The behind-the-scenes presence of Peter Jackson, the New Zealander responsible for the highly respectable Heavenly Creatures and before that the deliberately disreputable Dead-Alive, adds a degree of interest to this ghost tale, even if some of that interest must take the form of dismay. His direction is incontestably high in …
Who's going to believe you when a vampire moves in next door? Moreover, who's going to know what to do about it? Who more likely than the host of a horror-film series on local TV and former star of horror films himself? The latter (Roddy McDowall) naturally deplores the current …
Was this remake necessary? A one-mile-square housing development situated in the middle of the Las Vegas desert is the setting for this digitized facelift of Tom Holland’s ho-hum 1985 cult-horror item. No one believes Anton Yelchin’s claim that neighbor Colin Farrell is a vampire and responsible for the death of …
A band of vampires, looking more like a heavy-metal band, is out for blood. Well, yes, what else? But in particular the blood of the nosy youth and the Hollywood has-been who dispatched the vampire in the previous Fright Night. Too many tricks and special effects by half (or by …
Robert Aldrich would appear to be an odd candidate to direct a Gene Wilder vehicle about a pure-in-heart Polish rabbi on a westward trek to set up a synagogue in San Francisco in the 1850s. He handles the assignment with surprising seriousness, but with something less than sensitivity. The movie …
Bringing R. Crumb's crum-bum characters to life is no better an idea than bringing Charles Schulz's to life, not even for the privilege of boasting about making the first X-rated cartoon. The disappointment stems from some silly voices and stiff animation, not so much from the script, which is respectably …
Middle-aged dental technician Armando (Alfredo Castro) desired no physical contact with the impoverished straight boys he took home until the night 17-year-old Elder (Luis Silva) beat the feathers off the chicken hawk. True to its title, writer-director Lorenzo Vigas’s use of contrasting focal lengths says more about Armando’s detached outlook …
Halfway decent pulp science fiction. The decent first half, give or take a few minutes, is straightforward and unpretentious storytelling in the mode of H.P. Lovecraft (on whose story it is more or less based), about an invention called the Resonator, intended to stimulate the pineal gland and awaken our …
An early screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's, disinterred and refurbished for his friend and colleague Robert Rodriguez to direct, and for himself to act in (amateurishly, as always, but with thoroughly aroused senses of fun and enthusiasm). The pre-credits scene exhibits some genuine movie sense. An extended bit of fat-chewing between …
A collection of revealing stories from 22 Palestinian filmmakers living through war, who capture their lives in Gaza amidst war.
An earth-shaking — or shaky, anyway — hypothesis as to the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. It issues not from hell, exactly, but merely from a "graphic novel" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. The Hughes brothers' adaptation, taking its cue, is extremely graphic, in addition to gruesome, …
Fred Zinnemann directs Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, and some kid named Sinatra in this WWII melodrama.
There is no hint in the early going (neither in the title itself nor in the stagy, seemingly endless boudoir comedy between a proper Boston widow and a leery bank robber) of the form and tone which this expansive tall tale means to attain, by and by. Before you realize …
John Travolta, totally unrestrained, as a self-admiring U.S. superspy with the demeanor of a Hell’s Angel (“Tell me that wasn’t some impressive shit!”), shooting up the City of Light in a grainy sallow digital image. Jonathan Rhys Meyers affects a credible American accent as his timid embassy liaison, perhaps the …
The second of the Bonds. Istanbul, a gypsy revel, a horde of rats in a dank underground passage, and so forth. The main event is the close-quarters, hand-to-hand combat, back and forth in adjoining train compartments, between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw, his hair dyed Nazi blond. Shaw and Lotte …