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 …
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 …
Glamorizing biopic of baby-faced thrill-killer Carlos Robledo Puch (Lorenzo Ferro) whom, after spending more than forty-six years in jail, is the longest-serving prisoner in the history of Argentina. His life in crime began as a “house cat,” a burglar without a gun. You’re heard of a meet cute? Director Luis …
Woody Allen's approximately autobiographical movie tells of the short-lived romance between a New York Jewish intellectual (Allen himself, accoutered in a thrift-shop wardrobe) and a kooky Midwestern WASP (Diane Keaton). It can usefully be thought of as a movie tailored to the critics. It is Allen's most "personal" movie (no …
Documentary sketch of Antonia Brico, who won acclaim first in the Twenties as an orchestral conductor -- in Berlin, London, New York -- and for a while was able to ride on the novelty of breaking through the sex barrier in the conducting profession; once the novelty began wearing thin, …
First impression: a disease-of-the-week weepie about a widowed cancer survivor, the last tenant standing in a “ghost building” that can’t undergo urban gentrification until she vacates. But never judge a film by its trailer, as proven by this ravishingly realized study in filmed exasperation. Women’s pictures — those dark, intricately …
Sent to the home of an ill factory worker to fetch a change of clothes, an 18-year-old boy discovers a journal that changes his life (and the course of this heart-saddening and fiercely naturalistic road movie). The notebook to which author and off-camera narrator Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa) gives voice …
There’s a feature film waiting to be made on each of Robert Cenedella’s canvases; they illustrate as big a battleground of love, hate, and action as you’ll find in any of fellow outsider Sam Fuller’s movies. As an artist in all seriousness, Cenedella likes to cyanide-coat his message with humor. …
A comedy of unreserved movie love, shot in Hollywood by French director Michel Hazanavicius. Big silent star George (like a merger of Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, and Warren William) falls when sound arrives. The casting of brash, funny, hugely likeable Jean Dujardin as George gives heart to the charm. Bérénice …
Qiao (Tao Zhao) is, and will remain, a woman in control, even after serving a 5 year stretch for possession of an illegal firearm. (The gun belonged to her gangster beau.) According to Qiao, “Anything that burns at a high temperature is made pure.” A boat trip up the Yangtze …
Those who knew Adam Goldstein — a pioneering plate-mate remixer who survived an airplane crash only to die of a drug overdose — called him a “digital shaman,” a DJ who assumed rock star status. He no more invented mashups than he did the wheel, but he was the first …
An effective cinematic antidote to Valium: from the first ominous musical strains to the final smoke-clearing, it exercises an unslackening tug on the viewer. The upper-crust British critics responsible for enshrining this classically styled Hollywood B-picture have been quick to draw parallels to Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, but Assault on …
Out of this elegiac comedy on Old Age and the Changing Times, Burt Lancaster's fans ought to get the same sort of sentimental tingles that John Wayne's got from True Grit. His role here is as a small-time numbers runner (and part-time poodle walker) who disdains the swanky new casinos …
With this, the seventy-nine-year-old Eric Rohmer completes a cycle of four films begun a decade before, "Tales of the Four Seasons." What sets it apart from other Rohmers, what gets you to straighten up in your seat, is the greater generational mix in the cast of characters. There are still, …
Screwball comedy, screwed down more tightly than most, about a divorced couple who take the long way around to realizing how good they had it. By the beautifully crafted finale, the only things standing between them are an unsecurely closed door and a napping cat. And as long as you …