Same which way as Every Which Way but Loose; in other words, no which way but lousy. There is, though, a fairly nice introduction and buildup of the chief antagonist, played by William Smith, who is named the same as, and even looks a bit like, the Jack Palance character …
The suspense (with political overtones) is late in arriving and, when it comes, is dampening rather than warming. The character interest before that is fairly intense. Thanks for that to Colin Firth as the tortured homosexual with a dying mother, a languishing repertory cinema in Buenos Aires ("Once the James …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
The biggest asset of Francis Ford Coppola's thirty-million-dollar Vietnam War movie is the curiosity it stirred up while keeping the public cooling its heels for four years. Without that, there would be little to propel the viewer through this desultory up-river excursion, unimaginatively patterned after Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, …
Evidently Mel Gibson is in it only for the barbarity. Scouring the globe, roaming the pages of history, he has alighted here on the illuminating example of the Mayan people, past their civilized peak, where a happy, peaceable, practical-joking tribe of jungle dwellers (sample joke: the prescription of a red-hot …
In the role of the director and writer as well as of the titular character, Robert Duvall gives generously to himself, and to others too. An actor's director par excellence, he exhibits a patience that verges, if not on the infinite, at least on the Cassavetes-esque, in permitting his players …
Unpretentious, un-epic Western, adapted from a novel by the hard-boiled mystery writer Robert B. Parker. It bears more than a passing resemblance to a pseudonymous variation on the Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday legend, the 1959 Warlock, without itself qualifying as a variation on that legend. We have again the two-man …
Iranian film that follows up, rather than re-enacts, the factual case of twin girls who were kept locked at home with their blind mother for twelve years, never let out, until the neighbors alerted the Welfare Department. Because the principals play themselves, the film never loses its air of documentary, …
An Agatha Christie who-done-it, but almost equally a when's-it-going-to-be-done-and-who's-it-going-to-be-done-to. And the social observation during the waiting period isn't keen enough to ward off dreadful boredom. Nor is the cast enough, though it's certainly sizeable, and encompasses such stalwarts as Peter Ustinov (as Poirot once again), Piper Laurie, Carrie Fisher, Lauren …
Hexes, hexagrams, and such, in rural Pennsylvania (or the moss-green Norwegian locales that pass for it) in the 1920s. "Inspired by a true story," but not very truly inspired: a slow starter, a slow finisher, and a slow in-betweener. With Donald Sutherland, Chad Lowe, and Mia Sara; directed by R.L. …
A French gâteau of cloying overelaboration, relying on its characters' inexplicable behavior to prolong its plot's instantaneous tedium. A hurrying passer-by, after hours in a public park, stops to save a would-be suicide and thereafter goes to infinite lengths to help him out, giving him a place to stay even …
Not bad for its type. But the type is the college-kid elimination derby, set this time at a weekend party on an isolated island estate. "It's just like an Agatha Christie," remarks one of the guests. Or to be specific, quite a lot like And Then There Were None (or …
A high-school senior with an unhealthy interest in the Holocaust recognizes a fellow bus rider as a former concentration-camp commander. (The amazing coincidences don't stop there: the ex-Nazi will later share a hospital room with one of his Jewish prisoners.) The boy, a moral midget, offers his silence in exchange …
Pallid mermaid comedy aimed at tween girls or lower. Two representatives of that group, unnaturally perky, advise a more mature mermaid on the do's and don'ts of the mating game as played on dry land. No reason why that shouldn't have been fun (and educational) for all. With Emma Roberts, …