Scowlingly serious French film -- as the shot of carrion crows picking at the spilled entrails of a woodland creature soon makes plain. Or as the name of director André Téchiné had made plain beforehand. For all his soberness and somberness, Téchiné has put together an odd and colorful patchwork …
A newly widowed housewife, advancing toward middle age, hits the road, with her vocal twelve-year-old son in tow, in search of a future of some kind, hoping to make a go of it as the Alice Faye-style singer she dreamed of becoming in her childhood. (The passion for goldie-oldie songs …
The homeward odyssey of a disheveled German journalist who, in New York City, gets stuck with the responsibility of escorting back to Europe a callously abandoned nine-year-old girl. (In handling this Paper Moon relationship, the movie flirts constantly with sentimentality but is too low on energy and passion to make …
Tim Burton’s adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic gives him license, free rein, greased rails, to stage a congenial freak show in a hermetic netherworld: a 3-D moving-picture book. The customary merger of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, has the innovation of a marriageable …
In addition to the possessive Alice, the place is crowded with three strapping sons, a straying husband, and a vision-impaired mother (“Which one of you peed on the toilet lid again?”), not to mention, outside the house, an old flame who happens to be married to Alice’s best customer at …
Like the other big youth movies, so-called, of 1969 (Easy Rider, Last Summer), Arthur Penn's slight expansion of Arlo Guthrie's rambling protest ballad avoids coddling its audience. It is most effective, in fact, when it is gravely cautioning. The sour, melancholy notes sounded at a hospital death bed, at a …
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 …
The rare and special sequel that is not only worse than its predecessors but that makes its predecessors seem worse too. Seem, more exactly, to have been not worth the bother. Set in an extraterrestrial penal colony and crackpot religious sanctuary, where the shaven-headed inmates call each other "wankers" among …
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 …
Dimly socially conscious sci-fi about interplanetary (more than just interracial) cop partners, on the trail of one of the alien's fellows. (We are given a derogatory term for them -- "slags" -- such as must accompany all minorities; and we are invited -- no, begged -- to laugh at their …
Ripley, believe it or not, has been cloned from a drop of her own blood, with new superhuman strength as befits her stature as a Cultural Icon. But it is not for herself that she has been brought back from the dead. It is for the alien queen inside her, …
The cross-series combat continues on a crash-landed spacecraft in Colorado, and spills into the small town of Crested Butte. The brothers Colin and Greg Strause, visual-effects technicians in their feature directing debut, appear to be on very poor terms with human beings, and not a whole lot better terms with …
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 …