A screwball buddy comedy about a pair of Dizzy and Daffy apartment-mates (Helen Slater and Melanie Mayron, respectively), whose dope supplier entrusts them ("for a few days") with a bag containing $900,000 in cash, and whose rent is two months overdue. That's how it all begins. The plotting, at that …
Rickety romantic thriller, joining together two of the sweetest people you'd ever hope to find on the fringes of the Newcastle underworld. Boy bumps into girl (literally, in meet-cute fashion) at a shopping center, when her arms are full of parcels and he's on his way to apply for a …
True story of the last woman to be guillotined in France, a cottage-industry abortionist who performed the "service" twenty-three times during the Second World War. The subject almost screams with a Zola-esque squalor (the commonplace dreams of a singing career, the prostitute housemate, the collaborationist lover), but Claude Chabrol stifles …
Ernest Thompson, the author of On Golden Pond, probes the depths of adult heterosexual relations, and satisfies himself at every turn with the adolescent, the glib, the flip, the cute. The action -- one couple falling out of love, another couple falling into it -- is divided into episodes with …
It's The Front Page yet again, or really His Girl Friday, but transplanted from newspaper office to TV station, and with all the loss of subtlety normally noticed in the treatment of a story on the eleven o'clock news as against the daily paper. (And such a tellable story, too!) …
Oliver Stone's adaptation of a stage play by (and with) Eric Bogosian. And, for all the spaciousness of the set, the restless camerawork, the misty, powdery flashbacks, it very much looks like it. Like a stage play, that is. The basic text of it, taking off from the real-life murder …
The jokes recognizable as such run thin rather often in Juzo Itami's third movie comedy, following on The Funeral and Tampopo. But the congenial climate of it, the constant nearness in it to a laugh, is no less evident. This derives, this time, from the imbuement of white-collar crime -- …
The tax evaders this time -- land speculators fronted by a religious cult, and backed by an army of hooligans who do not stop short of murder -- are bigger fish than last time; and their very bigness kills some of what seemed to be the humor -- the burlesque …
One of those boyhood-pals-on-opposite-sides-of-the-law affairs, with a blonde thrown in between them to create a romantic triangle as well. For the most part it is decently and appropriately old-fashioned: the production is not out of proportion; the action, or violence as you prefer, is not excessive; the narrative is fast …
John Carpenter traces the social injustices in contemporary America to a plot among extraterrestrials to place themselves and their human toadies into positions of power and to hold down the rest of us through subliminally induced addictions to television, consumerism, and associated vices. There is nothing very original in all …
John Carpenter traces the social injustices in contemporary America to a plot among extraterrestrials to place themselves and their human toadies into positions of power and to hold down the rest of us through subliminally induced addictions to television, consumerism, and associated vices. There is nothing very original in all …
A journalistic reinvestigation and retrial of a decade-old Texas murder case, with findings very different from those of the court. One of the built-in limitations of this type of tabloid cinema is that it fully hopes to turn its "story" into "news," and thereby to shorten its own shelf life. …
The second directing effort of playwright and scenarist David Mamet, after the auspicious House of Games, is no disappointment, or only the mildest kind. Any hint of that feeling is probably attributable to the seeming increase in conventionality: an old Chicago shoeshine man (the dolorous Don Ameche), based on a …