Eight re-creations of the Japanese director's unconscious dreams. All are so limpid, so economical, so tidy -- so much so as to cast doubts on the authenticity of their origins or the accuracy of their re-creations -- that the viewer is able to feel like Freud's brightest disciple. Death would …
Rather a conventional historical epic by Eisenstein, about a 13th-century Teutonic invasion of Russia. (The patriotic trumpetry undoubtedly was more stirring in 1938, with Hitler situated right next door.) Much of the work seems quite handsome and intricate, and much seems lifeless and overcalculated. Everything else aside, the climactic battle …
A 13-year-old soldier, María (Karen Torres), is ordered to carry her commanding officer’s baby into battle with her. (The advantaged birth-mother is a fellow platoon-member.) Never once questioning the assignment is either an indication of María’s extreme loyalty to duty or a preoccupation with keeping secret her own pregnancy by …
In addition to the possessive Alice, the place is crowded with three strapping sons, a straying husband, and a vision-impaired mother (“Which one of you peed on the toilet lid again?”), not to mention, outside the house, an old flame who happens to be married to Alice’s best customer at …
Like the other big youth movies, so-called, of 1969 (Easy Rider, Last Summer), Arthur Penn's slight expansion of Arlo Guthrie's rambling protest ballad avoids coddling its audience. It is most effective, in fact, when it is gravely cautioning. The sour, melancholy notes sounded at a hospital death bed, at a …
Joseph Mankiewicz accepts all the Broadway Backstage stereotypes and hones them into a like-new sharpness, a little dulled again before movie's end. Bette Davis is the insecure star and Anne Baxter the ambitious ingénue climbing up her back. Gary Merrill, Davis's real-life husband, plays her husband, and George Sanders and …
Scheduled to open at around this time last year, the film was pulled and forgotten until the Digital Gym decided the time was at last right for Nina Geld (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to have her say. If Sarah Silverman and Sam Kinison conceived a love child, it might look something …
Viewers of a certain age may remember Robert Redford as one of the great handsome men of cinema. The sun-kissed skin, the wind-tousled hair, the little-boy smile that let you know he couldn’t lose. Like the title says, all is lost. Disaster rouses an solo yachtsman from comfortable sleep: a …
The slobbiness inherent in the subject -- women's professional wrestling -- is not as overwhelming as might be feared. For all the undoubted appeals to T-&-A fanciers, and for all the distant Rocky parallels played up in the ads, this turns out to be a surprisingly downbeat comedy, with a …
Strap Tyler Perry to a theater seat and use this to give him the Clockwork Orange treatment. The impeccably executed opening credit sequence, effortlessly distilling a 40-year marriage down to two minutes, gave reason to think this could be something more than just 2016’s annual nightmare-before-Christmas film. We’ve seen variations …
Another in the Fellini line of semi-autobiographical entertainments, episodic and variable in quality from episode to episode, this one set in the hometown of his youth. In his choice of recollections, there is a strict ban on the banal (it hardly seems possible that this wonderland is the same sort …
A heaping helping of period pleasure from director David O. Russell. Irving Rosenfeld (a gutty Christian Bale, resplendent in combover and ascot) is a '70s Jay Gatsby without the class anxiety, a man comfortable with the notion that everybody is, like him, working the con — getting along by lying …
Mathieu Demy's Americano (which he wrote, directed, and stars in) is a loving tribute to his parents, divine cinematic beings Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy. Don't worry, though; even if you can't screen Lola, The Model Shop, and Jacquot de Nantes in advance, Americano stands on its own as an …
A chewable bone thrown to the famished fans of Ghost World, with a protagonist closely related to the latter's Steve Buscemi in his marginal existence, his menial job, his obliviousness or out-and-out resistance to fashion, his patronage of yard sales, his esoteric record collection, his congenital negativity. One difference, of …
Having smeared a handful of real-world muck on the practice of giving superhero status to damaged people (orphaned Bruce Wayne, narcissist Tony Stark, etc.) with Chronicle, screenwriter Max Landis sets out to give the same treatment to the amnesiac superspy of The Bourne Identity. Here, he becomes Mike Howell, a …