Nathanael West's virulent portrait of the Hollywood he lived in, in the 1930s, and of the hopes that turned to despair there, is converted by John Schlesinger into a display of latter-day Hollywood know-how and wherewithal (a lavish re-creation of period, a couple of spectacular catastrophe production numbers), whose purpose …
Witchcraft in 17th-century Denmark, with something for almost everyone, the moralist, the feminist, the occultist, the cinephile -- especially him. It's not at all for the dogmatist, of whatever persuasion. Carl Dreyer starts out leading your sympathies where they will go most readily. A hoary old Lutheran pastor oversees the …
Silvio Soldini’s mature marital drama of middle-class, middle-age economic crisis: lost job, lost house, lost prospects, lost self-respect; set in Genoa but general in application; a bit dull in image but intense in empathy and emotion. Antonio Albanese and Margherita Buy, models of restraint, hide their individual suffering behind the …
Four fleshy and sophisticated Calcuttans go on rural holiday. Not a lot "happens," but a lot comes to light. Shakespeare's Polonius, one might imagine, would flourish in the attempt to pin down what kind of movie this is. It is comical, pastoral, political, poetical, historical, spiritual, and God knows what …
Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, in his second feature, paints a portrait of an indolent, amoral, apathetic lady-killer and his poisonous milieu, ca. 1960. Wong's camera is both very close and very mobile: overfamiliar, nosy, nuzzling, liberty-taking. And although the focus tends to be extremely shallow, the impression is of …
Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, in his second feature, paints a portrait of an indolent, amoral, apathetic lady-killer and his poisonous milieu, ca. 1960. Wong's camera is both very close and very mobile: overfamiliar, nosy, nuzzling, liberty-taking. And although the focus tends to be extremely shallow, the impression is of …
Filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb, of Algerian descent, has a point to make about the debt of the French to the North African volunteers who, despite second-class treatment, helped liberate their "motherland" from Nazi occupation, a debt ignored at the time and still today. He makes the point frequently and clearly ("We're …
If the Time-Life publishers commissioned a picture book on the Great American Bread Basket, ca. World War I, they'd probably want it to look like this -- a thing you could be proud to place on your coffee table. You never know for sure what the picturesque Thomas Hart Benton …
It may indeed be Top Gun on the ground, or Top Gun without wings, or Top Gun without guns. But it is also a Crowd Roars or -- closer in every respect -- a Red Line 700 for 1990, just as Top Gun was a Dawn Patrol or a Ceiling …
The 1951 s-f classic refashioned into a tolerable time-passer on a fast track to oblivion. The urgent mobilization of an ad hoc team of scientists and the descent of a UFO on Central Park get the movie off to a gripping start, once past the prolonged opening credits and 1928 …
Science fiction with a United Nations message. The stuffiness of that aside, there is plenty of low-key suspense built up around a tall and finely chiselled extraterrestrial (Michael Rennie) who maintains a low profile in a Washington, D.C. boarding house while satisfying his curiosity about the American Way of Life. …
A pleasant outing in a Buick station wagon, comfortably seating five: Mom, Dad, Sis and her boyfriend, and the suspicious wife who, on the day after Thanksgiving, has discovered a cryptic note to her husband, quoting an Andrew Marvell love poem and signed "Sandy." What is the meaning of this? …
A pleasant outing in a Buick station wagon, comfortably seating five: Mom, Dad, Sis and her boyfriend, and the suspicious wife who, on the day after Thanksgiving, has discovered a cryptic note to her husband, quoting an Andrew Marvell love poem and signed "Sandy." What is the meaning of this? …
Grade-school-level sociology lesson disguised, ever so slightly, as satirical science fiction: a mysterious "wall of fog" closes off California from the outside world and inexplicably causes the disappearance of all residents of Hispanic origin, all the way, apparently, to the Spanish-born tenor, Plácido Domingo. This in turn causes Californians to …
Richard Linklater, maker of Slacker, drifts into the mainstream with a multi-character comedy about the last day of school, 1976, and the long night of celebration: beer, weed, bad music, bad hair, bad pants, etc. The writer-director maintains his air of detachment, and even of universal disdain, but he has …