Jeepers! A sweet young somnambulist who communicates with insects is a pleasantly ridiculous idea. But other ideas to come along are just ridiculous, or quite unpleasantly ridiculous (e.g., the razor-wielding monkey), and despite some flickering signs of imagination (a girls' school situated in Richard Wagner's Swiss estate), one has the …
Amiable little backstage musical about a handsome salsa singer in East Harlem (Ruben Blades, who also co-wrote the script and the music), who wants to hit it really big: "Who the fuck do you think you are? Julio Iglesias?" The general structure is as weather-beaten as can be (singer gets …
True story of The Last Woman to Be Hanged in England, a "nightclub hostess" (read "tart") named Ruth Ellis, who shot her high-born lover in the mid-1950s. Although the sympathies of the filmmakers are quite certainly anti-capital punishment and pro-feminist (the screenwriter is Shelagh Delaney of A Taste of Honey, …
If you had not already heard that the eponymous hero is an android, or that the rather unsyntactical acronym stands for Data Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform, you would have to wait a long time for this movie to assert itself as science fiction. Because the hero is a child, and …
Those who thought the indoor shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead was a metaphor for America will perhaps be equally happy with the underground bunker cum missile silo here. Those who thought the shopping mall was a good place to hide out from a plague of zombies, with a …
The Roman numeral of the prior sequel has been dropped in preference for Arabic, and if the reason were simple forgetfulness it would not be surprising. Also forgotten, or unmentioned, is the fact that the hero was ever anything so mundane as an architect. He has settled instead into the …
We are asked to swallow several horse-pills of improbability. A yuppie Madame Bovary (Rosanna Arquette), who reads the Personals the way an earlier generation read novels, and who has identified herself with a recurrent character named Susan (pop singer Madonna), receives a bump on the head and wakes up thinking …
Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, née Alice Liddell, the "real" Alice in Wonderland, is brought to America at age eighty to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University on the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth -- a promising germ of an idea, that promises more than it delivers. It does deliver some …
The story, said to be based on fact, though it blasts off from that base fairly soon and fairly far, tells of the abduction of an American boy by Amazon Indians, and of his father's re-connection with him after a search of ten years. This bears a striking resemblance to …
In the late 21st Century an earthling and a Drac, on opposite sides of an outer-space dogfight, are downed together on an uninhabited planet, rather like Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on an uninhabited island during World War II in Hell in the Pacific. These two learn to co-operate sooner, …
Science-fiction juvenilia -- and wish-fulfillment stuff, to be sure, but not so much what an actual child would wish as what a protective grown-up would wish him to wish. A junior-high-school student (at Charles M. Jones Junior High, in salute to the animator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, et al.) …
Code names, those are, of two young Americans, one an amateur falconer and National Security employee, the other a drug dealer and user, who sell state secrets to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. John Schlesinger's version of Robert Lindsey's nonfiction best-seller provides adequate information on the how and the …
Cheesy thriller (namely, Kraft Grated Parmesan-y), with lots of bare bodkins and bodies too: a mad slasher is targeting Times Square strippers. This drastically cuts into the business of two Mafia-connected talent agents, who both look like Latin pop singers. (A couple of operational details are credible, but the on-stage …
Something about Las Vegas seems to impel filmmakers into montages, and Richard Brooks has been less resistant than most. Worse, the image, even when held on screen for more than a second, is grainy and muddy, and one can only surmise that Brooks has somehow dragged down the fine cinematographer, …