Elvis rockumentary.
Early Werner Herzog. A desultory revolt among the stunted prisoners on a chalky desolate island. (With strong intimations of a larger symbolic Significance.) The title is the best thing about it, though there's plenty of oddity mixed in with barbarity and monotony.
Jack Nicholson as the Drop-Out Kid, a classical pianist who opts for the blue-collar life. He makes showy fusses over a freeway traffic jam and a sourpuss waitress (two scenes that are played for easy comedy of the mad-artist-in-conflict-with-society type), and he finally sheds a tear over the lack of …
Leonard Kastle's one and only foray into feature films, a memorable one. Based on a true serial-murder case concerning an oddly matched man and woman (physically, a Jack and Mrs. Sprat) who preyed on elderly women and their bank accounts, it's related with a chilling matter-of-factness, but with sufficient dwelling …
Your quintessential male-menopause tale, subtitled "a comedy about life, death, and freedom," by John Cassavetes. Three buddies, gathered for the funeral of their inseparable fourth, are asked to face up to their own mortality, but instead go off on an extended bender -- all the way to London. Cassavetes, Ben …
To do his bit for the oppressed, an upper-crust dimwit (Beau Bridges) buys an apartment house in a black ghetto, and the ensuing jokes thoroughly exploit the situation. Diana Sands, all by herself, raises the level quite a lot. Directed by Hal Ashby.
Yet another of Jean-Pierre Melville's hommages to the American gangster genre. There is, as always, an ever-present element of playacting about it -- these European actors in their I-Am-a-Hoodlum uniforms -- but the "play" maintains a childlike seriousness and unselfconsciousness and freedom from irony. And if the modern-day moviegoer should …
Dustin Hoffman is a Wild West schlemiel accompanied by a funky guitar through a Jerry Lewis-Peter Sellers-type Man of a Thousand Faces performance. Everything about this debunking of frontier mythology is extremely broad -- the acting, the humor, the satirical targets, and the balanced, bowl-shaped, conventionally Romantic landscapes. Director Arthur …
Where do I begin? “Death Story,” as it came to be called, was the film that introduced Hollywood’s concept of a “set-’em up-to-watch-’em-die” picture to my then-15-year-old brain. The script originally called for the movie to open with the doctor bluntly informing Oliver (Ryan O’Neal) that his young bride Jenny …
A stark naked Richard Harris, scampering around the glorious American West landscape, is a bit too aggressive a beginning. But the story of a lordly British hunter who is taken captive by Indians and climbs up the tribal social ladder is written by Dorothy Johnson, and consequently it works its …
Man-vs.-bureaucracy parable, to do with a black African's dizzy chase to cash a money order. The humble, humanistic, De Sica-ish pathos (the actor gets some rich comic effects out of his arm-flapping efforts to find comfort in his roomy, bright-colored robes) is partially spoiled by the clamorous Leftist moralizing at …
The sense of humor in this smart-ass service comedy is actually more sick-making than all the bloody operating room splish-splashing. The gags are constructed to have a practical-joke thrust: there is always a victim and a violator. The jokers are a couple of barbarians, conceitedly acted by Elliott Gould and …
IMDb's first five keywords for this film are lobster, rape, drugs, church, and masturbation. John Waters writes and directs.
Ingmar Bergman provides a sort of TV-talk-show format for his actors (Tell us about your new role, Mr. Von Sydow...), as he interrupts the action now and then, to interview each of his stars behind the scenes. These interludes do not really reveal a great deal. They are quick, efficacious, …
Billy Wilder's drilling into Holmes's hush-hush side (his cocaine addiction, his rumored homosexuality, his broken heart) has a feeling of special privilege and intimacy, rather than irreverence and iconoclasm as it might have had. The opening examination of the deceased detective's personal effects is practically breath-taking; and for a while …