Three bodies have been found buried in the snow outside a Moscow skating rink; their faces and fingertips have been cut away. Who are they? Having got hold of our attention in the way of the classical detective story, the movie maintains its grip in the same way throughout. The …
From Robert Altman, a pleasant if overlong divertissement that combines the British class-conscious social satire with the dark-and-stormy-night murder mystery: Evelyn Waugh meets Agatha Christie. In short, Altman hell: etiquette, decorum, hierarchy on the one side, and convention, formula, artifice on the other. However much the director might distance himself …
Good news: Raja Gosnell (Beverly Hills Chihuahua, The Smurfs, Beverly Hills Chihuahua) had nothing to do with it. Bad news: It's made-for-TV anti-abortion propaganda that managed to receive a theatrical release.
Documentary portrait of André Leon Talley, fashion magazine editor and all-around snappy dresser.
And also according to Karl Marx. Pier Paolo Pasolini, a Leftist and atheist, dips into his sacred source material with a highly suspicious selectivity, and extracts an image of Jesus Christ as a revolutionary. Pasolini scored some automatic points with the critics by seeming to take as his inspiration their …
Mx Justin Vivian Bond’s raspy-throated narration frames the story as a sprawling tall tale that raises the question, how in God’s name did all these queers end up making the scene in Eureka Springs, Arkansas? The pietistic burg is best known among evangelical Christians for a 4,000 seat amphitheatre located …
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 …
Heavily politicized Gothic romance about an undercover Jew in the employ of upper-crust Scots. The intrepid heroine breaches the inner sanctum of the lord of the castle, shows him the undiscovered way to preserve his pioneering photographs, and even gets a one-century jump on Playgirl magazine with a full-frontal pin-up …
An interesting modification and extension of the theatrical effects that director Carlos Saura (and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) developed and perfected in Flamenco and Tango: the play of colored lights, the illuminated screens, the transparent scrims, so that what appears to be a solid wall, for example, will dissolve before our …
Odd odyssey of a young Yakuza who has lost his loose-cannon brother. The gynecological impossibility of the climax is pretty freaky, but after the masturbating restaurateur, the lactating hotelier, the masochistic spiritualist, the man with the two-toned face, the soup-ladle sex toy, etc., it seems almost normal. Hideki Sone, Sho …