Dishonor among thieves, two Brits and two Yanks to be exact, plus a proper bewigged barrister who's drawn into the mess. There are plenty of fresh and funny ideas: the use of foreign languages as an aphrodisiac, a gunsel who reads (but doesn't understand) Nietzsche and will fly off the …
Dishonor among thieves, two Brits and two Yanks to be exact, plus a proper bewigged barrister who's drawn into the mess. There are plenty of fresh and funny ideas: the use of foreign languages as an aphrodisiac, a gunsel who reads (but doesn't understand) Nietzsche and will fly off the …
Terry Gilliam makes big messes. Time Bandits. Brazil. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Each one more unmanageably ambitious than the debacle before it. The Fisher King, next in line, looks like a hard one to top. You always come out of any Gilliam movie feeling vaguely a need to be …
Sloppy and amateurish basketball comedy about the precision teamwork of an all-Pisces professional ball club. You wonder why Julius (Dr. J) Erving, in a sullen acting debut, couldn't have taken the director aside and given him a few pointers on the game: "Hey coach, listen up and listen good. Don't …
Charlie Day is a nice-guy teacher (with a sweet kid and a pregnant wife) in a high school that demands educators who look like Ice Cube and talk with his brand of menace and authority. But even Mr. Cube is not immune to the degradations of Senior Prank Day, and …
The initial Clint Eastwood-Sergio Leone collaboration, its sardonic storyline lifted from Kurosawa's Yojimbo and re-located in a comic-book Italian version of the American West. (Not by any means the initial "spaghetti Western," but the one that opened the floodgates.) Deeply devoted to perspiration, whiskers, squints, and Ennio Morricone's bizarre tweedles …
Marco Bellocchio's murderous black comedy of dissension and dissolution in an artistocratic family made up of various sickies and loonies. Scenes of family strife nudge close to typical Italian domestic comedy in sheer clamor and chaos. But, shoving the other way, Bellocchio's coverage of the milieu and Lou Castel's characterization …
Canadian coming-of-age comedy drama film written and directed by Molly McGlynn concerning a young girl on the verge of womanhood who discovers that her biology is not quite as simple as she'd imagined. Starring Maddie Ziegler and Emily Hampshire.
Herzog's second Peruvian expedition provides as severe a test as ever devised of the spectator's ability to dissociate the on-screen movie from what he knows of the off-screen one. Some of the director's fabled adventurousness, endurance, and what-have-you is in fact apparent on screen. The colonial city of Iquitos, the …
Another Tony Bill contemplation of violence and pacifism among the young (to go with My Bodyguard). But different. Very different. A sort of horror-comic vision of the Bronx in the Sixties, complete with a scarred Frankenstein's monster and an unconscious blonde in his arms. The interest of an Irish policeman's …
With six days left to serve on his sentence, a gentlemanly convict breaks out of prison in Arkansas when his son is hospitalized in California, and he takes five days to travel cross-country by foot, by hijacked car, by hopped freight train, and by stolen horse, leaving a trail of …
Vicky, a strange and solitary little girl, has a magical gift: she can reproduce any scent she likes, and collects them in a series of carefully labeled jars. She has secretly captured the scent of her beloved mother Joanne. When her father’s sister Julia bursts into their life, Vicky reproduces …
Jack Nicholson as the Drop-Out Kid, a classical pianist who opts for the blue-collar life. He makes showy fusses over a freeway traffic jam and a sourpuss waitress (two scenes that are played for easy comedy of the mad-artist-in-conflict-with-society type), and he finally sheds a tear over the lack of …