Jorge Amado's story about the ghost of an insatiable Don Juan who comes back to haunt his widow, now remarried to a respectable dullard, somewhat resembles a 1930s Thorne Smith confection, except with a grittier texture to its ambience, its sex play, and its naughty jokes. The authentic sensuousness of …

Jules Dassin takes another stab at modernizing an ancient Greek legend, maybe in hopes of rectifying the earlier attempt that resulted in arguably his biggest debacle, Phaedra. Here, a glamorous international star of stage and screen (Melina Mercouri), who looks like Catherine Deneuve from the back of her luxurious blonde …

Cops-and-robbers stuff, stripped to the barest essentials of the genre, reduced to the irreducible, abstracted to no more than the bluesy mood and the methodical, calculated, chess-game maneuvers. The nearly monochromatic color and uncluttered compositions conjure up a poetic night world somewhat in the manner of "Whistler's nocturnes." Writer-director Walter …

The title might lead one to expect that Nagisa Oshima has made a direct followup to his In the Realm of the Senses (or if not to that, then to Star Wars). But it's not in the same world, let alone same realm or same empire. There is little visible …

Burt Reynolds cultivates a mustache and beard which serve to muffle, or muzzle, his charm as a comic actor, and also serve to enhance his image as a serious film director -- exactly like Jerry Lewis, with his mustache and beard, in Which Way To The Front? Also like Lewis …

Clint Eastwood vehicle about a psychopathic hooker and an unbeatable streetfighter who decides to take a dive when he realizes the high price of fame. The foregoing information is provided as a courtesy to those who haven't the tolerance to sit through two plotless hours of brawls, country-western songs, slapstick …

Some fairly frightening jousts with unseen forces in a Civil War-period mansion, debilitated a bit by a Christmas Carol ghost who appears to be made up head-to-toe with Gold Medal flour, and by a climactic encounter with a jolly, obese Satan who is exactly the sort of demon you would …

The premise is hard to swallow and harder to digest. A fashionable fashion photographer (Faye Dunaway), who shoots sadomasochistic pictures with an imperceptible moral purpose behind them, periodically blanks out the world in front of her face and sees momentarily through the eyes of an anonymous killer as he stalks …

The tempestuous directorial debut of scriptwriter James (The Gambler) Toback, about a confused young man who vacillates between the career choices and value systems represented by his Italian-Catholic Mafioso father and his Jewish classical-pianist mother. It is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. Harvey Keitel, with his portable cassette-deck …

Somewhere there may be ten-year-olds or eight-year-olds or the intellectual equivalents thereof who can even now be pleasantly astounded by Alistair MacLean's tortuous plotting (or plodding). All others are in for a slow burn. With Robert Shaw, Edward Fox, Harrison Ford, Franco Nero, and Barbara Bach; directed by Guy Hamilton.

Comedy thriller assembled, by the Dr. Frankenstein method, from the assorted body parts of past thrillers. This sort of grave-robbing, scissoring, and sewing procedure is apt to cause some spectators some aesthetic squemishness, but the resulting creation is reasonably well coordinated and good- looking. Chevy Chase, is his first big …

Inhuman federal agents, who work for an unspecified government organization, kidnap a teenage boy, who possesses unspecified psychic powers, in order to channel his great potential toward unspecified ends. Clarity is not this movie's forte. It's especially confusing about the nature of the psychic phenomena and about the cinematic style …

A hatchet job on pet cemeteries, a well-marked target already (The Loved One, etc.), and a pitifully vulnerable one. Errol Morris, a Werner Herzog protégé, with his master's taste for the grotesque, keeps himself hidden in every sense as he lets the cemetery impresarios and bereaved pet owners address a …

Boudoir comedy about a young married woman, suffering fainting spells out of sheer ennui, whose husband tries unsuccessfully to pep her up by providing her with an additional lover, but who eventually finds contentment in the arms of a thirteen-year-old snot with an I.Q. of 158. The situation is artlessly …

The inner vanity of this outwardly modest movie is based on the fact that it tries to create "real people," a dubious virtue in itself, like "home cooking." These people -- the circle of friends, old and new, surrounding a would-be professional photographer who makes do shooting weddings and bar …