Fellini's ever intriguing interweave of fantasy and reality, having to do with the drains on a fictional movie director's creativity. Parasites, vampires, angels, ghosts, and grotesques drift weightlessly through the hero's real and imaginary life, moving as if on floats or on turntables -- this remarkable new groove for Fellini …
Middle-class problem picture. The problem is that of the working wife (door-to-door peddler of sewing machines), and it has, in contemporary India, two sides to it: the economic necessity and the social stigma. Satyajit Ray, no mossback he, lightens the problem, but doesn't diminish it, with an uncommonly high amount …
Hitchcock's shocker about an avian air attack on the citizenry of Bodega Bay is constructed along the lines of a sci-fi invasion film. Divested of all logic, this assault on middle-class complacency exposes Hitchcock's sadistic tendencies as nakedly as they have ever been. There is a lightening of load thanks …
Hitchcock's shocker about an avian air attack on the citizenry of Bodega Bay is constructed along the lines of a sci-fi invasion film. Divested of all logic, this assault on middle-class complacency exposes Hitchcock's sadistic tendencies as nakedly as they have ever been. There is a lightening of load thanks …
High-grade Hitchcock knockoff by Stanley Donen, with Cary Grant on hand to supply pedigree. Audrey Hepburn, composer Henry Mancini, cinematographer Charles Lang, designer Jean D'Eaubonne, and the city of Paris all add their share of glamour. With Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy.
One of John Cassavetes's more conventional projects, unrivalled on that count until Gloria and Big Trouble -- a "problem picture" on the instruction of mentally retarded school children. The use of actual retardees, in painfully extreme closeup, is simultaneously tough-skinned and soft-hearted -- a logical extension of his "people orientation." …
Godard described his movie as an Antonioni subject done in a Hitchcock style. That's a start. A French couple, out of an Alberto Moravia novel, drift apart, glumly, passively, uncommunicatively, after they travel to Italy in order for the husband to patch up the screenplay of a troubled Fritz Lang …
First in the film series employing Ian Fleming's James Bond, Agent 007, Her Majesty's Secret Service. Perhaps a trifle swifter and leaner (Sean Connery conspicuously so) than the subsequent ones; but fairly well developed, muscled, principled, even at this stage. Ursula Andress is Honey; Joseph Wiseman is Dr. No, a …
First in the film series employing Ian Fleming's James Bond, Agent 007, Her Majesty's Secret Service. Perhaps a trifle swifter and leaner (Sean Connery conspicuously so) than the subsequent ones; but fairly well developed, muscled, principled, even at this stage. Ursula Andress is Honey; Joseph Wiseman is Dr. No, a …
Luis Buñuel in his most cryptic mood: no clues and no clarifications. The elegant party guests in a high-rent Mexico City neighborhood adjourn to the living room after dinner and, for days following, are unable to leave the room, and are fitfully perplexed and exasperated by their peculiar inability. Buñuel …
The final hours of a suicidal alcoholic out-patient, movingly played by Maurice Ronet. One of the grayest of movies, not just visually (the filthy weather, the charcoal-y photography by Ghislain Cloquet), but emotionally and morally as well. The Satie soundtrack does a lot for the movie, but the movie does …
POW tale with a very roomy and airy feel to it, on the wide screen and in travelogue color, and staged with a sweeping eye for geometry. (A startling contrast, for example, to Bresson's claustrophobic A Man Escaped.) It builds up considerable rooting interest in its large congregation of heroes, …
Robert Wise's filmization of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and a personal retreat to his earliest directing jobs for producer Val Lewton: small, literate, understated horror films. The scope of this one, after a tempestuous prologue, is small to the point of claustrophobic: an assembly of assorted psychics …
Another of the finely drawn comic portraits in the capacious Peter Sellers gallery: this one of a cleric who brings only turmoil where he means to bring bliss. Not untypically, the picture around him -- a sort of blander Nazarin, a religious satire with its teeth in a glass beside …
Out of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, Akira Kurosawa has fashioned a formula kidnapping melodrama that, elaborated to two-and-a-half hours, manages to engage all his burning moral concerns, undimmed, as well as all his ingenuity as an action director unsurpassed on the wide-screen. Kurosawa makes good use of McBain's …