Besides the prefix and suffix of its title, this shares with Beloved the spectacle of Thandie Newton peeing on her own feet, puking, and behaving generally as if possessed by Linda Blair. Her character is that of a refugee from an African dictatorship, now a maid in Italy. Her master, …
A ruthless film producer steals a kid's English composition and transforms it into his next blockbuster: a dose of Hollywood self-loathing for the whole family. There's no harm in it, surely, and plenty of pep. Paul Giamatti, in the part of the producer, slathers the relish on the hot dog. …
Is not life in women's prison much like life all over these United States? Corruption in high places, capitalistic back-stabbing and throat-cutting, racial strife, mob riots, drugs, pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, lesbian rape, heterosexual rape, sadism, murder and mayhem, an obscenity every couple of words (or a couple of obscenities …
In the decades since Linda Blair first hocked up a pea-soup facial, Hollywood xerographers have found in demonic possession a perennial cash absorber. Director James Wan (Saw, Insidious) stylishly resists the easy temptation of schlock-shocks and CGI as a means of supplanting storytelling. For its its first hour, this fact-based …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
Just because the filmmakers do not trouble to work out one interesting development of character, situation, or metaphysics, is no excuse for the viewer to sit back, dull. And it is to the film's credit that there are so many teasing possibilities to pursue privately in this horror story, at …
John Boorman's Manichean allegory of good and evil, spirit and flesh, religion and science, goes way over the head of the Exorcist original, and probably over the head of the average fright-show fan as well. It goes so far as to identify Regan MacNeil (again Linda Blair) as one of …
At least the ninth screen version of the Sherlock Holmes story, this can be seen as a continuation of the road Paul Morrissey travelled in Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, a road that has taken him further and further from his mentor, Warhol, despite the latter's figurehead position …
A sixteen-year-old boy, afflicted with suicidal thoughts and “stress vomit” (outdistancing Linda Blair in The Exorcist, thanks a heap), gets thrown in, during renovations, with the grown-ups on the Adult Psychiatric Floor, there to experience the full wit, wisdom, warmth, and wackiness of a mental ward. Written and directed by …
A 10-year-old girl, suddenly stricken with an intestinal disorder that blocks evacuation, endures more graphic onscreen medical procedures than did Linda Blair in The Exorcist before a three-story tumble down the inside of a hollow tree trunk literally knocks the crap back into her. Or was it a miracle? One …
Takeoff on the original Exorcist, in the never-say-die manner of Airplane! (Like Exorcist III, this one pretends number II never existed.) Paul Morrissey did this same thing better in his Hound of the Baskervilles, and didn't take up an entire movie doing it. Linda Blair is there to lend it …
First, this is a feast of Americana, located largely in Kansas, and at times reminiscent of John Ford, with Ellen Burstyn talking to a tombstone, Eva Le Gallienne supplying the ham, and Richard Farnsworth, as a grizzled Last Chance Gas proprietor, softly singing "Come-a-ti-yi-yippie-yippie-yay" and showing off his two-headed snake …
As silly and sanitary a view of America's youth as any since the Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach movies. The lead female role, a Beverly Hills brat who ascends to the delirious pinnacle of winning a roller-disco trophy before she resigns herself to her sad fate as a Juilliard flautist, gives …