Like the other big youth movies, so-called, of 1969 (Easy Rider, Last Summer), Arthur Penn's slight expansion of Arlo Guthrie's rambling protest ballad avoids coddling its audience. It is most effective, in fact, when it is gravely cautioning. The sour, melancholy notes sounded at a hospital death bed, at a …
Stodgy BBC type treatment of the stormy marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, with the unflatteringly photographed players dressed to look like pincushions and talking themselves, and their audience, to death. Genevieve Bujold, Richard Burton; directed by Charles Jarrott.
Falling between Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, this would appear in some ways, at least superficial ways, to be Jean-Pierre Melville's most "personal" project, deviating from the archetypal, abstract, imitation-American gangster films with which he is most identified, veering instead toward his first-hand experiences as a Jew in the …
A tasty dish of British surrealism, and not bad as brain food -- either not a claim to be seriously made for many movies taking place in the aftermath of World War III, this particular version of that war having lasted very nearly two and a half minutes and left …
Under Pontecorvo's benevolent but often wishy-washy leadership, the natives on a Portuguese island colony arise in revolutionary fervor. This solemn historical pageant is thrown somewhat out of whack by the hefty presence of Marlon Brando, a willing martyr to Western decadence in the fragrant role of a mercenary Britisher. The …
Two grown men, Newman and Redford, having fun just like kids, never minding the hard times undergone by bank robbers in the Old West. A fey and frilly Western, sometimes nostalgic and sometimes mythic, and swamped with winsomeness. Directed by George Roy Hill.
Radley Metzger's deluxe, air-conditioned model of the durable romantic drama by Dumas fils (Metzger's second recruitment, after Carmen Baby, from the ranks of the classics), updated to the pop-art and jet-set era of sterilized, plastic, inflatable furniture and of sexual partners of similar description. Daniele Gaubert, Nino Castelnuovo.
A phantasmagoria of Armenian history and culture, from the officially disapproved Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov (among his crimes: homosexuality). A stranger to this territory might well feel the need for some textual commentary, footnotes, and the like, but he would not be bothering to feel that need in a lesser …
Visconti's horrendous dredging up of the Nazi nightmare begins inside a blast furnace, and for nearly three hours thereafter, his vision of human depravity rages like a fever. It's open to question whether Visconti was very interested in Naziism as a historical fact, or whether he was merely interested in …
The Vietnam generation's anguish and paranoia about America, acted out in three contrasting styles by Peter Fonda, who strikes mythical postures and meditative profiles, Jack Nicholson, who chews up the scenery and the other actors like an indomitable ham, and, the strongest of the three, Dennis Hopper, who turns in …
A crime of passion and its irreversible aftereffects intrude upon the equanimity of French bourgeois lives, rather paradisiacally pictured by Claude Chabrol. His would-be critical observations of the milieu are rather deflatingly squeezed between his encouragement of Stephane Audran's slinky, glamorpuss posturings and his own slick emulations of his favorite …
Very, very, very long Sergio Leone spaghetti Western -- long on carnage and bone-crunches, long on plot twists and yellowy scenery, long on inarticulate grunts and hoarse dubbing. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach loosely personify the respective qualities listed in the title.
Let’s open with trivia: what was the first film to be released on VHS? In actuality, there were 50, all 20th Century Fox titles licensed by Magnetic Video, and Hello, Dolly! was among them. Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau star, and it’s fun to try to spot signs of their …
An honest and humorous enough movie, despite some Godardian affectations, to bear up rather well under its reputation as one of the great landmarks of sexual liberation in the cinema. Lucky it has other merits to fall back on, because the bodies on exhibit are too close to the human …