William Friedkin's best, a gritty policier shot on location in New York, follows a career cop (Gene Hackman) on the trail of heroin smugglers.
The fluid fatalistic romance, the rather ungainly fawnlike manner of the fourteen-year-old lovers, the French girl's disarming rhythmic accent, and the diluted pastel countryside shot by Andreas Winding, taken all together, have the not unpleasant effect of a sedative. With Anicee Alvina, Sean Bury; music by Elton John; directed by …
As a way of atoning for his string of Sophia Loren pastries, De Sica here took up the hefty topic of isolationist Jews in Mussolini's Italy. Originally it was to have been directed by Valerio Zurlini, and it could well have used some of his delicacy. The script has a …
The Maysles' discreetly noncommittal coverage of the Rolling Stones tour that culminated in a fatal stabbing at the Altamont free concert. The moviemakers adopt the safe, aloof role of johnny-on-the-spot reporters, and refuse to implicate themselves in the events beyond that. In doing so, they haven't exactly put all their …
A hoary old man's rainy-day remembrance of a traumatic boyhood summer, which he spent in sumptuous English countryside, scampering conspiratorially between the majestic household of cool, blond aristocrats and the neighboring farmhouse tenanted by a sweaty, dark commoner. The polite conversation (by Harold Pinter, out of an L.P. Hartley novel) …
The fake-suicide jokes are predictable and the zany-old-lady jokes are typical, but this unimaginable romance between adolescent Bud Cort and septuagenarian Ruth Gordon has a sick-sweet tolerance for private perversity that is quite beguiling. And the many Cat Stevens songs at intervals give things a lift. Directed by Hal Ashby.
The equation of political Fascism with sexual perversion is formula Italian psychologizing (cf. The Damned and The Conformist). But this seamy storyline, about a police chief who experiments with murder in order to test his immunity from the law, plays rather light and clever. And director Elio Petri's agile camerawork …
What’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? The headquarters of the Bureau of Sexological Investigation, a non-existent but factual-sounding organization designed by husband and wife comedy team Jeanne and Alan Abel for this early entrant in the mockumentary market. A parody of Mondo movies, this hit at around the same time the …
Jane Fonda is allowed to talk out much of her characterization of a pricey Manhattan call girl, by way of tape recordings, phone calls, psychiatric sessions. But while maintaining a sympathetic and an open ear, director Alan Pakula appears to be distracted by the problems of fitting her, just so, …
Not to be confused with The Last Picture Show, from the same year. This is Dennis Hopper's encore to Easy Rider, made under the delusion that everyone would be fascinated to hear anything he had to say. The result is somebody's definition of self-indulgent, and somebody else's definition of personal. …
Peter Bogdanovich's cardboard re-creation of smalltown life in the Fifties (Anarene, Texas, to be exact) is done with a plethora of time-capsule artifacts (hit records, books, movies, magazines, and fashions of the period), a multitude of stereotypes, a minimum of feeling, and a patchwork of diverse Hollywood movie styles (Ford, …
Roman Polanski's neither very engaging, nor very clearly motivated, version of the Shakespeare tragedy, acted by a young and little-known cast. There are a few stunning surrealistic visions, and the violence, in tin-soldier armor suits, is herky-jerkily hectic. Several minor roles in the original play have been combined economically into …
Plenty of surface interest for those who enjoy looking at drizzle, cigarette smoke, opium haze. Under the dense atmospheric conditions, Robert Altman's snowed-in Western about the encroachment of capitalist enterprise on a tacky frontier town is exceedingly difficult to make out. Julie Christie and Warren Beatty are in the fog …
Louis Malle's nostalgic comedy of adolescence, a favorite French genre. The highly touted "tastefulness" of the climactic incest scene isn't really such a triumph; it would take something more than "tastefulness" to make us believe that the actor and actress, who bear no resemblance to one another, are engaged in …
Ken Russell's hysterical character assassination of Tchaikovsky. The wedding-night episode, with Glenda Jackson rolling naked back and forth on the floor of a train compartment and the aghast Richard Chamberlain understandably trying to climb the walls, is the ugliest scene, but it has a lot of competition.