Fictionalized, and very conventionalized, biography of Billie Holiday, and the inaccuracies will likely leave Holiday worshippers inconsolable. But Diana Ross, in her screen debut, escapes with surprising success from her Supreme mannerisms and burrows deeply, comfortably into her new role — a good effort. Snazzy period hairdos and costumes bolster …
Mawkish Neil Simon idea about an average Nice Guy, striving to rejuvenate his self-confidence with a middle-years extramarital fling. He gets nowhere fast, which could also be said of Alan Arkin in a role as monotonously strident as this. Sally Kellerman, Paula Prentiss, and Renee Taylor as prospective playmates all …
Zohra Lampert has nowhere else been granted this much time on a movie screen; and so, this ought to be an occasion for celebrating, even though she is required to impersonate a stock New York Neurotic, and even though the story material is flimsy Gothic paperback stuff. The shabby appearance …
Fellow day-laborers view new hire Júlio (Bembol Roco) as a professional drifter who lighted on their unscrupulously-managed construction site just long enough to spend a few months mixing cement before passing through. In point of fact, it’s romance (and proximity to the offices of Chua Tek), not randomness that brought …
Cinéma-verité exposé of the revivalist circuit. It's an "inside job," since the star evangelist (Marjoe Gortner, an ordained minister in the Old-Time Faith Church from the age of three) went through with his tour for the benefit of the cameras, although his heart and soul were not in his act. …
The patented John Cassavetes method (his very best friends get together and improvise a sketchy story idea in front of a camera that holds them in tight headlocks) is at its all-time loosest and lightest in this rosy love story, with a prim Gena Rowlands and a lunatic Seymour Cassel …
Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett's strong roots in naturalness enable this fair-minded portrait of a middle-class marriage to evolve gradually and smoothly from low-key comedy to gutsy tearjerker. Directed with few lapses of purpose by Martin Ritt.
John Waters's made-in-Baltimore cult piece about the battle for the title of Filthiest Person Alive. The combatants are, in one corner, Connie and Raymond Marble (she of the coral-red hair, he of the swimming-pool blue), who kidnap hippie hitchhikers, impregnate them, and sell the offspring to lesbian couples; and in …
Woody Allen's conservative (i. e., written for Broadway) comedy about a movie buff and social bumbler, played by Allen, whose emulations of Humphrey Bogart yield a predictable run of jokes about botched seductions. Some sappy excerpts from Casablanca further remove the worshipful Allen character from respectability. (Director Herbert Ross's half-blind …
Joan Didion's fragmented novel about the deserts in, around, and between L.A. and Las Vegas has been transferred to film, fragmentation intact, by Frank Perry, who can make the most difficult material seem simple-minded. While Tuesday Weld's likeness to a death's head is fitting, the actors (Anthony Perkins, Adam Roaker, …
Something a little different in time-ticking-away, struggle-for-survival epics. The characters are so obnoxiously inane, it would be a mercy for everyone if they were all eliminated quickly. It can be sat through quite easily, out of tolerance for silliness.
Morass of unrelated Fellini production numbers, each one overlong and overstuffed in itself, including an engrossing one about wartime brothels, a brilliantly sustained crescendo about the pileup of incoming city traffic, a predictable stomach-turning scene of endless eating, an obligatory anti-clerical skit having to do with an ecclesiastical fashion show. …
This British social satire is all fads and fluctuating interests in its eagerness to pamper the youth audience, which, according to director Peter Medak, must have an appetite for tidbits of everything: religion, sex, psychology, operetta, monster murder, antiques, etc. The only apparent accuracy this movie has about its Lincolnshire …
The first line is "Shit" and the second is "When's the funeral?" and by then it is plain that this is going to be an unflinching look at modern angst. Glimpses into the behind-the-scene pressures and shenanigans of the L.A. garment industry are pretty convincing; but there are also a …
Classic Comics on screen. A paper-thin travelogue through Northern India, lushly photographed by Sven Nykvist, it slides over any notion of pain, struggle, intellectual conflict contained in Hesse's novel about a man's search for spirituality. Directed by Conrad Rooks.