Another stylish Italian mystery from the 70s that more than likely contains more red herrings than a Russian fish market. Why does one get the impression that all of the genius to be found in this Lucho Fulci splatter mystery is contained in the title?
Woody Allen's sarcastic takeoff on Dr. Reuben's slow-witted sex guide, retaining only the title and the question-answer format, is set up as a series of seven blue-joke skits, each done as a parody of a distinct film genre; the cause for laughter is not always so distinct. With Gene Wilder, …
John Huston's tired-blooded treatment of the Leonard Gardner novel about has-been and would-be prizefighters stagnating in Stockton, California. Some of the dialogue, lifted en bloc from the novel, is approximately in Ring Lardner's arena, but it is watered down with humanitarian sentiment. The way he handles this promising material, Huston …
Oppressed Jews singing and dancing in Czarist Russia. The Broadway rendition of Sholem Aleichem's stories is transferred to the screen by way of the chokingly atmospheric photography of Oswald Morris. Topol, in the role of Tevye, senses his big movie chance, and his overzealousness shows through the thickest makeup on …
Jean-Pierre Melville's acutely minimalist take on American gangster films resulted in a formal probity unlike anything cinema has experienced before or since. Un Flic is his final contemplation of the genre he embraced. Both the reason for the opening heist and the rationale behind a seemingly well-heeled cabaret owner (Richard …
Bringing R. Crumb's crum-bum characters to life is no better an idea than bringing Charles Schulz's to life, not even for the privilege of boasting about making the first X-rated cartoon. The disappointment stems from some silly voices and stiff animation, not so much from the script, which is respectably …
This unpenetrating gaze into Earth's future stops at rather sophomoric ironies, but the imagination level hardly matters, in light of the irritating piccolo-voiced hero and heroine who represent Adam-and-Eve innocence in the New World of post-nuclear holocaust, the color that looks as if it has soaked through a Viva paper …
Although it finds room, in its three hours, for nearly every known gangster-movie gambit, there is no sense of having gotten at last to the bottom of the criminal underworld. The refined pictorial compositions and lighting effects are styled, misguidedly, after Rembrandt rather than the daily tabloids. And Marlon Brando's …
Robert Downey, crawling ever higher out of the underground, has gathered together a gaudy collection of fruits and nuts, dressed to the teeth, for a New York smark-aleck metaphysical absurdist Western. The awkward timing of the jokes and the performances (to call it "offbeat" would be a kindness) makes it …
Uncommonly funny, possibly because directed by Elaine May, this Neil Simon script has more cruel meaning than most scripts with Neil Simon's name attached. Charles Grodin (a cross between Redford and Hoffman) meets his dream girl (a Clairol golden-haired Minnesota princess, Cybill Shepherd) while on his honeymoon in Miami Beach. …
Culp and Cosby, reunited I Spy pair, play two baggy-pants, struggling private eyes, and they have wrung out their acting of the comedy-team glibness flaunted in their TV series routines. This glum, nicely paced thriller is directed by Culp, who plays his cards very smartly, if conservatively.
The saga of a mountain man, salted with uncomfortable, self-conscious "legendary" qualities — ballads, hammily colloquial narration, quaint dialogue. With the actors (especially golden-haired Robert Redford) trying to be lovable, and with Pollack's direction trying for aloof, expensive pictorializing, any sense of frontier hardship is blockaded from the screen.