Very blue -- in coloring and in attitude -- movie about Upper Manhattan heroin addicts who maintain dismal apartments, puffy faces, and low spirits. Within those limits, Al Pacino nonetheless acts up a storm. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg from a script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.
The Royal Ballet Company's bringing-to-life of the Beatrix Potter books for children is really a better exercise in costumery than in dance. It's understandable and perhaps allowable that the footwork should be encumbered by the bunny-fox-frog outfits. The music, however, is even less distinguished than the dancing; and the at-first-sight …
The giddy editing and photographic techniques give you an early sensation of motion sickness, and make you excessively grateful when the film settles down to its cornball plot contrivances about a wife, a husband, and a prepubescent daughter who go separate ways in the morning and return at night with …
The domestic tension between mismatched mates, he being the quiet type and she being the brassy, is played with considerable edge by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George. But any meaningful character interaction is bulldozed by the all-pervasive ominousness, the human meanness, the moronism, the muscle, and the machismo, not to …
The remembrances of the now mature and mellow-voiced narrator conjure up an adolescence that is seen as a storehouse of klutzy comedy material for the amusement and reassurance of those who are glad to be, or who would be glad to be, well beyond the stage of stumbling. The happenings …
Springing from a USC short-short film, this George Lucas science fiction, while it is competently enough handled, adds mainly bulk to the original germ. Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, and everyone else, put in their time in totally white surroundings and totally bald heads. They must have felt like lunatics.
In old Gothic Europe, they had two burning passions: witch hunting and devil worship. John Hough directs.
Monte Hellman's brooding think-piece about restless cross-country traveling in a souped-up '55 Chev is sort of a flat tire. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are the speed demons and they're about as animated as they are in still photographs.
Edward Bond's screenplay — two school children, accustomed to crisp uniforms and transistor radios and such things, find themselves marooned in the Australian outback — possibly is more complex in its ideas about a cultural misalliance than is readily apparent. No matter. Nicolas Roeg's bright, clear, airy images create a …
An undeniably, even if unreliably, funny New York comedy about a low-spirited attorney (George Segal) who plots to get rid of his dependent mother (Ruth Gordon), who, among her lesser faults, pours Coca-Cola over her breakfast cereal. Impressive debut performances by Ron Leibman and Trish Van Devere; and the direction …
Gene Wilder > Johnny Depp. But you knew that.
The fictional thread in Dusan Makavejev's tangle -- a love affair between a Soviet ice skating idol and a feminist radical -- is fairly interesting; at least the burlesque and the destructiveness are out in the open. The rest -- documentary footage on Wilhelm Reich and followers, Jim Buckley, Stalin, …