On sojourn in France, Giuseppe Tornatore has left his sentimental humanism at home in Italy, and for a change of pace plunges into a Polanski-esque thriller, dark, cramped, cryptic, unreal (or irreal) (or surreal), with Polanski himself on hand for validation, in the part of a provincial police inspector engaged …
Sam Raimi clamps down his comic-book graphic style — Wellesian deep focus, tilted cameras, magnifying-glass closeups — on the Western genre. For him, a new frontier. Essentially he has worked out an exhaustive series of variations on the Main Street showdown: the two opponents lined up on a parallel visual …
An anti-Christmas card (ever notice that Santa is an anagram for Satan?) that takes off in ironic leaps and bounds from its snow-globe landscapes and its Bing Crosby holiday melody in the background. A starry-eyed housewife (Mia Farrow) must make a hasty exit out the window in her nightgown when …
More than one rendezvous, in fact, photographed in Eric Rohmer's shoddiest manner, and enacted by a typically Rohmerian cast of slim young unknowns. The three separate episodes -- "Seven O'Clock Rendezvous," "The Benches of Paris," "Mother and Child 1907" -- ensure that the film will be less interminably but more …
The pervading spirit is not a ghost of William Congreve or of John Dryden, but apparently someone closer to Lloyd C. Douglas or A.J. Cronin, those raconteurs of medico-religiose uplift: Magnificent Obsession, Green Light, The Citadel. The story is set, true enough, in England in the early days of the …
The natural period of adjustment to any play by Shakespeare is here apt to take a little longer: the Elizabethan blank verse has been transplanted, with minor revisions, into an alternate-universe England circa the 1930s. (Marlowe's "Come live with me and be my love ..." is sung to a swinging …
The 18th-century Highland hero, in an intelligent, strikingly handsome representation. Not only is it set well geographically, in some of the planet's most glorious scenery, but it is also set well verbally, in a Well-Made Screenplay by Scotland's own Alan Sharp, crafty, witty, oftentimes bawdy: "Love is a dunghill, Betty, …
A heavy-on-the-sugar recipe for an irascible but lovable old Polish baker: Peter Falk in a latex Halloween mask like something out of a Gahan Wilson cartoon. D.B. Sweeney is the fine young man (and gifted physician) into whom the baker raises his parentless grandson. By the end, you're expected to …
Run-of-the-mill coming-of-age tale, very professionally handled by director Peter Yates, and invested with above-average scenic values by virtue of its rural Irish locale. That, and the pursed, pouchy visage of Albert Finney, in the role of a small-town constable with a big dream: "One good murder, that's all I ask, …
More isn't always better, ventures the eponymous heroine. "Sometimes it's just more." Truer words never fell on deafer ears. Sydney Pollack's update of Billy Wilder's fairy-tale-for-grownups is, by virtue of fidelity to its forebear, a well-constructed piece of work, and (major assist to cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno) a gleamingly polished one …
Todd Haynes's personal baptism in the commercial mainstream. It starts out as if it could be an extension of one of the three plot strands in his 16mm black-and-white homoerotic undergrounder, Poison -- the science-fictional strand to do with a "Leper Sex Killer on the Loose." An AIDS metaphor, unmistakably. …
Roland Joffé's adaptation of the Puritan classic engenders more yawns than hoots: the reconstruction of a Pilgrim settlement of the 1660s is tediously detailed; John Barry's music is slumberously sumptuous. But besides the intermittent rib-tickler (Demi Moore, with her Cosmo-girl's finely sculpted nose, jaw, eyebrows, etc., and her party girl's …
A metropolitan murder mystery that, in the Golden Age of the detective novel, might well have appealed to Ellery Queen: somebody is killing people in graphic illustration of the Seven Deadly Sins, and littering the crime scenes with quotations from Milton, Shakespeare, etc. We do not now, naturally, have an …
A metropolitan murder mystery that, in the Golden Age of the detective novel, might well have appealed to Ellery Queen: somebody is killing people in graphic illustration of the Seven Deadly Sins, and littering the crime scenes with quotations from Milton, Shakespeare, etc. We do not now, naturally, have an …
Sophisticated but smug comedy of midlife crisis, a not-too-far-from-the-mainstream directorial debut for painter David Salle, about a small-scale wheeler-dealer from provincial Florida who, under the spell of self-help self-hypnosis, wants to leave his mark on the world, wants to do something of permanent value, wants specifically to make a film …