Bernardo Bertolucci combines a pamphleteer's penchant for straight, party-line ideology and a best-selling novelist's flair for wanton sensation: heaps of flesh, blood, and excrement (of both the literal and figurative sort). In its breadth, if not in its detail, this maxi-budgeted extravaganza could loosely be termed "novelistic." But just whose …
ABBA: The Movie dances back into movie theaters for a special two-day fan event celebrating 50 years since the Swedish pop sensation was formed and 45 years since the film's original release. The mockumentary comedy-drama film is about the Swedish pop group Australian tour.
A Third World groin-kicker, eye-gouger, and gorge-riser about an escalatingly bloody rebellion of salt miners. Strong stuff; sheets of dust blowing relentlessly across the screen, Spanish epithets like puerco, cobarde, and hijo de puta popping up throughout the script, Eisensteinian extras in noble poses, Peckinpahian special-effects gore, a passionate score …
This movie begins in the realm of the ridiculous (the airborne pleasure palace borrows several ideas in first-class travel accommodations from The Big Bus, and the audience is expected to go ga-ga over them), and it follows a course even sillier than the forerunners in the Airport series (the attempted …
As a sort of official, permanent record, the repertoire of prima ballerina Alicia Alonso, one of Cuba's national treasures, has been duly committed to film. Because she's performing for the camera, and for posterity, she performs to the hilt, and she is afforded a variety of backdrops on the sumptuously …
A shamefaced copycatting of Disney's FANTASIA. To put some distance between his model and himself, Bruno Bozzetto, the Italian animator, elects to flip-flop the values of the Disney movie -- the naivism of the animation and the solemnity about classical music. Bozzetto's cartoon sequences are both gamy and preachy, and …
Pulp thriller version of the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, based on the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, and directed by Wim Wenders. On one level, it's a withering critique of the male camaraderie ethic (with friends like this, who needs enemies?). On another, it's a conventional underworld adventure refreshingly infused with …
Not really an Andy Warhol nor even a Paul Morrissey movie, but rather a Jed Johnson. (Who is he, you wonder? He's a veteran of the sound department on the Warhol-Morrissey movies, promoted herewith to the director's chair.) The undiscriminating misanthropy, the grotesque comedy, and the boringly belligerent tastelessness owe …
Woody Allen's approximately autobiographical movie tells of the short-lived romance between a New York Jewish intellectual (Allen himself, accoutered in a thrift-shop wardrobe) and a kooky Midwestern WASP (Diane Keaton). It can usefully be thought of as a movie tailored to the critics. It is Allen's most "personal" movie (no …
This excursion into the supernatural has a subject, but no story to speak of. The subject, reincarnation, harbors about as much dramatic potential as, say, evolution; and so, to inject some horror-story thrills into it, Frank de Felitta, author of book and screenplay, has postulated a freak case, a faulty …
This Italian horror movie comes on strong. Ahead of the credits we are shown four fast suicides, all of them messy, and immediately afterwards we are sent into the city morgue to watch white-aproned actors fondling uncooked meats that are supposed to represent human innards. Before the movie is five …
A different and diffident sort of movie comedy, which takes up the limited-interest subject of a Boston underground newspaper, why it lost its aim in the post-Nixon Seventies, and how it finishes the good fight not with a bang, but with a whimper. The style is realistic caricature, and it …
The sequel craze of the Seventies has here reached the point of certifiability: this movie has nothing whatever to do with the original Beyond the Door, but for marketing reasons it is smarter to pretend otherwise. Cult director Mario Bava, an unpretentious surrealist, creates a nasty atmosphere with a haunted …
Each of the three principals goes a bit deeper than skin: Bruce Dern earning some sympathy for the former P.O.W. who conforms to the popular notion among scriptwriters that all Vietnam veterans are psychopaths; Marthe Keller striking a blow for womanpower as the Black September terrorist who masterminds and single-handedly …
A secretive, monosyllabic Grand Prix racer (Al Pacino) is flung together by chance with a dizzy Italian girl (Marthe Keller) who incessantly badgers the self-important sportsman in the manner of Katharine Hepburn in a screwball comedy. He, living daily with the possibility of death in his profession, wears an arrogantly …