A newly widowed housewife, advancing toward middle age, hits the road, with her vocal twelve-year-old son in tow, in search of a future of some kind, hoping to make a go of it as the Alice Faye-style singer she dreamed of becoming in her childhood. (The passion for goldie-oldie songs …
The homeward odyssey of a disheveled German journalist who, in New York City, gets stuck with the responsibility of escorting back to Europe a callously abandoned nine-year-old girl. (In handling this Paper Moon relationship, the movie flirts constantly with sentimentality but is too low on energy and passion to make …
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's crocodile-tearjerker about the romance and marriage of a sixtyish German scrubwoman and a young Moroccan immigrant. It's a crossbreed of two Douglas Sirk tearjerkers of the Fifties, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, and twice as hard to swallow as either of those. Fassbinder clicks …
A cocky, heedless, high-dive stunt undertaken by Claude Lelouch, the object of which is to stretch a love story across the entire 20th Century and three hours of movie time. (The version for American release retraces the two roads, going back to the beginning of the century and the beginning …
Faced with a depletion of virgins in the Transylvanian countryside, a pouty, worried Count Dracula is impelled, at the urging of his spit-and-polish valet, to take leave of his home in search of virgin blood ("But I can't leave my family down in the crypt," he whines). And so he …
Paul Morrissey's facelift of the old Mary Shelley tale -- now a deadpan charade of beautiful young people searching, scissoring, and stitching in the laboratory for more beauty yet. Backed by Carlo Ponti, Morrissey is for the first time a man of means (European forest and castle locales, elegant musical …
Documentary sketch of Antonia Brico, who won acclaim first in the Twenties as an orchestral conductor -- in Berlin, London, New York -- and for a while was able to ride on the novelty of breaking through the sex barrier in the conducting profession; once the novelty began wearing thin, …
Something of a male version of Repulsion, about a boys' Phys. Ed. teacher, played by a physically fit and emotionally taut Tab Hunter, whose skin starts to crawl whenever a member of the opposite sex gets close, hot, and familiar. The narrative runs along sadly worn paths, and, in any …
A slice of Americana from the Corman company. It pictures a gang of hick stickup artists whose boisterous impersonations of rural Bonnie-and-Clyde types more closely resemble excited chickens. Angie Dickinson, William Shatner; directed by Steve Carver.
David Hockney at work, and at a romantic crossroads with his lover and model, Peter Schlesinger. The balance is quite the reverse of what it is in most movies on artists: the details of his evolving art are far more gripping than those of his personal life, though of course …
A series of obscene phone calls start to plague the residents of the sorority and it becomes clear that a psychopath is homing in on the sisters with dubious intentions. And though the police try to trace the calls, they discover that nothing is as it seems during this Black …
Leading off with fiery credits in the color of cheddar cheese and a whip-cracking parody of Frankie Laine's Rawhide theme song, Mel Brooks bursts onto the Western plains; but the terrain gives way, unpredictably, and opens up to allow any whim: a street brawl that spills across the Warner Brothers …
Vittorio De Sica's second-to-last movie, released post-humously. The blue-collar heroine, tubercular, is packed off, for a breather from family and factory, to a breathtaking mountaintop sanatorium, and just as she embarks on an extramarital romance with a fellow patient she is pronounced fit and sent back home. Out of this …
In the professional gamblers' circuit, from the Santa Anita track to the Reno casinos, Robert Altman has again selected a fortuitous stretch of terrain to survey. However, he seems unable to find much that interests or makes sense to him there, and he sweeps aside most of the gambling scene …