Overly manipulative romance between a wholesome, peaches-and-cream gentlewoman and a ratty desperado. They are played, respectively, by Mary Steenburgen, who looks as if she has stepped out of a Jacques Louis David portrait, and Jack Nicholson, who sounds as if he is in constant need of Dristan nasal spray. Nicholson, …
A Vietnam War movie, set in 1964, when U.S. involvement in the fighting hadn't yet escalated beyond the advisory stage. Adapted from a novel by Daniel Ford, Incident at Muc Wa, the story is told with the swift forward propulsion of a WWII Warners action movie, despite the heavy ideological …
A huge freighter, manned by uneducated Norwegians who speak only in subtitles and know nothing of the maritime traffic laws, plows into a U.S. submarine and sends it plummeting to the edge of an underwater cliff, where it teeters in such a precarious position that the survivors, inside, are photographed …
Plasticized, inflated, and bulgingly grotesqued replica of the 1950s -- a distinctly 1970s replica with 1970s music, dance, and condescension infiltrating the Brylcreem and bobby-sox milieu. There are some pleasant musical numbers: a parallel-constructed duet that ping-pongs between John Travolta at the football-stadium bleachers and Olivia Newton-John at the school …
Plasticized, inflated, and bulgingly grotesqued replica of the 1950s -- a distinctly 1970s replica with 1970s music, dance, and condescension infiltrating the Brylcreem and bobby-sox milieu. There are some pleasant musical numbers: a parallel-constructed duet that ping-pongs between John Travolta at the football-stadium bleachers and Olivia Newton-John at the school …
Courageously ridiculous, blushingly romantic, tastefully perverse — in short, the best sort of Truffaut movie, in company with Wild Child and Two English Girls and The Story of Adele H., if not nearly the best of his best, in fact rather wan and lethargic. A necrophiliac meditation on love, death, …
A spectacular opening: a circuitous single-take which travels, a little unsteadily, up the walkway of a modest Middle American home, all the way around the side of the building, through the kitchen door, briefly into the cutlery drawer where a hand reaches in from offscreen to select a fearsome butcher …
A spectacular opening: a circuitous single-take which travels, a little unsteadily, up the walkway of a modest Middle American home, all the way around the side of the building, through the kitchen door, briefly into the cutlery drawer where a hand reaches in from offscreen to select a fearsome butcher …
Warren Beatty's atavistic remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan — he's the star, the producer, the co-writer (with Elaine May), and the co-director (with Buck Henry) — is scrupulously clean, moderately liberal, irreverently reverent, and refreshingly airy. Such qualities were rampant in the Depression years whence this comedy-fantasy came, but …
Hal Needham's salute to Hollywood stuntmen is in the Howard Hawks mode of This Special Breed male camaraderie movies. Needham, a celebrated stuntman and stunt coordinator himself, knows what he's talking about, and he seems to be drawing from a fairly deep well of feelings. Even his glib ridicule of …
At least the ninth screen version of the Sherlock Holmes story, this can be seen as a continuation of the road Paul Morrissey travelled in Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, a road that has taken him further and further from his mentor, Warhol, despite the latter's figurehead position …
Uncomplicated romantic comedy about a widowed doctor whose Second Youth is jeopardized by a fortyish divorcee who plays only for keeps. Both of them are presented uncritically, and a bit too sweetly, as "good catches." The waggish dialogue by a foursome of scriptwriters and the deft playing by Walter Matthau …
An epidemic of lycanthropy in and around a culty psychiatric clinic in Northern California. Slow to get going, and toward the end, if not sooner, it is drawing more off Invasion of the Body Snatchers than off werewolf legends. Numerous tangential allusions to the subject — a mention of Wolfman …
A late-blooming but God-gifted figure skater from Iowa begins her Cinderella climb toward the Winter Olympics (after one look at her new rival, the favored French champion is skidding all over the ice on belly and knees), and she gets as far as a Sports Illustrated cover before she is …
That this insipid sex comedy has run into censorship imbroglios in its native Canada and in Chicago (why on earth?) is a riper joke than any of those contained within the movie's borders. The chronicle of the sexual education of a young Hungarian immigrant has some pretensions, to be sure; …