chinese black magic, about the Lords of Death versus the Wing Kong, about Lo …
High-tech action film centered around a sportscar prototype -- called the Black Moon, shaped like an axe blade -- which approaches the realm of the futuristic. ("It's-alike-a science feection, no? A jet-a car!" enthuses an Italian auto manufacturer.) The international car-theft ring that steals the prototype, with headquarters in a …
An adaptation of a very early Ross Macdonald novel, or in other words nearer the slam-bang manner of Dashiell Hammett than the surgical delicacy of later-Macdonald: he wasn't yet himself in 1947. Compared with the Byzantine structures of The Galton Case and The Chill, this one would seem to have …
David Lynch's "controversial" version of what really goes on in the American small town: rather more squirm-producing and shrug-inspiring than (as you may have heard) shocking or provoking or, at the very least, rib-tickling. So far from it being warped and twisted and depraved somehow, the proper complaint with this …
He has never spoken a word. He sits on his windowsill at all hours of the day, arms stretched out at his sides. He thinks he's an airplane. And as the title divulges straightaway, while the script plays it catty, he actually can fly. This situation is worked out in …
Better than average Neil Simon piece, perhaps because a semi-autobiographical one -- like, for instance, the above-average and semi-autobiographical Chapter Two. The Neil Simon character here is a sex-starved teenager (and would-be either writer or New York Yankee) in the Brooklyn of 1937, but the author sees the entire household …
Early effort from Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki (The Secret World of Arietty) about a boy and girl who must use their magic geegaw to get to a special castle before the bad guys get them.
Early effort from Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki (The Secret World of Arietty) about a boy and girl who must use their magic geegaw to get to a special castle before the bad guys get them.
Early effort from Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki (The Secret World of Arietty) about a boy and girl who must use their magic geegaw to get to a special castle before the bad guys get them.
Strenuous uplift by way of Broadway (the Mark Medoff play), about a speech teacher of deaf eleventh-graders. We see little of the man's daily teaching techniques (and hear little of the sounds of deaf people's speech), only what the headmaster disapprovingly terms "razzle-dazzle": standing on his hands in the classroom, …
A simple and painless diversion about a tortuous and torturous detour. The time-budgeting, second-squeezing headmaster of Thomas Tompion Comprehensive School, and the first such non-posh headmaster ever in history to be selected as chairman and keynote speaker of the Annual Headmasters Conference at Norwich University, gets aboard the wrong train …
Sylvester Stallone portrays a member of the L.A.P.D. Zombie Squad -- whatever that is -- named Cobretti, hence Cobra. (His given name is disclosed, with some boyish abashment, to be Marion -- just like John Wayne's real one, although somehow less likely to have been bestowed by Italian parents than …
Martin Scorsese's extremely tardy sequel to The Hustler. The twenty-five-year interval between the two should prepare us for some pretty radical changes, and any perceived differences or inconsistencies in the character of Fast Eddie Felson (now a prosperous liquor salesman and only connected to the game of pool in the …
Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek, who don't have much in the way of family resemblance, are three Southern weird sisters (to risk a redundancy), rather like the heroines of three disparate Tennessee Williams plays assembled for a sitcom pilot. Keaton is an aging virgin afflicted with a "shrunken …