It begins with an armed robbery at a jewelry store, a shooting, and a suicide — though the single-take camera seems more concerned with the symmetry of the composition and the rectangle of light at the center of the shot than it is with the people inside the store or …
Sam Fuller, whose eyes are always bigger than his stomach, takes on a murder investigation and East-West race relations at the same time. The after-dark location shooting and the presence of Glenn Corbett in the lead role remind us rather rudely of the budget limitations. With Victoria Shaw, James Shigeta.
Continuing to circulate among the heroes of time-honored action genres — aviators (Top Gun), car racers (Days of Thunder), private detectives (The Last Boy Scout) — director Tony Scott here moves on to submariners, complete with map-and-pointer briefings, locker-room-style inspirational speeches ("Go, 'Bama!"), sonor-screen blips of incoming torpedoes, and so …
Slow, very slow coming-of-age process, set in Key West during the Vietnam War. (Historical markers: the Moon Shot; mooning; stringy long hair.) Goldie Hawn plays down, down, way down, as the single mother of a twelve-year-old boy, the unshowbizzy David Arnott. Lowest point: her interpretation of the topless dancer as …
Sidney Lumet, as witness his Network, could never see much point in being humorous unless he could be lecturing you and hectoring you in the bargain. (Not too surprisingly, his climax here gives up all pretense of humor and settles down to strict lecture.) The topic this time out is …
Richard Pryor is a convicted con man who talks and shrieks and convulses his way into a psycho ward for observation and then has to impersonate a doctor after he escapes in the midst of a hurricane. The frequent injections of Sixties-vintage liberalism -- about things like the superior humanity, …
The old country-bumpkin-in-big-city routine. The city, as so often, is New York; the country, this time, is Australia -- the "bush." Paul Hogan, commercial spokesman for Australian tourism and Australian beer, is herein a pitchman for Australian "character" or Australian manhood or just himself. It was the surprise hit of …
Whatever slender charms this character (or its creator and incarnator, Paul Hogan) possessed the first time around have been nudged off the screen by his widening smugness. This is partly an effect of simply trying to keep him the same while time marches on around him. Rustic naiveté, for example, …
Entertaining lessons on Australian wildlife, from cable TV personality Steve Irwin ("It's so hot out here the flies are comin' right into my eyes for a drink"), are interrupted with an unentertaining fictional quest for a spy satellite's data recorder: swallowed by a croc, like the alarm clock in Peter …
Ecuadoran-born filmmaker Sebastián Cordero concocts an inflammatory fiction on inflammatory journalism, an unscrupulous exploration of professional ethics, a cynical exploitation of cynical exploitation. In it, a scripture-spouting Bible peddler (Damián Alcázar) accidentally kills a child who runs out in front of his car, the twin brother of a boy raped …
From a narrated prologue that relates how a Renaissance alchemist fled to Vera Cruz during the Spanish Inquisition, how he tinkered away on a secret invention, and how he met his fate in a cave-in in 1937(!), the action proceeds with cautious pace and meticulous circumstantiation into what amounts to …
Spike Lee knows enough camera tricks to keep you glued to the screen. Though not necessarily with pleasure. The sequence here that most nearly approaches outright pain, in fact crosses well over the threshold of it, is the one that employs an anamorphic lens to compress the players into funhouse-mirror …
Self-consciously feminist but rather mild and inoffensive biographical film about novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings -- inoffensive except maybe to fellow writers, who will have their own way of looking at her bouts of speed-typing when she is "inspired." The emphasis is on the group of people in the Florida backwater …
Based on Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. The title, reportedly, was changed in the belief that not enough of the moviegoing public is familiar with the story or its author. A more respectable reason would have been a desire to escape comparison with the book or the 1937 …