Second in the line of Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns. Lee Van Cleef enters the equation as a black-frocked genius of gunmanship named Bright Eyes, or Beady Eyes, nursing a mawkish revenge motive. This is supposed to add interest to the continuing conflict between Clint Eastwood and a resurrected Gian …
Two girls decide to open a phone sex business in order to make rent on their fabulous apartment. Now there's a fantasy.
Flat, drab, dismal film about a pink-cheeked Dutch boy awakening to his homosexuality in the last days of World War II. By the time he fully wakes up to it, in the arms of a Canadian "liberator" (a tender and respectful pedophile), the audience is apt to be asleep. In …
Amazon princess (former beauty queen Laura Herring) comes to America to save her forest from a multinational petroleum corporation ("You're talking about the hole in the ozone! That's important to everyone!"), teaches a Beverly Hills playboy the lambada, and wins a dance contest in order to deliver her message on …
Roman Polanski's lecherous private joke about a hippie hitchhiker (someone has described her as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Little Annie Fanny, though she favors the latter) who stumbles from a roadside rape into the mixed-nuts company at a secluded Italian villa: a bedridden patriarch, an arthritic pianist, …
Three mall store employees - Apple, Cherry, and Fig - operate as a witchy coven. When a new member, Pumpkin, joins their tight-knit group, the group faces internal drama and psychological tension. Written and directed by Meredith Alloway.
A bullied Boston teenager and martial-arts film aficionado (Michael Angarano) gets transported through the Gate of No Gate to a kind of kung-fu Shangri-La, where he learns to fight from the best (Jackie Chan, Jet Li), while fulfilling a prophecy of returning a magic golden staff to Five Elements Mountain, …
Habitually overpraised science-fiction classic, whose Freudian pretensions hope for intellectual stature on the basis of Walter Pidgeon's professorial windiness in expounding them. Robbie the Robot, with his rotating gizmos and flashing lights, may be ingratiating as robots go; and the amorphous transparent id is exciting; but the others in the …
Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson bring you the story of a trapped submarine that is also many other things maybe. A true cinematic whatzit.
This film plays as part of the San Diego Latino Film Festival's Cine Gay Showcase. According to the festival brochure, "When Moises Serrano was just a baby, his parents risked everything to flee Mexico and make the perilous journey across the desert in search of the American dream. After 23 …
Somewhere there may be ten-year-olds or eight-year-olds or the intellectual equivalents thereof who can even now be pleasantly astounded by Alistair MacLean's tortuous plotting (or plodding). All others are in for a slow burn. With Robert Shaw, Edward Fox, Harrison Ford, Franco Nero, and Barbara Bach; directed by Guy Hamilton.
The beginning is such a mess -- what with the two separate flashbacks, the ill-written narration ("Hong Kong is like a slap in the face that makes you feel good"), the superfluous sightseeing tour, the credits that come in two distant installments, and the slow-motion, silhouetted kung-fu fight that looks …
An ominous “controlled avalanche” at a Swiss resort sparks a tidal wave of emotion when Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) discovers her work-addicted husband, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), places his own safety, and that of his smartphone, ahead of their two kids. It’s a conspicuous moment of indecision that plunges their marriage …
The only film Abraham Polonsky was able to direct before he fell afoul of McCarthyite witch hunters (the only one until Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, two decades later), a morality play against a background of the numbers racket. The tough-guy language and ambience have rich veins of poetry …