Four struggling actors, plus an unsteady camera, repair to a remote Big Bear cabin for a weekend, to write themselves a film much like the one we’re watching: a shoestring relationship thing that develops into a thriller thing. For the four actors (Ross Partridge, Steve Zissis, Greta Gerwig, Elise Muller) …
The rare American movie to make the jump from television to theaters, and without having to cross any oceans to do it. No one is apt to question its credentials (it debuted, after all, on public TV, not network), although the straight-shooting social consciousness is rather more characteristic of TV …
Rebecca Miller -- daughter of a dominating man, the playwright Arthur Miller -- has written and directed a coming-of-age tale about the daughter of a dominating man, a radical Sixties bitter-ender who, in the mid-Eighties, still lives in TV-free isolation at an abandoned commune on an island off the East …
Maggie Greenwald's non-Western: not an anti-Western, just not quite a Western. The action may be located in a mining town not too distant from those of The Hanging Tree and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and by and by the historic conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders may loom on the horizon, …
Shohei Imamura offers numerous grim vignettes of human misery and animality -- most especially the hair-raising burial-alive of a potato thief and his entire family, photographed in so lengthy a single-take that our thoughts about human misery eventually give way to wonderment and worry about what sort of provisions were …
A daughter's documentary on her elusive and unavailable father, Ramblin' Jack Elliott (the descriptive adjective, we learn, refers as much to tongue-looseness as to footlooseness), born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in 1931, son of a middle-class Jewish doctor in Brooklyn, teenage runaway, self-made cowboy, protégé of Woody Guthrie, precursor of Bob …
Introductory lecture (Marian Seldes, the not overly familiar narrator) on the post-revolutionary Russian refugees who laid the foundation of modern ballet, namely the Ballet Russe and its warring spinoffs, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo vs. the Original Ballet Russe, Leonide Massine vs. Wasily de Basil (and companies). The supplementary …
Antonio Banderas vs. Lucy Liu, rival undercover agents in a storm of fireballs, crumpled cars, thudding and shrieking rock music. But they're not "versus" for long; they team up against a common foe (common as dirt), a good deal for Banderas, because Liu was chilling him with her superior cool. …
A retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck and Oskar Homolka.
An animal picture for highbrows. Robert Bresson's episodic chronicle of the martyrization of a humble donkey is a sort of Christian existentialist version of Will James's horse story, Smoky, only not so credible in its plotting. Among devout Bressonites, this is sometimes said to be one of his supreme achievements, …
The world's greatest pool players, real and fictional, face each other in a movie not worthy of the neighborhood-bar variety. The only interest is in watching James Coburn and Omar Sharif making some of their own shots, and in wondering how many takes were required. Directed by Robert Ellis Miller.
Love of literature, love of music, love of the opposite sex, survive amid the repressive rigors of a Maoist "re-education" camp in the lush green mountains, and open up the wider world to a local village girl. Mostly sweet; a hint of bitter in the years-later epilogue. Dai Sijie directs …
In this storyless and humanless paean to woodland creatures (Man is regarded as the eternal enemy, the bringer of fire, destruction, death), the Disney animators are able to give free rein to their appreciation of the natural world, of Romantic landscape, of animals' little idiosyncrasies, of types of weather and …
Spike Lee, in confrontational mode, serves up a new generation's Putney Swope, the blaxploitation-era satire by Robert Downey (Jr.'s father) about a black takeover of a Madison Avenue ad agency. The comparable premise here concerns a prissy Harvard-educated African-American TV executive (Damon Wayans), under pressure from his blacker-than-thou white boss …