The first remake of the Clouzot Diabolique under the same name. (But see Games, see Reflections of Murder.) The retention of the French title emphasizes that this is frankly a film for those who refuse to read subtitles, or who are blind to black-and-white, or who can find no way …
Frederick Knott's theatrical thriller, forever a staple of provincial playhouses, comes to the screen under the aegis of Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious). Its cinematization, however, depends not so much on any overt attacks on its staginess and talkiness as on the simple imposition of 3-D; and not so much on any …
Frederick Knott's theatrical thriller, forever a staple of provincial playhouses, comes to the screen under the aegis of Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious). Its cinematization, however, depends not so much on any overt attacks on its staginess and talkiness as on the simple imposition of 3-D; and not so much on any …
Puttery, ploddy character piece centered around a travelling jewelry salesman in provincial Pennsylvania ("I have relationships. These go back decades," he says in his best Willy Loman impression), who must break in his youthful replacement. There's a hopeful stretch dealing with teaching, learning, bonding, but this soon gives way to …
Sean Connery returns to action, if not quite to form, after a much-needed, one-movie hiatus from the James Bond series. Almost all of the breeding and individuality have evaporated from this series, and in their stead is a vulgar vaudeville gagsterism, homosexual gags, dumb-broad gags, Keystone Kop gags, etc. The …
Not the first project that Buñuel undertook in France, but the one that signalled his thorough Frenchification: more refinement, more elegance, more finesse. The Octave Mirbeau novel, which Renoir had adapted into a synthetic Hollywood production in 1946, was felt by some (perhaps predominantly Renoir partisans) to be too Buñuelian …
Robert Bresson's truly, not falsely, pious treatment of the Georges Bernanos novel about a dying village priest (the sad-faced yet childish Claude Laydu) whose parishioners don't understand him. It occupies the most advantageous position in Bresson's output, the spot where his minimalist style has already been fully refined but not …
In the darkest, dingiest photography, a stoop-shouldered oaf is followed through his week in the minutest, mundanest detail: getting out of bed, shaving, making tea, walking to the subway, riding in the subway, putting on the white smock of his Marty-like job in the meat department of a supermarket, and …
A discarded wife, after eighteen years of marriage, gets revenge and a new romance, with a made-to-order dreamboat ("I carry you in my spirit") who's almost the living embodiment of a Luther Vandross song. Everyone else, too, gets better than they deserve. A clumsy and bruising piece of audience manipulation, …
The live-action adaptation of Jeff Kinney’s popular series of cartoonishly illustrated “tween” books is not in diary form but is nonetheless sufficiently episodic (the “Cheese Touch” episode, the “Devil Worship Woods” episode, and so on), covering the hero’s traumatic first year in middle school, with no help from his tormenting …
Polanski's lickerish private joke about a hippie hitchhiker (someone has described her as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Little Annie Fanny, though she favors the latter) who stumbles from a highway rape into a secluded Italian villa and into the mixed-nuts company of a bedridden patriarch, a syphilitic …
George A. Romero, passing off Ontario as his Pennsylvania habitat, raises more zombies for the purpose of running them further into the ground. The tetralogy hereby becomes a pentalogy. The borrowed Blair Witch gimmick of filmmaking students recording the events on shaky camcorders is more expedient than plausible; and the …
Andrew Dice Clay in concert: one of the soon-forgotten controversies of 1990. Some thought that his Brooklyn-bred, leather-jacketed, pompadour-coiffed, filthy-mouthed persona is vile enough to be spoken of in terms of an organized boycott. Others, or at least he himself, thought the vileness is all right because it's just a …
Warren Beatty had long contemplated playing the comic-strip cop (under assorted directors), but only after a screen version of Batman had pulled in a zillion dollars, give or take, did he at last discover the wisdom, the ingenuity, the genius, the vision, to go ahead on the project, and with …