This ecologically concerned outer-space fiction, directed by Douglas Trumbull, taps the audience's fondness for household plants and for cute, pint-sized robots. The use of Joan Baez songs as morality boosters is facile but at least understandable; the casting of Bruce Dern in the lead role is less understandable, as he …
While it would be quite passable as part of a drive-in theater's dusk-to-dawn Halloween jamboree, this leering little fantasy about Siamese twins is over its head when it crashes film festivals and gets promoted as a rival of Vertigo. Because Brian De Palma (Greetings) made it, there has been a …
George Roy Hill's prettified treatment of Kurt Vonnegut's sci-fi novel about a man who is "unstuck in time," i.e., he skips uncontrollably back and forth along his lifeline, which divides too neatly into historical periods that have nothing in common except the sadsack presence of Michael Sacks. (He adapts to …
Anthony Shaffer's veddy, veddy clever stage play is really not a mystery story at all, but rather a character study of a lordly WASP bigot (Laurence Olivier, acting in a Man of a Thousand Voices style) who just happens to compose genteel whodunits on the side. Shaffer spoofs the detective …
Yet another film that would not have been given the green light in our current climate. Not because it’s offensive or politically incorrect, mind you, but given the army of service dogs currently working the malls, the running “No Dogs Allowed” gag (voiced to perfection by oracular-tongued Thurl Ravenscroft) would …
Several superlatives are in order for this indifferent and unsuspenseful heist picture. First, the most apt title since Boy Did I Get a Wrong Number! Second, Jean-Claude Killy makes the most expressionless debut since John McGuire in Steamboat Round the Bend in 1935, if such honors can creditably span decades.
Authenticity initially peeks through with the title song by Lightning Hopkins and intermittently thereafter with the incidental music of Taj Mahal. But this heavily sentimentalized image of a black family in rural Louisiana, 1933, is otherwise blurred by caution and cliches. With Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield.
One of Costa-Gavras's transformations of recent history into declamatory melodrama, for popular consumption -- this one suggested by the kidnap-killing of U.S. agent Dan Mitrione at the hands of Uruguayan terrorists. The method here seems to be an attempted balance, or ping-pong game, between the rigorous claustrophobia of The Confession …
Coarse-grained and clumsy, this black action film shies away, rather squeamishly, from encouraging audience whoop-dee-doo. Credit for the relative restraint should go to the unconceited and uncool acting of Ron O'Neal and Carl Lee, as partners in cocaine distribution who are anxiously looking for a place in the shade. Directed …
The teamwork of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin produces something like half-a-Godard, a stripped-down but long-winded simulacrum (approx. 300 words per image), a handy anthology of concepts, color combinations, and chalked-out camera moves from any number of previous Godard movies, but particularly Two or Three Things I Know about Her. …
Whatever happened to the Maggie Smith who used to score heavily, but surreptitiously, in humble supporting roles? Having collected an Oscar for her worst screen performance as Jean Brodie, here returns worse yet, matching the George Cukor decors in gaudiness, tossing around gestures faster than the eye can follow. The …
Truffaut's second rendition of an H-P Roché novel — the first being Jules and Jim, the only other novel written by Roché — is more mature, controlled, detached. It flits across years and years (the time is the early 20th Century) in the lives of its characters — a prissy …
Egghead western, written by the Scottish novelist Alan Sharp, largely devoted to the esoteric military tactics involved in rounding up a small Apache raiding party. You realize how unfamiliar you are with the fine points of Indian fighting when you hear one cavalryman eulogized as "a good man," shortly after …
Anemic European-made gangster movie, based on the Peter Maas bestseller, goes in more for yakety-yak than bang-bang. Charles Bronson is impressive for keeping his body and spirits in peak condition despite the lethargy surrounding him. Directed by Terence Young.