Jean Simmons is a fine actress, but a femme fatale she is not. Even a deceptively angelic femme fatale, much less a ball-busting dominator of Robert Mitchum. Memorable end, for her and for the movie. With Herbert Marshall, Mona Freeman, Jim Backus; directed by Otto Preminger.
Hard-boiled private-eye hokum, with a wire crossed into the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, resulting in a major power outage at the end, after getting by on dim bulbs till then. A black-garbed, bearded, be-ringed, pointed-fingernailed mystery man named Louis Cyphre (equals "Lucifer," get it?) hires a wisecracking Brooklyn gumshoe named Angel ("Of …
A cinéma-verité portrait by Robert Duvall of a ten-year-old New York gypsy. The fictional storyline, about the theft of a family jewel and its eventual recovery, introduces us to a lot of individual gypsies (and others); and Duvall gives them, in semi-improvised dialogues, as loose a leash as they might …
Although the Dan Brown novel was written before The Da Vinci Code, the screen adaptation of it (directed again by Ron Howard) takes care to situate itself afterwards with a reference or two to the returning hero’s “recent involvement with, shall we say, Church mysteries” and his consequent strained relations …
The class divisions and emotional repressions -- meat and potatoes -- of Victorian England. The aggressively modern perspective (A.S. Byatt original novella, full frontal nudity of both sexes, and the major innovation of the movie: punctuation marks -- periods -- after each of the opening credits) knocks some of the …
And on the pitcher's mound, and in the batter's box, and on the base paths, aiding the California Angels on their drive to the pennant. The (lower-case) angels, excluding the maniacally mugging Christopher Lloyd, are impressive -- glowing, shimmering, streaking things in the sky. But only the very young and …
More disappointing than most Adam Sandler comedies because the subject was more promising: temper control. You would hardly know that that's the subject from the way the humor runs to sex, private parts, bodily functions, in short the toilet. The strong supporting cast is a sign of either Sandler's growing …
One woman's story, more traditionalist than feminist, more concerned with responsibilities than freedoms. The director is the impeccably credentialed Martha Coolidge (Not a Pretty Picture, Rambling Rose), so that's all right, then. The story as such, although not lacking in particulars, is also not lacking in banalities: the brassy ethnicity …
Poland in wartime, with few actual Nazis in evidence, but with collaborators, resisters, fence-sitters, and a beautiful fur-coated married Jew who jumps off one of the death trains (much like the ones, and in much the same countryside, featured at length in Shoah) and hides out in the cellar of …
Bigas Luna, the bad boy of post-Franco Spanish cinema (witness the pubic haircut of the drugged heroine in Bilbao), has been on his better behavior for the world at large (cf. the somber religious parable, Reborn). In this handsome production, he has taken over an idea from Lamberto Bava's Demons …
Very early and very primitive Marx Brothers comedy. It has a number of numb areas, particularly when Margaret Dumont or some other straw figure shrugs or grins or grimaces on one half of the screen while one of the Marxes showboats on the other half. It has, as well, some …
Writer-director David Michôd gives us Australian cops-and-robbers and three solid characterizations, James Frecheville as an almost catatonic callow youth (casting glances at a TV game show as paramedics administer to his unresponsive OD’d mother on the couch), Jacki Weaver, a bottle-blonde little dumpling of a woman, as the sugar-coated monstrous …
Career-spanning clips of the big-band, bebop, and blues vocalist — “The Jezebel of Jazz” for her well-publicized drug habit — in performance and in interviews (David Frost, Dick Cavett, Tom Snyder, Harry Reasoner, Bryant Gumbel, Terry Gross), right up to her death in 2006. The visual and audio quality is …
Uncalled-for and uninspired retelling, without benefit of Yul Brynner or Broadway show tunes, of the clash of wits and wills between the Victorian-era widowed English governess and the progressive Siamese monarch-cum-polygamist. Jodie Foster has a painful-to-watch tenseness in her lips and jaw, perhaps under the strain of the British accent …