There is something surreal about Swedish journalists, “fueled by curiosity and naïveté,” gaining unlimited access to America’s black-power movement. The raw footage sat neglected for 30 years, as though waiting for documentarian Göran Olsson to liberate it. Add contemporary commentary by scholars and surviving activists, and the result is an …
In the tradition of The Yakuza, The Challenge, House of Bamboo, Rififi in Tokyo; namely the tradition of Western tough guy in the Land of the Rising Sun. Michael Douglas (who always looks as if he knows he's being photographed, possibly because he is under investigation by Internal Affairs, but …
Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath — and there is no sense here, as there is elsewhere, that he is having to go out of his way to cook …
Bruce Beresford's rendition of a Brian Moore novel about a French Jesuit with a touch of a martyr complex ("Death is almost certain") on a mission among Canadian Indians in the early Seventeenth Century. The subject and setting might provoke a wish that the spirit of Willa Cather -- the …
The last waltz for Ozzy Osbourne and rock's most renown heavy metal band.
Writer-director Craig Brewer wriggles at the far edge of the socially acceptable, and he does so with some of the fearlessness of the exploitation filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies: the title itself distinctly echoes Blacksnake, the contribution of Russ Meyer, "King of the Nudies," to the racial discourse. Except …
Three brothers – Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta), the brains, Luigi (Marco Leonardi), the brawn, and Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane), the goat-herding outcast – each with a different vision of what direction the “family business” should take. The stories are workaday, but the storytelling is anything but in Francesco Munzi’s instant gangster classic. …
Possibly the best horse movie since National Velvet and without question the best Mickey Rooney showcase in a long, long time, but not quite as long a time as since National Velvet. Carroll Ballard, a Francis Coppola protégé, makes the story seem very tall, as though seen from a child's …
To his old Arabian home, that is, in a jerry-built plot wherein he is horsenapped by his original owners, escapes several attempts on his life by the evil Kurr of the Uruk tribe (a ludicrous performance by Allen Goorwitz), and, after falling his usual twenty lengths behind, wins the big …
Each of the three principals goes a bit deeper than skin: Bruce Dern earning some sympathy for the former P.O.W. who conforms to the popular notion among scriptwriters that all Vietnam veterans are psychopaths; Marthe Keller striking a blow for womanpower as the Black September terrorist who masterminds and single-handedly …
Ballet hokum becomes a head trip of pop-goth stylization as director Darren Aronofsky falls off his raw, real form of The Wrestler. Natalie Portman worked hard as the traumatized ballerina but spins around in a blur of bad dancing, one-note acting, and demented plot. Helping to creep it up are …
A new Western classic, enough to make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seem like a sappy prequel. Old Butch (Sam Shepard), now called Blackthorn, hides out in deep Bolivia raising horses and loving a village woman (but still able to ride hard and shoot fast) when a Spanish mining …
Argentine beauty Olga Zubarry stars as a cabaret performer trying to protect her young daughter (Gogó) from a mysterious murderer while parrying the advances of the prosecutor (Roberto Escalada) pursuing the killer. Directed by Román Viñoly Barreto.
A highly satisfying and only slightly dirty-dealing cat-and-mouse game, or really cat-and-cat, that opposes two feminine archetypes, the contemporary career woman (and not without personal sacrifices: "You're not a happy person," her boss observes) and the classical femme literally fatale, the independent and the parasite, the equal-rights competitor and the …