The first movie of the Monty Python group is a scattering of scatter-shot comedy routines; and with fresh starts every few minutes, it boasts a few stretches of unflagging comic invention. There are also some sputtering routines -- more of that kind. And the dreary animation sequences are mainly for …
Plainly, if only partially, Claude Lelouch's title echoes that of his 1974 And Now My Love. The film as a whole echoes the other more faintly: two destined lovers on distant paths, a debonair British jewel thief and a soulful French cabaret singer, each as gaunt and haunted as the …
A cocky, heedless, high-dive stunt undertaken by Claude Lelouch, the object of which is to stretch a love story across the entire 20th Century and three hours of movie time. (The version for American release retraces the two roads, going back to the beginning of the century and the beginning …
So lifelike and human are the members of the 404 series of robots that they eventually enter a period of adolescence, with all the troublesome accompaniments: a taste for video games and rock-and-roll, an awakening sexual curiosity, an increasing recalcitrance, a tendency to get in with the wrong crowd. (The …
A microbiological invasion from outer space gets off to an immediately gripping start: a walkie-talkie transmission from a small New Mexico town chokes off, an elaborate defense mechanism clicks into operation, and four civilian scientists are rousted from their homes and speeded to a top-secret, cylinder-shaped laboratory sunken in the …
Pre-First World War Ship of Fools, complete with that lazy storytelling device of a narrator-commentator speaking directly into the camera. With this, Federico Fellini advances himself as a serious candidate for that old drollery about so-and-so having forgotten more about making movies than most moviemakers will ever know. One thing …
Not really an Andy Warhol nor even a Paul Morrissey movie, but rather a Jed Johnson. (Who is he, you wonder? He's a veteran of the sound department on the Warhol-Morrissey movies, promoted herewith to the director's chair.) The undiscriminating misanthropy, the grotesque comedy, and the boringly belligerent tastelessness owe …
Faced with a depletion of virgins in the Transylvanian countryside, a pouty, worried Count Dracula is impelled, at the urging of his spit-and-polish valet, to take leave of his home in search of virgin blood ("But I can't leave my family down in the crypt," he whines). And so he …
Paul Morrissey's facelift of the old Mary Shelley tale -- now a deadpan charade of beautiful young people searching, scissoring, and stitching in the laboratory for more beauty yet. Backed by Carlo Ponti, Morrissey is for the first time a man of means (European forest and castle locales, elegant musical …
Wonders and terrors of girlhood: a new house (with convenient eavesdropping access to the grownups' bedroom); an unbalanced mother; a sleepwalking neighbor; an imagined angel in the basement; babies; boys; and so on. The feature-film debut of writer-director Rebecca Miller, daughter of the Death of a Salesman man, is quiet …
Hardly a movie at all, more like a glossy picture-book supplement to Frank McCourt's best-selling memoir of growing up poor in Ireland. McCourt's prose has accordingly been whittled down to excerpted captions in service to the lavish illustrations. And very arty illustrations they are, too, predominantly in grim parsimonious gray-green …
Jane Campion's biography of her New Zealander countrywoman -- author Janet Frame -- was made originally for TV, and for showing in three separate parts at that. Had it been a feature-film project from the start, no doubt its proportions would have been totally different. The chosen narrative technique of …
Nutters in love -- in a phone booth, in a back alley, in a rainstorm, in candlelight, etc. But the world is against them -- these two heavily medicated innocents who follow the counsel of their guardian angel, Astral, communicating to them through the mystery phrases on the Australian Wheel …
Halfway serious romantic drama from director Luis Mandoki, the man who gave us the completely silly Message in a Bottle, about a one-of-the-guys policewoman (Jennifer Lopez) and an enigmatic, gray-overcoated loner who identifies himself as just "Catch": part-zombie, part-simpleton, part-Montgomery Clift (Jim Caviezel). The nonserious half would have to include …