The sequel craze of the Seventies has here reached the point of certifiability: this movie has nothing whatever to do with the original Beyond the Door, but for marketing reasons it is smarter to pretend otherwise. Cult director Mario Bava, an unpretentious surrealist, creates a nasty atmosphere with a haunted …
The cast of characters includes a whisky-sodden British diplomat, an ex-prostitute Indian wife, an ex-seminarian Paraguayan rebel, an apolitical, amoral doctor with allegiances to all of the above, an implacable South American policeman -- well, it's Graham Greene, you see. The Honorary Consul, to be precise. The abbreviated TV style …
Further lengthening an already lengthy rut, Robert Altman again takes his source material, if not exactly his "inspiration," from a theater piece, in this case Christopher Durang's comedy about a match made through the Personals of New York Magazine. And then he brings to it that same offhanded style, that …
Vanity film from Kevin Spacey, directing himself in the part of pop star Bobby Darin in a free-form, fantasy-riddled biopic, throwing in a gratuitious impression of Jerry Lewis in the bargain (not bad), and doing his own singing in a mellower, droopier, croonier style possibly more suited to a biography …
Russ Meyer's supreme -- or maybe just extreme -- achievement in high spirits and low morals, having to do with an all-girl rock-and-roll group (The Carrie Nations) travelling to Hollywood and falling into wayward, wicked, and weird ways. The whirlwind tour of Tinsel Town and the finger-snapping, bus-rocking, cross-country trip …
Day-trip from Birmingham to Blackpool, in a minibus packed with Indian women of wide-ranging ages and attitudes. Pleasant enough while it lasts (notwithstanding some overemphatic fantasy scenes, in mockery of the Bombay cinema, and a heavy-handed face-off with a wife-beater), but nothing much to remember the next morning. Colorful, bouncy, …
Saccharine science fiction concerning a domestic android named Andrew, who comes to want his freedom and his humanity. We go through a long stretch of sitcom material, followed by an even longer, and slower, stretch of tearjerker material, both stretches littered with juvenile off-color material. Isaac Asimov, the author of …
Vittorio De Sica's heart-wrenching and arm-twisting argument on behalf of the Little Man. The people's faces and the slum locales look coldly authentic and untampered-with. But the woeful plotline -- a menial laborer's frantic search for his stolen bicycle -- dumps truckloads of irony and pathos all along the way.
Tom Hanks, who needs no incitement to act immature, is here given carte blanche: a runty twelve-year-old, towered over by the cute blonde in his class, makes a wish to be "big" and has it granted overnight by a coin-operated fairground wizard. (Technically, he not only gets bigger, but older …
The long-sought answer to the question of what ever became of Debra Winger, absent from the screen for seven years since the forgettable Forget Paris. Seems she married Arliss Howard, her co-star in the little-seen and badly named Wilder Napalm, and consented to play a part -- unflamboyantly -- in …
A slice of Americana from the Corman company. It pictures a gang of hick stickup artists whose boisterous impersonations of rural Bonnie-and-Clyde types more closely resemble excited chickens. Angie Dickinson, William Shatner; directed by Steve Carver.
An important thing to remember for the less attentive follower of the French cinema is that Luc Besson (the director of this English-language production) is not Luc Beraud. The second of these Lucs made a quite good little film called Like a Turtle on Its Back. The first one made …
Anemic remake of an underrated adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. What was, in 1969, a sort of neo-James Cain hard-boiled thriller is now, under the direction of George Armitage (Miami Blues, Grosse Pointe Blank), a post-Tarantino, post-Get Shorty smarty-pants romp. And there is nothing to replace the sexual sparks …
The gimmick of mismatched twins separated at birth: if it was funny before (Start the Revolution without Me), perhaps lightning could strike again. Or if not a bull's-eye, at least somewhere on the target, say about the first ring from the outermost. That would be, and is, not bad at …
Much the same premise as Mary McCarthy's (or Sidney Lumet's) The Group: a circle of political idealists in their college days are reunited years later for the first funeral within the circle. But it is treated more in the form of The Return of the Secaucus Seven, a long shapeless …