It is perhaps advisable to recall, every few minutes, that when this first hit the nation's movie screens there was a war going on. Otherwise, viewed a safe distance from the general spirit of pulling-together, it may not be wholly clear why this Preston Sturges service comedy earned such hurrahs …
Erotic male fantasizing -- and exceptionally lazy fantasizing at that -- about the twelve-year-old boy who, with a busty redhead as his paragon, makes up his mind he's going to marry a hairdresser, and in late middle age does just that. (Does, as far as we can tell, virtually nothing …
Where does John Waters's poor taste leave off and his characters' poor taste begin? (Which came first, the chicken or the egg?) His deepest wade into the mainstream to date (but no higher than the ankles), this is sort of his personal American Graffiti, set in Baltimore in 1962. And …
Screenwriter Robert Towne gifted Hal Ashby with two masterful, director-proof scenarios, The Last Detail and Shampoo. Harold and Maude and Being There are basically one-joke comedies, the latter aided to no end by Peter Sellers’ performance, the former sentimentalizing the Holocaust by placing a concentration camp tattoo on Ruth Gordon’s …
Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love, girl doesn't. Girl agrees to be boy's half girlfriend.
By day, Sigourney Weaver is an underpaid researcher at the Institute for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies in London (with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a pair of designer eyeglasses to show for it); by night, an "escort girl" at the famous and infamous Jasmine Agency (and unbeknownst to her, a …
Ryan Gosling has his arms full as a do-gooding, dedicated, young, white, liberal history teacher and girls' basketball coach at an inner-city middle school, a voluntary role model who develops a special friendship with a fatherless black girl and a rivalry for her affections with a neighborhood dope peddler. Oh, …
Criminal commandos break into New Alcatraz to disrupt an execution. They hadn't counted on the undercover agent in convict togs: Steven Seagal. A lot of tough talking and tough posturing (quite fetchingly on the part of Nia Peeples), though the Hong Kong-style action is strictly twinkle-toes. With Morris Chestnut, Ja …
King Vidor's highly personal, highly willful portrayal of the life of black folks (sin, salvation, and songs in particular) in the Deep South, Vidor's own geographical origin. In some ways it was as bold an experiment in ethnography as the documentaries of Robert Flaherty (and maybe, because so much closer …