Yes, but more of blood, plus some bubonic-plague lesions and vomit for good measure. This is Europe in 1501, and a California sex kitten (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has been abducted from her Australian betrothed (Tom Burlinson) by a handsome Dutchman (Rutger Hauer) and his yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum band of mercenaries. The stuff …
Another in Robert Altman's series of struggles against innate staginess, orchestrated with his usual sloshing fluidity and trickly leaks around the edges, and permeated with his special vision of humanity as a matter of the askew bow tie and the visible lingerie strap. The theatrical source-material this time, set 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 …
You do not have to be a great admirer of a film director in order to take an interest in a film about him. But a shared admiration will be a great help in getting you through those stretches of hot air, whitewash, looking the other way, putting the best …
A Richard Donner Film, but “a Steven Spielberg Presentation.” The second fellow wrote the original story and was one-third of the team of executive producers, and the finished product is chock-full of Spielbergian ingredients: skeletons, bugs, bats, boulders. There is even (in the duplicitous spirit of E.T.’s resurrection) a moment …
There can have been no false sincerity in Godard's proffered thank-you to the Holy Father for his personal interest in (i.e., official denunciation of) this film: just the thing to throw into reverse the director's inexorable drift from his pivotal and influential position in the Sixties to an increasingly marginal …
St. Basil's Catholic Parochial School for Boys, Brooklyn, 1965. The photography is so aggressively unattractive, with that fluorescent abrasiveness in which Miroslav Ondricek specializes, that you might almost think the movie took itself seriously. Perish the thought. Every character is one insistent note, strident if not downright sour: fat bespectacled …
Typically silly Robert Ludlum thriller, the full silliness of which does not come to light till the end: something about a coalition of neo-Fascists and Third World terrorists, organized and financed by a long-dead Nazi who still wants to conquer the world and, at the same time, avenge himself on …
A very level view of the impoverished Extremadura area of Spain, still under Franco. It is a view of social inegality ("We're here to serve" is the peasants' motto) characterized more by chagrin than by anger. The camera is stolid and steady, and the look and pace of the depicted …
Satyajit Ray's chamber piece about the stirrings of feminism and nationalism in colonial India. Victor Banerjee of A Passage to India is the wealthy, Westernized maharajah, with liberal and rational attitudes. (And very good in the role, too.) Opposed to the notion of purdah, or the seclusion of women in …
But damp ammunition. Rich bored beautiful housewife, with ruthless stuffy domineering husband, tumbles for brash boyish overconfident thief. "I didn't know I was like this," she says. (She hasn't seen enough movies, then.) Shot in New Zealand; with Simone Griffeth; directed by Denis Lewiston.
A fanciful Meeting-of-the-Minds in a Manhattan hotel room in the mid-Fifties between (not all at once) Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Joe McCarthy, identified in the script as just the Professor, the Actress, the Ballplayer, and the Senator. The promise of philosophical fireworks is largely unfulfilled, although the …
It would be possible to feel we were getting more than a comedy-thriller if we could feel we were getting at least that. A simple nonstop pursuit -- of a spacey emerald smuggler and a Good Samaritan astrophysicist by a team of Middle Eastern hit men, among others -- produces …
America is ripe for terrorist attack: "soft, spineless, decadent." Ah, but they forgot about Chuck Norris, who, although no longer with The Company, has kept in shape wrestling alligators in the Everglades. We get to see two successful terrorist strikes, against a sleepy middle-class suburb and a Latino youth center, …