Second in the line of Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns. Lee Van Cleef enters the equation as a black-frocked genius of gunmanship named Bright Eyes, or Beady Eyes, nursing a mawkish revenge motive. This is supposed to add interest to the continuing conflict between Clint Eastwood and a resurrected Gian …
Diagrammatic adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novelette allows very few unstressful moments, such as the one about coming in from the winter cold and savoring a hot cup of coffee in a simple country kitchen. Most of the time, the peaceful Canadian farm is forced to seem terribly sinister, and, …
Streisand's coming-out party, devoted totally to pumping up its pre-sold star and providing a definitive definition of prima donna. For a story set in the Ziegfeld Follies, there is a queer absence of alternative females. The movie's males, meantime, are reduced, one and all, to passive star-gazers. Omar Sharif in …
Sergio Corbucci spaghetti western about a mute gunfighter (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who defends a young widow and a group of outlaws against a gang of bounty killers led by Klaus Kinski.
A horror film from Ingmar Bergman. While vacationing on a remote Scandanavian island with his younger pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.
It is practically impossible to avoid comparison with Vigo's Zero for Conduct, and this is most assuredly not to the advantage of If. The problem is that Lindsay Anderson's film sticks slightly too close to realistic, and credulous, so that the vision of the revolt of the trouble-makers in a …
A buttoned-up and stuffed-shirted Jewish attorney drops out into hippiedom. As might be expected, Hollywood seems less in touch with subcultural beings (Leigh Taylor-Young) than it does with mainstreamers (Peter Sellers, with a flattened American accent, and Joyce Van Patten, both of whom are quite funny). Directed by Hy Averback …
Karel Reisz's re-creation of the life, career, and death of Isadora Duncan was reportedly victimized by producer's cuts; but it seems obviously to be hampered, anyway, by the usual whirlwind-tour cursoriness and momentousness of movie biographies. Reisz and his star, Vanessa Redgrave, experience their best moments rather at random, with …
It stands to reason that if Alain Resnais were to go into science fiction, he would go by time machine. For this purpose, the vehicle he has devised, with perfect deadpan sobriety, looks a good deal like Cinderella's magic pumpkin. It enables the passive guinea-pig hero to relive, in impartially …
The stand-out segment has Susannah York and Beryl Reid impersonating Laurel and Hardy, before and at a frenetic costume party. Even there, director Robert Aldrich's unamused outlook is evident. Elsewhere, his humorlessness tends to inflate and overstate the original short stage play, turning it into an interminable sadomasochistic lesbian soap …
Katherine Hepburn, Peter O'Toole, and Anthony Hopkins star, so one can expect good acting at its finest. Anthony Harvey directs.
Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine douse one another with needle-thin streams, messy spatters, and great swollen waves of words, words, words, all taken from playwright James Goldman's bottomless well. Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn respond to these appointed roles with deep thanks and deep breaths. Directed by Anthony Harvey.
The title (and plot synopsis) in full: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade. Peter Brook has put on film his own stage production of the inspired Peter Weiss play, but shock …
Before Woodstock there was Monterey Pop, a rock documentary directed by D.A. Pennebaker that features performances by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and the Mamas and the Papas.
A blinding quick start, a blistering blitzkrieg pace, and a sincere determination to drive the viewer to panic, to nausea, or to suicide, have earned this semi-professional shoestringer a high place among the midnight cult movies. Among its more notable attributes (going from bad to better) are some atrocious amateur …