A comedy of male menopause. The hero, a Hollywood songwriter with personalized license plates that read "ASCAP," is explicitly a product of an earlier, more romantic era, and is quite nakedly a stand-in for writer-director Blake Edwards. Edwards's conscientious efforts to adopt liberal, open-minded, up-to-date attitudes lead him onto some …
The sighting of a stray Japanese submarine off the California coast ignites a slapstick panic which might more revealingly have been titled The Japs Are Coming, The Japs Are Coming. Steven Spielberg must have figured that if Stanley Kramer could resuscitate slapstick comedy (cf. It'a a Mad, Mad [etc.] World), …
This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
A sort of 42nd Street with aspirations to Lincoln Center, following the blue-ribbon casserole recipe of Fellini's 8 1/2, of intermingled reality, fantasy, and memory. The changes wrought on the backstage-musical formula by these uptown ambitions are of dubious import: a dizzying, quicker-than-the-eye editing style, a blunt closeup of semen-wetted …
Completely credulous (not to say credible) haunted house thriller, based on a documented case. The spacious Long Island house -- an attractive object which favors the side, or profile, view -- seems to affect devout Catholics (a priest and a nun have to vomit after merely breathing its air) more …
This case against the American legal system is so ill-prepared and ill-presented that it ought never have been brought to court. Add to that the whimpering liberal piety of Al Pacino and the aggressive ugliness of the image, and you have sufficient cause to slap it with a contempt citation. …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
Odd and unsatisfying selection of old material and new, nosing around the subject of the Beat phenomenon, but not pinning it down either as to period or locale, to the Beat people's situation then or now, in one place or another. Because the method is evocation rather than explication, it …
Jerzy Kosinski's adaptation of his own novel about a retarded gardener named Chance, whose only acquaintance with the world beyond his garden has been through his constant exposure to TV, and who is suddenly turned out into that world when his benevolent employer passes on. There would seem to be …
Must be without competition the shortest twenty-million-dollar movie ever made (clocked at well under ninety minutes, minus the credits), which is but one crude measure of how much more money than imagination went into this scandalously derivative and down-at-the-heels sci-fi epic. The bulk of its debt is payable to Star …