Single-handedly, William Hurt damn near ruins the movie. Always a strange, always a mannered, always a tormented actor, he would appear here to be making a concerted effort to find out how close he can get to being the World's Worst Actor without sacrificing the good opinion of his fans …
A Third World groin-kicker, eye-gouger, and gorge-riser about an escalatingly bloody rebellion of salt miners. Strong stuff; sheets of dust blowing relentlessly across the screen, Spanish epithets like puerco, cobarde, and hijo de puta popping up throughout the script, Eisensteinian extras in noble poses, Peckinpahian special-effects gore, a passionate score …
Husband and wife square off in the courtroom as District Attorney and defense advocate. The emphasis in this juridical battle of the sexes is on "cute" comedy (he summons a tear to his eye at will, he paddles her derriere, etc.). With Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday; directed …
The reteaming of the writer and the director of Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, has produced no less madness but much more method. Or anyhow more meaning. Kaufman, playing fast and loose with the truth, evidently set out in reality (though it doesn't seem his sort of …
They had me at Uncle Fester’s nipples. And kudos to Nick Kroll for restoring Jackie Coogan’s insensitive lisp to the character! Much closer in spirit to Charles Addams’ ghoulishly byzantine etchings (Lurch was indeed an escapee from a home for the criminally insane) and the '60s sitcom it spawned than …
The athleticism in this Warner Brothers swashbuckler is shown to be of a dubious character when Eugene Pallette, built like an egg, outmaneuvers Errol Flynn in a five-minute stick fight on a foot-wide plank. From that moment, it is plain that the memorized moments in the Robin Hood legend are …
Philip Roth, no less, lauded mentor Saul Bellow as the first Jewish author to gain acceptance in a Christian world. He was championed by readers and peers alike as the literary voice who defined his generation. What became of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author? Long before the woke brigade loomed on …
One of the better of Otto Preminger's sprawling adaptations of big, fat, multi-character, best-selling novels, this one Allen Drury's melodramatic civics lesson on cut-throat politics in D.C. The large cast -- Fonda, Laughton, Pidgeon, Don Murray, George Grizzard, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney (a comeback role for the star …
Collective New York phobias -- fear of involvement, fear of strangers, fear of break-ins -- are enacted by way of a comic nightmare in which an Upper East Side word processor, lured by the prospect of a hot date, gets marooned in SoHo without a dime (well, actually with ninety-seven …
The opening long take and the quietly unexpected off-camera appearance by the film’s shamefaced lead character set the tone for this powerful family melodrama. For most of its running time, director and co-writer Joachim Lafosse gives the impression that he’s drilled a hole into the side of a married couple’s …
Nancy Biurski's documentary on the astonishing ballerina affectionately known as Tanny is not quite a great movie: there are a few too many stills, some clunky voiceovers, and an occasionally foray into the lugubrious. But it does tell a great story. Tanny, whose long limbs and angular grace were expansive …
It wasn’t a random act of violence like the ones that hit classrooms with greater frequency, but rather a broken spring of nature. More than 6000 parents whose children perished in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake were inspired by the government to cut their losses and have another one. (Those who …
Few people can be put out with Ingmar Bergman for having not kept his promise that Fanny and Alexander would remain his last movie. Still, Bergman has felt obliged to argue, with perhaps an overrefined sense of integrity, that inasmuch as After the Rehearsal was made originally for Swedish television, …
Werner Herzog's Radical Left slanting of an old-fashioned Lost Patrol adventure yarn. The anti-imperialist, anti-militarist storyline concerns a splinter group of Pizarro's conquistadors searching in vain for El Dorado and mown down a man at a time by invisible Peruvian cannibals. What gives this inevitable, countdown plot (18 dead, 6 …