Misunderstood Youth, as it was understood in the Sixties: embodied in Dustin Hoffman's sadsack slouch and flat-footed shuffle (he is supposed to be a college track star), bounced around between yammering grownups and suffocating lovers, swept up and down the California coast, buoyed by the watery sounds of Simon and …
Katherine Hepburn's lily white niece falls for black man Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's set-bound Oscar-winning slog. With Spencer Tracy in his farewell performance.
For a guy who has spent the better portion of his life playing cinephilic matchmaker, this about-face ring-up endures as a marriage made in “Hell.” “Quick! Turn on channel 9,” the voice on the other end of the line commanded. “You gotta see the way the dad catches the football.” …
While traveling in the Deep South, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a black Philadelphian homicide detective, becomes unwittingly embroiled in the murder investigation of a prominent businessman. Finding the killer, however, proves difficult when his efforts are constantly thwarted by the bigoted town sheriff (Rod Steiger). But neither man can solve …
This marks the exit from Warhol's best period as a filmmaker. It's in the same mode as, though less likable than, its immediate predecessors, I, a Man and Bike Boy. Much of the decline can perhaps be attributed to an increased dependence on Viva, with her strident and orthodox notions …
Lee Marvin's robot-like pushiness and impassivity tower above the whimperings, cringings, stammerings, and other symbolic castratings of a smug bunch of nattily tailored chieftains in the San Francisco underworld. The director, John Boorman, whips up mountains of hot color, frigid modern architecture, twisted sexuality, and modish Marienbad editing. With Angie …
The digging of a new subway line puts Professor Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir) in contact with a ancient martian spaceship. Roy Ward Baker directs.
An elegy on the American gangster genre by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (note to the unwary: no actual sword-wielding samurai are to be found herein). The opening twenty minutes or so are as smoothly tooled as any stretch of cinema you could ever hope to see, with each shot clicking …
It is faithful to Camus. But it is not Camus. It is Visconti, which is something quite different, but quite fine in its own, other way. That way encompasses a palpable, if not really oppressive, atmosphere, with delicate color work by Giuseppe Rotunno, and a leisurely but compelling pace. The …
The first film to shine a light inside a modern-day Bedlam, the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Criminally Insane — the sort of place that was once jokingly looked down upon as a “laughing academy” or “nuthouse.” It also marked documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s first crack at chronicling the brutalizing effects …
Difficult as it is to imagine someone treating Audrey Hepburn badly, Albert Finney does. Luckily screenwriter Frederic Raphael and director Stanley Donen don't let him get away with it for too long. A masterpiece, strongly influenced by the French New Wave, that through time lives on as one of the …
Jacqueline Susann's potboiler on the cruel and ironic tribulations of the Hollywood crowd -- paraplegia, breast cancer, the treadmill of pill-regulated highs and lows -- is true trash, and Mark Robson's treatment is true tolerance. With a substantial background in movie soap operas, Robson has picked up the domestic virtue …
Quintessential blind-lady-in-distress thriller, from the theater piece by Frederick Knott, playwright also of Dial M for Murder. It's undeniably talky and stagy, but the device whereby the heroine learns that her new ally is really her new enemy is an ingenious bit of stagecraft, and it gains on screen from …
A whimsical excuse for a movie: Woody Allen has dubbed his own dialogue onto a silly Japanese spy movie. It is undisciplined, to put it gently. But the voices are really a very funny parody of standard, raspy movie dubbing, and a reasonable number of the gag lines receive gusty …
Evil-minded comedy in Victorian dress, played a bit archly and daintily by the likes of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and others, but periodically fun, especially when taken over by Peter Sellers and a roomful of cats. Based on the book by Robert Louis Stevenson; directed by Bryan Forbes.