Romanticized Mexican madonna and child. Satirized Anglo housewives. Villainized lawmen. Existentialized hero. Tony Richardson's experience with British working-class dramas in the days of the Angry Young Men prepared him well for the bleak landscape -- both natural and industrial -- around El Paso, Texas, and he gets much mileage (or …
Sub-Pinter social satire by Dennis (Pennies from Heaven) Potter, about a smarmy young stranger who insinuates himself into a suburban London household and shines a light into its dark corners. What does the stranger himself hope to get out of it, besides some sexual relations with the vegetalized daughter of …
Documentarist Les Blank, who earlier recorded Werner Herzog in the act of eating his shoe (never mind why), here follows the German director's misadventures in the Peruvian jungle on the set of Fitzcarraldo. Perhaps most useful as a sort of subtext or appendix to the finished Herzog film, this is …
A young woman named Carmen is cast for the lead role in a dance production of the same name, and proceeds to prove her rightness for the role off stage as well as on. That old life-imitating-art gambit, or more accurately, that old art-imitating-life-imitating-art gambit, which has been a creaky …
Foolhardy American assault on the Japanese martial-arts tradition. The story concerns the thirty-seven-year feud between rival siblings for possession of two matched swords that have been in the family for generations. One of the brothers is without honor, head of a vast corporation that dwarfs (we are told) General Motors, …
Half mystery, half documentary, adding up to half a movie. We are free, of course, to see in the title an allusion to that famous fictional representative of the Chinese people, Charlie Chan, and to interpret the title as a somewhat less provocative version of "God Is Dead." We are, …
And also The Gifted: two brilliant, charming, multi-talented sons of eminent Jewish leaders on opposite sides of orthodoxy, and especially on opposite sides of the Zionist issue at the end of World War II, one of them a Hasidic rabbi and the other a liberal scholar and journalist. The father …
Abysmal exploitation film begins somewhere in the area of The Blackboard Jungle (but a bit deeper into the jungle: every square inch of Abraham Lincoln High has been spray-painted with graffiti, and metal-detectors have been installed at the entrances to ensure that the students leave their guns and switchblades at …
The pronunciation of the last two (or four) words of the title, in the local dialect, is "Jim Dine," like the American pop artist; the actual reference, of course, is to the deceased American actor and cult figure, who has left his mark on a tiny Texas town not far …
The closest thing to a Steve Reeves Italian muscleman epic to come along in quite some time. The ravaging of a peaceful village by vandals on horseback, the son of the slain chieftain brought up in slavery and honing his avenger's ambitions by way of gladitorial school, the diabolical temptress …
The closest thing to a Steve Reeves Italian muscleman epic to come along in quite some time. The ravaging of a peaceful village by vandals on horseback, the son of the slain chieftain brought up in slavery and honing his avenger's ambitions by way of gladitorial school, the diabolical temptress …
Sententious moral tale about the breakdown of civilized behavior in French colonial Africa, just before World War II. Comic-strip caricatures, in place of rounded characters, are not much use in a moral tale, however. They and their escapades are so determinedly loony that no tension can be built around them: …
Five tales of terror (or humor, or humorous terror, or terrible humor) written by Stephen King and directed by George A. Romero, and grouped together in a comic-book framework to bring back memories of pre-Seduction of the Innocents classics like Tales from the Crypt. There is a frequent elbow in …
Tolkien-esque fantasy, designed by British illustrator Brian Froud, co-directed by Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets) and Frank Oz (voice of Miss Piggy, Yoda, et al.), and enacted by a new breed of puppet for which there is as yet no convenient label. The major designing effort has gone toward …
The basic idea -- namely, to interweave clips from actual 1940s films noirs into a parody of that genre, so that the star, Steve Martin, would appear to interact with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Fred MacMurray, Alan Ladd, et al. -- sounds at first blush as if it must …