As hard to accept as a blind swordsman may have been in feudal Japan (the Zatoichi series), it is many times harder among the guns and cars and machinery of modern-day America. The flashbacks to Vietnam and the relationship with an orphaned towhead don't make it go down any easier. …
Post-Rollerball, post-MAD MAX, post-apocalypse science fiction about a sport of the future called The Game, played by athletes called juggers, with a dog's skull for a "ball." Very minimal, except in the amounts of makeup. (These juggers are more beat-up than any professional hockey player.) With Rutger Hauer and the …
Kathryn Bigelow got some deserved attention for her revisionist vampire film, Near Dark. Having got it, she seems in a mood for some showing-off, with a full arsenal of camera lenses and sheets of blue light and silhouettes and moodscapes and fetishistic closeups and color "studies" and documentary inserts and …
Tom Wolfe's fat novel of New York City, of high finance, low politics, racial conflict, manipulated media, the whole ball of wax. Brian De Palma's adaptation of this avoids the pieties of the Problem Picture by turning it instead into an impious comic strip, with healthy doses of cynicism and …
Robin Williams slightly (and strangely) constrained as a car salesman and womanizer: we don't see much of his technique in either pursuit, though we get a definite whiff of squalidness. Midway through, a Dog Day Afternoon-type "hostage situation" puts an end to all that, and also to all interest. A …
Another franchise in the French coming-of-age industry. Semi-autobiographical, bien sûr, nosing around the same territory that Diane Kurys scoured earlier in Peppermint Soda and Entre Nous. An eight-year-old girl bursts through a closed door and smack into a deadly silence in a tiff between mère and père: everyone freezes, and …
Fearless exposé of the deplorable conditions in a state mental institution -- as of three decades earlier and no longer. It has the zeal of not so much a social reformer as an old I-told-you-so. The opening scene of the actual crackup (it's based on a true case) retains some …
Mark Lester's revised forecast of the educational future, an escalation of his Class of 1984, with a Free Fire Zone around the school, and robot teachers inside (programmed to deal harshly with disciplinary problems). The "relevance" of this vision fades in a hurry once the teachers emerge as the chief …
Abbas Kiarostami, always gravitating toward the province of documentary, here goes further than usual, though perhaps not all the way to the very last toe. The film chronicles true events, the arrest and trial of an imposter who had insinuated himself into a middle-class home in the guise of Kiarostami's …
Interracial romance, labor agitation, the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War -- two hours plus of harsh penance for Americans, prescribed by the Englishman Alan Parker (Mississippi Burning). Richly produced, handsomely photographed -- and Tamlyn Tomita, as the Nisei who defies her father and accepts the attentions of …
Truth in advertising (Jaguar: "For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know"). What a concept! And who better to carry it out than a copywriting team of incarcerated lunatics? What a -- to be more exact -- stale concept! What a rancid one! With Dudley Moore, …
French children encore. The story -- a boy is left an orphan when his single parent dies, and his classmates close ranks behind him to keep it a secret -- generates more interest than most times. Not as much interest, however, as the same situation in the British Our Mother's …
Jean-Paul Rappeneau's rendition of the Edmond Rostand play is a perfectly acceptable version of the piece for either someone who has never seen a production of it before or else someone who can't get enough of it. But the interest of the thing is infinitely more literary than cinematic. The …
Dirk Bogarde's return to the screen after a twelve-year absence -- a happy event in itself, and it injects just that degree of initial interest and lingering excitement lacking in the average Bertrand Tavernier movie. Our first sight of him hardly constitutes a grand re-entrance: flat on his back in …