Or "No Wonder the British Empire Folded," based on a true murder case (set in Kenya during the Second World War) that's a bit like Somerset Maugham crossed with a weekly gossip tabloid. The decadence ("You wouldn't by any chance have a chocolate-covered lobster?"), corruption, moral rot, and whatnot, are …
In the time-honored tradition of alternate-world fantasies, this posits a post-WWII Hollywood nestled against a borough called Toontown, populated by autonomous cartoon figures. Most of these seem to find employment in the entertainment industry, and all may wander about Hollywood at will and rub elbows with resident humans. The result …
Sherlock Holmes remodelled, but not improved. Dr. Watson is now an actual man, and an author and deductive genius to boot. Holmes is his invention, impersonated in real life by a ham actor, and "a gambler, a womanizer, and a drunkard." (This pretty well cuts Conan Doyle out of the …
From John Nichols's autobiographical novel about boyhood during World War II -- and clearly an above-average boyhood at that, with a wide streak of morbidity, and a vocabulary that includes "scrutinize," "blatant," "infantile," "castrate," and "gluteus maximus," not to mention "goddamn" and "son of a bitch." Episodic in structure, and …
Domestic travails worthy of a Roy Lichtenstein painting, with jokily grand passions, jokily cheery colors, jokily clever compositions -- all courtesy of Spanish gadfly Pedro Almodóvar. The high-impact imagery is genuinely fun, and the opening-credits sequence -- in the style of fashion-magazine ads -- is alone almost enough to make …
Picture this: it's to be a sort of New York fairy tale about an ambitious, industrious, competent, loyal, and trusting secretary outrunning all the rats in the rat race, and the first shot is an aerial one of the face of Lady Liberty. Might you just as well give up …
Cleverly roundabout (and upstream) approach to the apartheid problem in South Africa, with a deceptively sunny, pastel image. It starts out from the strict point of view of a thirteen-year-old white girl who doesn't know why her father has had to leave the country, or exactly what her leftist mother …
The post-apocalyptic future, where water is strictly rationed, where a white-robed guru instructs his flock from The Wit and Wisdom of Charles Manson, where all jokes (like the foregoing) are lame, and where TV director Lee Katzin can toss around greater gobs of violence than in his normal habitat. In …
This is, as the title serves warning, a youth Western, which would seem for starters a cunning enough way to lure the bulk of Eighties moviegoers back into theaters to view the newborn of this vanishing breed. And the very young screenwriter John Fusco, who earlier had written the Crossroads …
A steady trickle of sap, albeit one from the heart (writer-director Tina Rathborne's). It tells of the alternating raptures and tortures of childhood, or anyway those of a hypersensitive orphan with a Joan-of-Arc complex, raised by a domineering grandmother and sympathetic French governess with a Joan-of-Arc haircut. (The sap flows …