Must be without competition the shortest twenty-million-dollar movie ever made (clocked at well under ninety minutes, minus the credits), which is but one crude measure of how much more money than imagination went into this scandalously derivative and down-at-the-heels sci-fi epic. The bulk of its debt is payable to Star …
Possibly the best horse movie since National Velvet and without question the best Mickey Rooney showcase in a long, long time, but not quite as long a time as since National Velvet. Carroll Ballard, a Francis Coppola protégé, makes the story seem very tall, as though seen from a child's …
As incompetent a movie as you are ever apt to come across in the upper-crust economic bracket. It appears actually to be missing several pieces, including most of its marbles. The fun-ness that sometimes accompanies badness is felt on very few occasions, the only sustained one being Ben Gazzara's guided …
Well-spent efforts, early, toward documenting the East Los Angeles barrio, the houses, the streets, the youth-gang style of dress, the low-rider car culture, etc., all very slickly photographed (nothing less would do justice to the wax jobs on the cars). This documentary detail is sufficiently exciting to make one deeply …
A nice subject, the tensions between the natives and the university students in the industrial town of Bloomington, Indiana. The acute class-consciousness of the treatment, however, seems somewhat Europeanized or Medievalized, owing presumably to the origins of the British director, Peter Yates, and the Yugoslav scriptwriter, Steve Tesich. Those two …
A young jazz buff from Chicago arrives by bus in a California beach town to "check out the scene," and he proceeds to make a spectacle of himself by speaking in the lingo and dressing in the style indigenous to the jazz buffs of Chicago, or to the jazz buffs …
The most cryptic credits on any movie ever. The dismissed director, Tinto Brass, is credited only with Principal Photography (not to be confused with Director of Photography), while the final Editing is attributed to an impersonal Kafkaesque entity identified as "the production." The script is proclaimed to be Adapted from …
Franco Zeffirelli's remake and update of King Vidor's 1931 tearjerker of the same name, with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder taking the places of Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, and mopping up, so to speak, on their elders. The characterization of the little boy is rather like a repressive, authoritarian …
Neil Simon re-creates more or less the circumstances of his real-life marriage to Marsha Mason, he a recent widower and she a recent divorcee. The badinage between these two, who, as one of them observes, "talk in the same rhythm," is on a more lifelike level than usual in a …
Very serious comedy, but very funny, about a man who thinks he has found the perfect woman and pursues her accordingly, and a woman who knows she is not that and wants him to stop. They and a host of other characters are thoroughly particularized by age, by speech, by …
The portions that have to do with "happy talk" television news programs have more of a critical edge than you usually meet up with in a movie theater, but this movie's stature as a critical organ is cut down considerably by its taking a romantic, almost reverential view of the …
Oriental mysticism, original story by Bruce Lee, James Coburn, and Stirling Silliphant, screenplay by Silliphant and Stanley Mann, eminent mystics every one. Cord, the Seeker (acted by a conceited Muscle Beach type named Jeff Cooper), travels the perilous path leading to Zeton, the Keeper of the Book. David Carradine pops …
This, the fourth of the Airports, continues the steady climb into thinner and thinner air. It concerns a billionaire arms manufacturer who launches repeated midair attacks on the Concorde airliner, en route from Washington to Moscow, in order to eliminate one of its passengers, his girlfriend, who is in possession …
As sopping-wet a love story of the why-can't-society-leave-us-alone variety as anything to come along since "Patches" and "Town Without Pity" disappeared from the Top Forty hit list. The lovers in this case are a couple of Blueboy-ish homosexuals, having to take separate turns in prison for their sexual predilections, and …