Paul Schrader recounts the life and death of Bob Crane (1928-78), ephemeral star of TV's Hogan's Heroes, obsessive womanizer (exploits he would copiously document in photographs and on primitive video), and unsolved-murder victim. This is a story of the Dark Side in which the lightweightness of the main character (very …
This Italian horror movie comes on strong. Ahead of the credits we are shown four fast suicides, all of them messy, and immediately afterwards we are sent into the city morgue to watch white-aproned actors fondling uncooked meats that are supposed to represent human innards. Before the movie is five …
The fifty-fourth and final film of Yasujiro Ozu, in his most rigid and repetitive style. The theme, of father abandoned by daughter in marriage, has been done by Ozu with greater emotional impact. (Where? Was it in Early Spring? No artist outside of novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett gives the memory more …
Joan Chen's worlds-apart followup to her first film, Xiu Xiu, the Sent-Down Girl, brings together Richard Gere and Winona Ryder as the perfect couple: he'll never grow up, and she'll never grow old. (Peter Pan Complex and heart condition, respectively.) A cure is possible, for either or both, but not …
Ingmar Bergman's characters suffer from many things, one of them being logorrhea. They talk directly to the camera, they talk solitarily to themselves, they talk to framed photographs, and of course, when given the chance, they talk each other's ears off, but even then their gaze tends to wander into …
With this, the seventy-nine-year-old Eric Rohmer completes a cycle of four films begun a decade before, "Tales of the Four Seasons." What sets it apart from other Rohmers, what gets you to straighten up in your seat, is the greater generational mix in the cast of characters. There are still, …
Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical tale of a family of Russian immigrants in Baltimore spans something like fifty years -- sufficient in some people's minds to qualify any movie as an "epic" or "saga" -- but for the most part it spans only about five of them, from post-Second World War to …
Probably the best 1959 movie made in 1972. Bill Wilder's latest opus hides beneath its Samuel Taylor romantic comedy facade, several layers of undertones, issuing from the director's complex blend of sourness, sentimentality, and corn. Playing off Jack Lemmon's patented brash American businessman, Juliet (sister of Haley) Mills lives up …
Ambitious merger of live action and computer animation, with at least one groundbreaking 3-D effect: English subtitles for the language spoken on the celestial body of Pandora inserted on a plane in the middle distance between a foreground figure and an upstage figure, as if the foreground one could look …
Ambitious merger of live action and computer animation, with at least one groundbreaking 3-D effect: English subtitles for the language spoken on the celestial body of Pandora inserted on a plane in the middle distance between a foreground figure and an upstage figure, as if the foreground one could look …
Ambitious merger of live action and computer animation, with at least one groundbreaking 3-D effect: English subtitles for the language spoken on the celestial body of Pandora inserted on a plane in the middle distance between a foreground figure and an upstage figure, as if the foreground one could look …
Ambitious merger of live action and computer animation, with at least one groundbreaking 3-D effect: English subtitles for the language spoken on the celestial body of Pandora inserted on a plane in the middle distance between a foreground figure and an upstage figure, as if the foreground one could look …
Lavishly refurbished TV show, and an especially dated one at that: the supercilious British superspies of the late 1960s, illegitimate spawn of 007. Anything goes: a dead ringer for Mrs. Peel, an invisible man, a supervillain in command of the world's weather, anything but a spark of life, a lightness …
From French writer-director Daniéle Thompson, a comedy of discontent, a comedy of attempted self-transformation, a light entertainment with darker undertones. The way station for three principal intertwined plotlines, on the titular swanky boulevard in the 8th Arrondissement of Paris, is the Bar des Théâtres, a "microcosm" composed of the coming-and-going …
Martin Scorsese continues to suffer from a form of elephantiasis, compounded by a touch of Oscaritis: a pushing-three-hours epic on the tumultuous career of Howard Hughes (the eternally boyish Leonardo DiCaprio, deficient in gravitas even with the added mustache midway through) in the parallel worlds of filmmaking and aeronautics circa …