Dan Aykroyd impersonates a Comparative Lit. professor who impersonates a Rhett Butler-ish Southern gentleman, a hapkido master, and an iron-fisted (literally) mobster. Nothing goes with anything else, and nothing goes by itself, either. With Howard Hesseman, T.K. Carter, and Kate Murtaugh; directed by Michael Pressman.
The period of the Second World War, with its consequent boost to the spirit of The Show Must Go On, recalls Truffaut's The Last Metro and (an even closer contemporary) the remake of To Be or Not To Be. But lacking the specificness of either of those, this one, about …
Start with Rodney Dangerfield, and proceed on the assumption that it doesn't much matter where you go from there (mother-in-law jokes, son-in-law jokes, drug jokes, fat jokes), and one man's slobbery is soon parlayed into masses. Directed by James Signorelli.
Citizen Kane-ish journalistic investigation into the disappearance, twenty years past, of a New Jersey rock-and-roll singer. Did he really go to the bottom of the river with his '57 Chevy, or did he pull an Arthur Rimbaud? (Why else was his final unreleased album titled Season in Hell, and why …
The determination of an unlettered, Liverpudlian hairdresser to storm the barricades of Higher Learning, through private tutorials with a burnt-out Scotch-addicted poet and against stiff opposition from her working-class husband, is sufficiently touching to overcome all dramatic short-cuts, greased wheels, and tail winds. The movie is more truthful about the …
Victor Erice's second feature film was a long time coming: ten years after Spirit of the Beehive. High in quality but medium-low in excitement, it is again a discreetly interior drama, with again some interest in the insatiable sponge of a child's curiosity, and again some interest in the enchantments …
Sleek, fast-moving, and, even though it appears at times to be getting reckless and out of control (stay calm, have patience), really quite adroitly handled espionage tale. The plot, which sends a broadcaster for Free World Radio ("The Voice That Speaks the Truth") on a perilous mission beyond the Berlin …
Perhaps because it is based on a true story,' this horror film is afflicted with a vagueness of definition: the invisible rapist who bedevils the young single mother (Barbara Hershey) is not a house-haunter as in Poltergeist nor a body-possessor as in The Exorcist. What, then, is he, and where …
As in Peppermint Soda and Cocktail Molotov, Diane Kurys takes her subject from her own life, in this case the friendship between her mother and another woman, a friendship that surpasses and survives each of their marriages. The apparent benefit of her faithfulness to reality is the freedom from feminist …
A young girl (Claudia Ohana, who has a beneficial resemblance to Barbara Steele) is forced into prostitution to repay a million-peso debt to her grandmother (Irene Papas, not so much matriarchal as monarchical, wearing imperial robes, sitting in thronelike postures, brandishing a scepter). The script is by Gabriel García Márquez, …
I'm the only one here who doesn't have a past, observes the student helper of her co-workers on the dining-hall staff at a resort hotel on the Welsh coast. But by the end of summer -- the summer of '62 -- she has gotten a good start on one. The …
No potboiler by Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins or one of their relatives has ever lurched faster and farther into daydream improbabilities. And none of those, furthermore, has had the indecency to drag in Goethe and an analytical note on him by Leslie Fiedler. Writer-director James Toback, who somewhat resembles …
It should be enough to say, by way of recommendation, that no one who has followed Ingmar Bergman this far in his career will want to miss out on this comprehensive reprise of his themes and obsessions. With that said, it can next be said that the attempted summary of …
What a feeling! Something between amused exasperation and outright derision. A graphic document, in any case, of what life is not like for a female welder in a Pittsburgh steel mill who works nights as a beer-hall dancer and who would really rather be a ballerina. With Jennifer Beals; directed …