Full original title: Three Colors: Blue (it's part of a trilogy, completed by the remaining colors of the French flag, Red and White). Blue is certainly the color of the dawn when the heroine's husband, a world-renowned classical composer, is killed in an auto accident. And elsewhere there's a great …
Emil Jannings's puritanical professor interposes himself between his impressionable students and a cabaret artiste called Lola-Lola; but in so doing he succumbs himself to the spell of this pitiless femme fatale, and he sinks lower and lower in order just to be near her, donning clown makeup, crowing like a …
Catherine Breillat, director of the assorted sexual provocations of Fat Girl, Romance, and Anatomy of Hell, is a name likely to strike terror in the hearts of filmgoers far more than that of George Romero, say, or Dario Argento. But where the 19th-century setting and idiomatic Romanticism of her previous …
A paradigm, practically a parody, of the American Independent Film, the coming-of-age of a vulnerable high-school girl (the conventionally "pretty" Agnes Bruckner, whose discomfort is contagious), with an overtaxed mother ("You're an ungrateful brat!"), an absent father, a self-mutilating little sister, a nose-ringed bosom buddy, and a caring English teacher …
Worth seeing for the face-reddening, throat-constricting, vein-popping performance of Nick Nolte as a college basketball coach fashioned after Indiana U.'s Bobby Knight (who appears as himself in the climactic game, opposite Nolte on the sideline). At any rate he is fashioned after Knight up until he forges a Faustian pact …
An adaptation of a very early Ross Macdonald novel, or in other words nearer the slam-bang manner of Dashiell Hammett than the surgical delicacy of later-Macdonald: he wasn't yet himself in 1947. Compared with the Byzantine structures of The Galton Case and The Chill, this one would seem to have …
Scriptwriter and former film critic Paul Schrader's directing debut, a hot-under-the-blue-collar propagandrama about how the System contrives to divide and conquer the workers in the Detroit auto industry. (The manufacturers of Checker cabs, who opened their facilities to the filmmakers, are graciously absolved, in the acknowledgments, of any likeness to …
Can the local Hawaiian surfer chick bounce back from a near drowning, conquer her fear, and win the Pipemasters Contest at the same time as she romances a GQ NFL QB? Director John Stockwell, of Crazy/Beautiful, murmurs some feminist sweet nothings, but his PC lip service is overcome by a …
Seamy mystery story about a discharged veteran (the military experience explains his poker-faced savoir-faire in the face of death) who returns from the war accompanied by a shell-shocked puppylike Army buddy, and who arrives at his tacky L.A. apartment just in time for his wife's murder. Raymond Chandler's script outfits …
Amorphous, garrulous, largely improvised, largely sedentary companion piece to Smoke, centered again around the Brooklyn Cigar Co. (Harvey Keitel is the only returning big-name star, so you get to hear the word "Auggie" spoken aloud another thirty or forty times.) Co-directors Wayne Wang and Paul Auster should have quit while …
Banned in China! Apparently for having the temerity to suggest that Party politics -- through the Rectification Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution -- could be oppressive to private individuals. Cultural Relativism in action! Sort of a Frank Borzage heart-tugger (Little People tossed by Big Storms) without …
Two shipwrecked children of opposite sexes come of age all by themselves in an island paradise, and as in the Garden of Eden the female proves to be the inquisitive, trouble-making one. Randal Kleiser's remake of the old Henry DeVere Stacpoole tale parades under the banner of Natural Beauty, but …
Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, as a couple of Chicago white boys tuned to a rhythm-and-blues wavelength, expand the musical act they unveiled on television's Saturday Night Live into a full-blown slapstick chase movie, travelling through a meaningful cultural landscape that includes a Catholic orphanage, a black Baptist church, a …
Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, as a couple of Chicago white boys tuned to a rhythm-and-blues wavelength, expand the musical act they unveiled on television's Saturday Night Live into a full-blown slapstick chase movie, travelling through a meaningful cultural landscape that includes a Catholic orphanage, a black Baptist church, a …
A for-want-of-anything-better-to-do movie. It at least serves as a reminder that John Landis made a good one once. Eighteen years earlier. His lack of inspiration here extends to the clodhopping parade of face shots, the paraphrasing and plagiarizing of the original, the employment of the Russian mafia as straw badmen, …