Jessica Lange as the mood-swinging, not to forget hip-swinging, wife of a steadfast army guy (Tommy Lee Jones), ca. 1960. She fashions herself after BB and MM (or momentarily, when transferred from a base in Hawaii to one in Alabama, Bette Davis: "What a dump!"). She teases, she flaunts, she …
Kathryn Bigelow got some deserved attention for her revisionist vampire film, Near Dark. Having got it, she seems in a mood for some showing-off, with a full arsenal of camera lenses and sheets of blue light and silhouettes and moodscapes and fetishistic closeups and color "studies" and documentary inserts and …
Several Stanford University acid heads of the late Sixties are experiencing a delayed reaction to a special LSD recipe called "Blue Sunshine," a reaction characterized by a complete and embarrassing loss of hair and a subsequent urge toward gruesome homicide. (Nice touch: one of the drug victims loses a clump …
Lazily plotted paranoid thriller. The main instrument of paranoia is a crowd-control combat helicopter that can see and hear through solid walls. But the technology-crazy moviemakers can't hide their ambivalence about this. They seem to feel that such a Big Brother weapon is quite all right as long as it's …
David Lynch's "controversial" version of what really goes on in the American small town: rather more squirm-producing and shrug-inspiring than (as you may have heard) shocking or provoking or, at the very least, rib-tickling. So far from it being warped and twisted and depraved somehow, the proper complaint with this …
Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky's comedy about a pair of fun couples -- the Groovies and the Uptights -- in the free swing of California culture. The mentality is television small smirking and shirking. Looking back, this film shows how early Elliott Gould was set in his smug ways and …
A secretive, monosyllabic Grand Prix racer (Al Pacino) is flung together by chance with a dizzy Italian girl (Marthe Keller) who incessantly badgers the self-important sportsman in the manner of Katharine Hepburn in a screwball comedy. He, living daily with the possibility of death in his profession, wears an arrogantly …
The first of Jean-Pierre Melville's many emulations of the American film noir, and much scragglier in appearance than the later Le Doulos, Second Breath, and The Samurai. The semi-documentary and lyrical evocations of Montmartre at night seem rather at odds, here, with the classical gangster-film iconography. But the idealization of …
A political satire irretrievably misdirected from its basic premise: a thirty-something Right-wing folk singer, one of whose albums has climbed as high as #3 on the Billboard pop chart, who is running for one of the Pennsylvania senatorial seats on the monosyllabic slogan of "Pride." (The year is 1990.) If …
Slightly cerebral romantic comedy (the title derives from Newton's First Law of Motion) about the attachments and disconnections of a quartet of under-thirties in Enfield, Az., over a single weekend. It is just cerebral enough to be more than slightly pleased with itself; just enough to be more than slightly …
The Hitchcock thrillers that Brian De Palma has plundered this time are, first, Rear Window, and second and foremost, Vertigo. (Wasn't it enough that he stole the latter plot for Obsession?) Even if you do not see through the ruse straightaway or do not solve the mystery by way of …
The Hitchcock thrillers that Brian De Palma has plundered this time are, first, Rear Window, and second and foremost, Vertigo. (Wasn't it enough that he stole the latter plot for Obsession?) Even if you do not see through the ruse straightaway or do not solve the mystery by way of …
A romantic thriller of such ridiculousness that it could be difficult ever again to take seriously anyone connected with it. That would include Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the script, albeit seventeen (or was it nineteen?) years previous, which might partially absolve him if he were fifteen years old at the …
A romantic thriller of such ridiculousness that it could be difficult ever again to take seriously anyone connected with it. That would include Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the script, albeit seventeen (or was it nineteen?) years previous, which might partially absolve him if he were fifteen years old at the …