Bill Forsyth, having built up expectations with Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, was hereupon charged with "slightness." Why? A character who gets dumped by his girlfriend at middle age, seizes upon the opportunity to take stock of his life, finds it to be without serious purpose, and begins to cast …
The fever dream of a contemporary British teenager turns into a fantasia on the werewolf theme, set in a sunless fairytale kingdom, vaguely 19th-century, with a bespectacled and bonneted Granny as guide to the dark mysteries. The whole show has something of the charged erotic atmosphere of Christina Rossetti's Goblin …
Also describable as Conan the Modest, in comparison with his first screen adventure and none the worse for it. Grace Jones, she of the flat-top haircut and the flat-front torso, is a helpful recruit, with none of that mushy stuff between her and the hero to slow things down. And …
You might well have expected that a movie called The Cotton Club would actually be about the Cotton Club. But no. The movie is not so much about it as around and about it. One of the main characters owns the place. A couple of others work there. Others of …
The problem is a real one: the plight of the modern-day Midwest farmer in the face of government foreclosures. But the portrait here is hinged entirely on a romantic notion of 19th-century frontier individualism that we cannot believe has come into the present day, or much past Willa Cather's day …
Not since Mae West has there been a script so ravenous for the salty line, albeit at a level of wit quite out of sight of that other -- and not out of sight above it. ("I never forget a face, especially when I've sat on it"; "You're the head …
A highly competitive movie, at least insofar as its subject matter. That it deals with the World Chess Championship ensures it a degree of the dramatic tension inherent in any sports event, and that the competitors are an aging, ailing Soviet Jew and a temperamental, somewhat paranoid Soviet defector ensures …
Attractive and provocative sci-fi about dream research in which gifted psychics are able to project themselves into other people's dreams, either as passive observers or as active participants, with possible curative effect (or, as we soon see, possible destructive effect, too). Not an original idea, but not as yet an …
The storyline of the Frank Herbert sci-fi novel is hopelessly buried beneath an avalanche of unfamiliar vocabulary and proper names -- beneath Arrakis and Atreides and Caladan and Giedi Prime and Kaitain and heaven knows what all. One doesn't have the luxury in a darkened theater of referring to the …
The storyline of the Frank Herbert sci-fi novel is hopelessly buried beneath an avalanche of unfamiliar vocabulary and proper names -- beneath Arrakis and Atreides and Caladan and Giedi Prime and Kaitain and heaven knows what all. One doesn't have the luxury in a darkened theater of referring to the …
The story of a Guatemalan brother and sister who enter the United States through four miles of abandoned sewer, and with far more melodramatic a motivation than is needed to mobilize most illegals: their father machine-gunned and beheaded, their mother imprisoned, the brother pursued by the militia for a self-defense …
The movies that men do, likewise, live after them, and this one, while not exactly evil, is pretty bad, and not one of the glories of the long careers of Charles Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson, nor even of their short string of mutual collaborations. A litany of grisly …
Brief Encounter on the Manhattan commuter train -- but not all that brief after all, and without anything like Noel Coward's verbal facility. Michael Christofer's underwritten script maneuvers the characters fairly cleverly into place, but then gives them nothing much to do or say once there. A glaring oversight, this, …
Arcane satire on modern middle-class Japanese education; or more specifically, on the ninth student from the bottom of his class, and his highly ambiguous (but highly effective) tutor. It is often difficult to pick out the joke, or even the basic point, of a scene; and such uncertainty is more …
Five million stolen dollars are secreted in a coffin to be shipped cross-country by rail. The coffin, as chance would have it, is commandeered in the train depot by an imposter soldier, who drapes it with the American flag he happens to be carrying, in order to evade a couple …