How to cope with a rogue shark, who’s choosing his meals among the summertime beachgoers on a New England vacation isle, is a possibly plausible crisis, puffed up however to the proportions of a whopping fish story. The plot appears to be fooling with some fairly advanced chemistry (the hunting …
Sam Peckinpah, who knows much about real-life violence and is glad to share his findings, begins this movie with a worthwhile lesson on the maiming effects of bullets -- the weeks in hospital, the months in therapy. But he permits James Caan to make a near-complete recovery and to compensate …
Ted Allan's autobiographical screenplay about boyhood in a Russian-Jewish tenement in 1920s Montreal (with Allan himself appearing as the Leninist proselytizer, Mr. Baumgarten) inclines a little toward the schmaltzy. And no matter how true to the remembered facts, the story spends considerable time among things predictable and inevitable. The little …
Woody Allen makes an unexpected retreat, taking along his eyeglasses and neuroses, to Russia of the Napoleonic era and to the social circles charted by Tolstoi, Turgenev, others. He presides over more props, more extras, more budget than ever before (the movie was shot, furthermore, in Paris and Budapest); but …
A Ménage-à-trois of Prohibition bootleggers around the Mexican border is played, broad-mindedly, or feeble-mindedly, as simply another contribution to the buddy genre. The strangeness of this unorthodox arrangement is probed no deeper than the dear-me expressions on hotel clerks, real estate agents, etc. The strangest aspect -- the incomprehensible aspect …
Something for the culture-vultures. Ingmar Bergman directs, for television, a Swedish opera company in a performance of the Mozart classic -- a radical change of pace for Bergman, who, for years, had banished music from his movies. To set the proper lofty tone for this gala event, Bergman assembles an …
Diana Ross climbs to fame, from a dressmaking factory in the Chicago slums to the international fashion scene in Rome, while Billy Dee Williams supplies the nagging voice of conscience, stays home, wears bluejeans, talks on streetcorners through a bullhorn, and toils tirelessly for the betterment of His People. This …
It's a sharp drop from Tara to Falconhurst. For all that's shown of the interior, two-thirds of this Southern mansion might be boarded up and collecting dust, although the central staircase serves just as well to snuff out an unborn child if the expectant mother descends it head over heels. …
Defoe's classic, Robinson Crusoe, as told by Friday to a congregation of his tribesmen, fashionably attired in macramé belts and headdresses. Q white-man's-guilt movie -- and in the clash of cultures, black against white, the white man agrees to take a dive. Western Civilization is represented by pre-Age-of-Enlightenment colonialist-Christian dogma, …
Fellow day-laborers view new hire Júlio (Bembol Roco) as a professional drifter who lighted on their unscrupulously-managed construction site long enough to spend a few months mixing cement before passing through. In point of fact, it’s romance (and a proximity to the offices of Chua Tek), not randomness that brought …
Sports documentary on a daredevil expedition by the Japanese athlete, Miura, to ski in the thin air of Mt. Everest's summit. It lacks the suspenseful immediacy of a Wide World of Sports special event on ABC-TV, but it has the advantage of a high-quality, crisp, wide-screen image. And it is, …
John Huston at long last realizes his plan to adapt the Rudyard Kipling story, which he first took up, twenty years earlier, as a project to star Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Whether it's because of the new age, or Huston's old age, or simply the increased distance from the …
Monty Python's skits — sometimes funny, always silly illustrations of human stupidity — are strung together here into a more or less linear narrative, spoofing King Arthur in Old England. The picaresque itinerary (traveling lightly and quickly through spots that are never returned to again, although many of the jokes …
Monty Python's skits — sometimes funny, always silly illustrations of human stupidity — are strung together here into a more or less linear narrative, spoofing King Arthur in Old England. The picaresque itinerary (traveling lightly and quickly through spots that are never returned to again, although many of the jokes …
Werner Herzog's story comes from actual accounts of a mystery man who turned up on the streets of Nuremberg in the 1820s, and who, after being force-fed a few proprieties of polite society, was unaccountably murdered. Herzog doesn't shrink from supplying this strange case with a possible beginning and ending: …