This François Truffaut circus, by turns comic, pathetic, and acrobatic, reveals what is most self-indulgent in this director's output and in the French New Wave's as a whole. In telling the tale of a deadpan pianist (Charles Aznavour) sliding downhill from concert halls to honky-tonks, Truffaut shows supreme confidence in …
The first in Ingmar Bergman's so-called Silence-of-God trilogy, a series that got better, more cinematic, as it went (Winter Light, The Silence). This one, about faith and madness and all that, is a lot of talk -- high-quality talk, but highly theatrical talk. And the literal play-within-the-film is appropriately enough …
For American distribution, Satyajit Ray's Three Daughters has had exactly one daughter and approximately one hour eliminated. This operation has done no damage to what remains -- two out of three separate short stories dealing with different forms of first love, the first about a servant girl's devotion to a …
One man's vendetta against the mob -- a commonplace topic to which Sam Fuller brings his vinegary tabloid temperament and ravenous camera eye. With Cliff Robertson, Dolores Dorn, and Robert Emhardt.
Working with a free hand in his native Spain for the first time in three decades, Luis Buñuel slaps together a rude tale of Virtue Unrewarded that has ample accommodations for his special pleasures: decadent aristocrats, envious peasants, disease, deformity, larceny, lechery, rape, sacrilege, fetishism, Peeping Tomism, sexual symbolism, surrealistic …
The Romeo and Juliet tragedy relocated amid Manhattan's juvenile gang wars — Puerto Ricans and whites at daggers with one another. The plot sits quite easily in its new surroundings (though some effective revisions have been dared, where they were not absolutely necessary), and the tale even acquires a fresh …
Godard in his most unbecoming mode: the unnaturally effervescent (effervescence, that is, at about one-tenth the requisite tempo). The occasion, or flimsy excuse, is a romantic triangle drawn in the style of a Hollywood musical. Equally competent and equally unselfcritical imitations are performed in front of bathroom mirrors the world …