Gary Busey's surly, burly performance in the lead role somewhat elevates this conventional musical biography, which skims without pause over the short road from jam sessions in a small-town Texas garage, to Top 40s fame and fortune, to an early grave in the Midwest winter. (Nothing in this easygoing movie …
West Coast transplant of Plaza Suite is second-gear Neil Simon, a quartet of sketches allowing for a slew of Southern California jokes ("It's like paradise with a lobotomy") and moving progressively into lower and lower comedy. Simon is on his happiest level in the one with Maggie Smith as a …
Based on a true incident, the story concerns a light-skinned half-caste whose sunny countenance is gradually clouded over by contact with white society in turn-of-the-century Australia. "Do you have any religion other than nigger?" -- this asked by a rustic during a brief recess from chopping off the heads of …
Neil Simon's Bogart parody gets underway with a verbose prologue which reads more like Woody Allen and which brings a smile to one's lips only by misspelling the Philippines. Simon's unnatural marriage of medium-good, cutie-pie Bogart (The Maltese Falcon) and medium-bad, bleeding-heart Bogart (Casablanca) is necessitated not because Simon has …
As stark and stately as the artiest work of John Ford, this Western is set during World War II, though it's easy to lose track of that fact. The narrative events, concerning the cattle ranchers' seemingly eternal struggle to preserve their way of life in the face of social change, …
The Marine Captain's wife, thinking to make herself useful while her man is away in Vietnam, takes a nonpaying job in the veterans' hospital. There, she undergoes a radical character change (symbolized by her going from straight hair to frizzy) and falls in love with a bitter wheelchair case who, …
There are still a few signs of Sam Peckinpah's former authority: the crisp color, the flashy but superficial use of cross-cutting and slow-motion, and one particularly photogenic chase over powdery, unpaved roads. Otherwise, the big-name director is reduced to little more than a glorified traffic cop in this banal interpretation …
Glitterbug movie which demands that the audience go ga-ga over customized sports cars and vans, garish paint jobs, hydraulic lifts, waterbeds, wigs, the night lights of Las Vegas, and others of life's little extras. It uses two unassuming actors — Mark Hamill as a gullible grease monkey and Annie Potts …
Based on Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. The title, reportedly, was changed in the belief that not enough of the moviegoing public is familiar with the story or its author. A more respectable reason would have been a desire to escape comparison with the book or the 1937 …
Caringly acted, expensively produced, and bottomlessly empty suspense movie, wherein the Antichrist, just reaching puberty and entering the military academy, is watched over by a bad fairy -- or fairy devilfather, if you will -- in the form of a pesky crow who prefers to be photographed in profile and …
If the Time-Life publishers commissioned a picture book on the Great American Bread Basket, ca. World War I, they'd probably want it to look like this -- a thing you could be proud to place on your coffee table. You never know for sure what the picturesque Thomas Hart Benton …
Following in Albert Finney's footprints, Peter Ustinov perpetuates the corpulent screen image of master detective Hercule Poirot, but this balloon-like inflation (nearer to Nero Wolfe) will be a bother only to the most fanatical followers of Agatha Christie, the queen of the "who cares?" whodunit. In this one, the murder …
"I can't afford to pass this up. It's an experience!" enthuses the sun-bleached jock to his fainthearted girlfriend, who only wishes to return home safely from her Bermuda holiday. The so-called experience is a Tom Swift-ian adventure involving sunken treasure, a giant moray eel, and voodoo villains. Its undeniable excitements …
Michael Cimino's Vietnam War story centers around an "ours not to reason why" trio of mindlessly patriotic Middle Americans from a small Pennsylvania steel town. Three hours long, in the tradition of bigness established by the Second World War stories of Norman Mailer, James Jones, Herman Wouk, and Irwin Shaw, …