One of John Cassavetes's more conventional projects, unrivalled on that count until Gloria and Big Trouble -- a "problem picture" on the instruction of mentally retarded school children. The use of actual retardees, in painfully extreme closeup, is simultaneously tough-skinned and soft-hearted -- a logical extension of his "people orientation." …
From Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal) comes this adaptation of novel about an unhappily married judge deciding a case involving a teenage boy who is refusing a blood transfusion on religious principle.
Strenuous uplift by way of Broadway (the Mark Medoff play), about a speech teacher of deaf eleventh-graders. We see little of the man's daily teaching techniques (and hear little of the sounds of deaf people's speech), only what the headmaster disapprovingly terms "razzle-dazzle": standing on his hands in the classroom, …
The opening-credits sequence alone, a closeup of hands at work on mending a shoe, is more enriching than most entire movies. And the following hour and a half are loaded with no less solid information on life today in Iran, its streets, its shops, its schools, its houses. The plot …
True tale of a British correspondent in China during the Japanese invasion of 1937, reluctantly assuming responsibility for five dozen war orphans. The cardboard characters, the battering-ram dramaturgy, and the lackluster look of the thing (excepting the luminous Michelle Yeoh as a shady lady) fail to substantiate the truth of …
The basic idea — from a novel by P.D. James, a departure from her detective fiction — of a worldwide plague of female infertility, even though not at all original (see The Handmaid's Tale, as a prime example), remains nevertheless a potent metaphor for that science-fiction staple, the End of …
Marcel Carné's escapist period piece, made in France during the Nazi occupation, looks like an effort to manufacture a movie that belongs on the library shelf beside Hugo and Balzac. For certain, it is a literate piece of work, a-buzz with witty and crafty gab; and it is played with …
Marcel Carné's escapist period piece, made in France during the Nazi occupation, looks like an effort to manufacture a movie that belongs on the library shelf beside Hugo and Balzac. For certain, it is a literate piece of work, a-buzz with witty and crafty gab; and it is played with …
Tony historical romance centered around the affair of the twenty-three-year-old Alfred de Musset and the six-years-older George Sand, "poetry and prose," perhaps not a perfect match but an ignitable one. Not half, not a quarter, not an eighth the fun of the cooler-headed and farther-distanced Impromptu, navigating the same social …
A cross between Village of the Damned and The Wicker Man: heathen youth in Nebraska (pretty corny, all right). The worst of the gore is sprung first thing, and thus the rest of it, though more discreet, becomes worse in anticipation. And there seems to be an eternity of anticipation. …
Comedy about Commies: the one-night fling of a comely Australian firebrand and old Joe Stalin himself, and the resulting offspring. It could hardly have been any unfunnier had it been made by card-carrying Party members. With Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill, F. Murray Abraham; directed by Peter Duncan.
The old malevolent-doll routine, this time a knee-high scamp named Chuckie, with a freckled nose, blue eyes, thatch of red hair (combed in a vaguely Bobby Goldsboro "do"), a more legitimate monstrosity than monster. Stick with Devil Doll or Dead of Night or Trilogy of Terror or...or...or.... With Chris Sarandon …
The old malevolent-doll routine, this time a knee-high scamp named Chuckie, with a freckled nose, blue eyes, thatch of red hair (combed in a vaguely Bobby Goldsboro "do"), a more legitimate monstrosity than monster. Stick with Devil Doll or Dead of Night or Trilogy of Terror or...or...or.... With Chris Sarandon …
Chile, 1976. Carmen heads off to her beach house to supervise its renovation. Her husband, children and grandchildren come back and forth during the winter vacation. When the family priest asks her to take care of a young man he is sheltering in secret, Carmen steps onto unexplored territories, away …