A pair of novice car and end-of-the-world enthusiasts bone up for Armageddon by spending their days and nights in search of army-surplus stores and auto graveyards that stock parts to build do-it-yourself flamethrowing devices. Other than the fact it took producer/director/co-editor/star Evan Glodell eight years to complete his audacious $17K …
Leave it to Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delight, Basic Instinct) to set an erotic thriller inside a convent. Don’t let the bird poop and fart jokes that open the picture throw you. It’s his way of distracting audiences from the corporeal abominations that await. Verhoeven’s role in this fact-based 17th Century …
Claude Miller, in his first directing assignment, exhibits much sensitivity, restraint, neatness, and thoroughness in dealing with what used to be spoken of as a Gide-ian relationship in a summer boys' camp. It's a relief that the focus of attention in such a locale is on the counselors rather than …
Director Cristian Mungiu follows up his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days with a harrowing, unsentimental, but hugely sympathetic story of a tiny religious community's attempt to care for a damaged soul who comes into their midst. Voichita and Alina are young women who clung to one another …
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 …
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 …
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) …
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: …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
Director Ciro Guerra, whose mesmerizing Embrace of the Serpent similarly treated the havoc wrought when gringos take an interest in local produce (there, it was rubber; here, it’s marijuana), teams with his producer on that film, Cristina Gallegos, to bring you a classical tragedy, complete with cantos for chapters and …
Horrormeister Dario Argento establishes his durable and elegant pattern in his first feature: a witness to a crime knows more than he knows he knows. How and when will his subconscious cough it up? More of an atmosphere, more of an air of mystery, less of a blood bath, than …
Spike Lee opens with the money shot from Gone With the Wind (“a romance set in Auschwitz”), then jumps forward a few decades to a time where a black police officer was actually able to infiltrate the KKK. (Guys who wear pointy hoods don’t generally do so in order to …
A new Western classic, enough to make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seem like a sappy prequel. Old Butch (Sam Shepard), now called Blackthorn, hides out in deep Bolivia raising horses and loving a village woman (but still able to ride hard and shoot fast) when a Spanish mining …