Feels more like ninety. Either way, it is almost as effective as summer camp for keeping the kids tied up a spell. David Niven, Cantinflas, Shirley MacLaine, and practically everyone else in the Screen Actors Guild are in it. Michael Anderson directed.
Something of a male version of Repulsion, about a boys' Phys. Ed. teacher, played by a physically fit and emotionally taut Tab Hunter, whose skin starts to crawl whenever a member of the opposite sex gets close, hot, and familiar. The narrative runs along sadly worn paths, and, in any …
Briskly efficient, blithely superficial visitors-from-space thriller. The thrills, as they may rationally be called, are widely varied in kind and degree: the momentary frisson upon finding a dead ringer in Mexico of the bad guy in Los Angeles; the well-sustained bout of heebie-jeebies in a hotel room swarming with scorpions; …
More of Dudley Moore's comedy routine as The Happy Drunkard, suitable for a Hal Roach two-reeler, but now extended to the face-freezing lengths of a second feature film -- through adoption proceedings ("We take drinking problems very seriously around here"), a bout of poverty, and finally a period of indistinguishable …
Behind the scenes at a V.A. hospital where a team of young, dedicated, superbly skilled doctors (Ray Liotta, Kiefer Sutherland, Lea Thompson, et al.), but also swashbuckling, flirting, wisecracking, rule-breaking, speech-making doctors, are impeded but not completely prevented from practicing medicine by a budget-balancing, nickel-counting administrator and "a whole new …
Documentarist Don Argott relates the story, with the aid of a roundtable of talking heads, of what happened to the Barnes Foundation, specifically its collection of post-Impressionist and early modern art, after the death of the philanthropic Philadelphia pharmaceutical king, Albert C. Barnes. The paintings, expressly intended never to be …
Lush, loud, furious, preposterous espionage thriller, something to do with a pending Chinese Trade Agreement and ongoing attempts to scuttle it. The too-much-too-soon opening is as indigestible as any recent James Bond pre-credits sequence. But Wesley Snipes, although incontestably a superspy, is at least not supercilious about it. And there …
The reunion of director Terry Zwigoff with the writer of his Ghost World, graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, seemed to bode well for his recovery from the badness of his Bad Santa. Boding even better, the subject matter -- the lowdown on high art in higher education -- must be one …
Boastfully misnamed, but well above average: an eccentric, bordering on bizarre, romantic triangle composed of an obsessive-compulsive homophobic misogynistic racist antisemitic (misanthropic, in short, besides dog-hating) best-selling romance novelist, and a next-door homosexual painter with a push-faced little pooch and a black art dealer, and a single-mom waitress with a …
Spruced-up reissue of the 1994 Wong Kar-wai film of the same name minus the Redux. The changes consist principally of a new musical score showcasing the plangent, pensive cello of Yo-Yo Ma. They have not, however, amended the confusion and disappointment in an arty, abstract, almost actionless martial-arts period piece …
From Sergei Paradjanov (The Color of Pomegranate, The Legend of Suram Fortress): more of the same, only less. There is the customary treasure chest of clothes and artifacts from another time and place. (Period: Once upon a Time. Setting: Fairy Land.) And a moment, early on, when a photographed still-life …
A world-class Swedish symphony conductor (Michael Nyqvist, a big, strong Richard Burton-y pocked face) moves back to his native village with a bad heart, whips the church choir into competitive shape, upsets the local bluenoses, shelters abused women, wins the heart of the budding Jezebel, draws out the village idiot, …
Depression-period romance, written and directed by Robert Towne, in a largely dark, nocturnal, unsunny Southern California, a star-crossed affair between a gringo and a Chicana, or more disparagingly a "dago" and a "spic," an impoverished young novelist taken under the wing, at long distance, of H.L. Mencken (whose voice in …
Two buds on the peaks, the slopes, the dangerous curves. The cute one wants to be a writer someday, but he's "got to live first," meet people, read books, be the hero in a featherbrained movie. Paul Gross, Peter Berg, Finola Hughes; written and directed by Patrick Hasburgh.
Prototypical caper film, rather hurried into the heist itself, and plodding through the calamitous aftermath. John Huston's direction is mildly overemphatic and strongly oversentimentalized. But the bare bones (W.R. Burnett novel) are solid enough. Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Louis Calhern, Marilyn Monroe.