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 …
Middle-class problem picture. The problem is that of the working wife (door-to-door peddler of sewing machines), and it has, in contemporary India, two sides to it: the economic necessity and the social stigma. Satyajit Ray, no mossback he, lightens the problem, but doesn't diminish it, with an uncommonly high amount …
Near-perfect murder mystery, from a novel by the poet Kenneth Fearing, about a Big Town crime reporter, overdue for vacation, following a killer's trail that seems to lead straight to himself. Classically compressed in time and space (two of the three "unities"), and the action (the third) is ushered along …
Well-turned genre piece, lean, tight, minimalist, photographed by John Alton with such an eye for black-and-white abstraction as to provide the perfect specimen in the Evolution of Expressionism circa the mid-1950s. Jean Wallace contributes some smoldering sexuality as the gun moll, and Cornel Wilde (Wallace's long-time husband in real life) …
Adam Sandler adopts a five-year-old in order to appear mature by comparison and impress his girlfriend. It doesn't work: neither the impressing nor the appearing mature. Lovers of peepee jokes are requested to love him anyway. With Joey Lauren Adams, Leslie Mann, Jon Stewart, Rob Schneider, Steve Buscemi; directed by …
Italian spoof of the Rififi-type caper film, and enough of an archetype in its own right to win a lot of tolerance for director Mario Monicelli throughout his prolific career. The buildup achieves a genial sense of proletarian oneness, though no eruptive laughs. Those are reserved for the climactic caper: …
Strictly routine case of police corruption, with dashes of Cajun flavoring around New Orleans, and a mildly spicy sex scene ("Stop that," the woman protests, in reference to the man's out-of-frame hand. "That?" he leers. "Or that?"). Its most distinctive feature, however, is its attitude of Old World (or Man's …
Overlong, oversweet romantic comedy on the homosexual passions coursing through a culturally diverse, tolerant, tight-knit Montana paradise ("Can't you see what a good job God did here?"): the successful New York artist returned home to tend his ailing grandfather; the ex-jock Adonis for whom he has carried a torch since …
A ruthless film producer steals a kid's English composition and transforms it into his next blockbuster: a dose of Hollywood self-loathing for the whole family. There's no harm in it, surely, and plenty of pep. Paul Giamatti, in the part of the producer, slathers the relish on the hot dog. …
Big bore. Tim Burton, to inhibit erosion of his "fan base," needed to bounce back in a big way from the commercial conservatism of Planet of the Apes, and in Daniel Wallace's slender novel he has found a fund of peculiarity: the sententious and sentimental memoirs of an Alabama fabulist, …
At the heart of this up-to-date private eye caper is the question, Whatever happened to the student radicals of the Sixties? And the several given answers are not lacking in humor, nor in sentimentalism for the good old days of peace marches, SDS meetings, and such. That one of these …
David Hockney at work, and at a romantic crossroads with his lover and model, Peter Schlesinger. The balance is quite the reverse of what it is in most movies on artists: the details of his evolving art are far more gripping than those of his personal life, though of course …
Christopher Bell’s documentary on steroid use in the U.S., mainly in athletics, and candidly in his own family (brothers “Mad Dog” and “Smelly”). Not a polished or thorough presentation, but neither is it a pat, open-and-shut presentation. It is judiciously two-sided, with a hard look at the hypocrisies of the …
Brutal crime-buster movie, not just in the limited sense of the famous coffee-in-the-face scene and the subsequent Phantom of the Opera makeup job. It is brutal, beyond that, although to less effect, in the lack of all artifice and adornment with which it lays out its issues. It lays them …