Arthur Penn's Dust Bowl fairy tale, in crackling crisp color, about two romantic runaways, a would-be Robert Taylor and a would-be Jean Arthur, who build a legend around themselves with crime headlines, publicity photos, and sophomoric poems, who achieve sexual success in a wheat field after some earlier worries about …
Arthur Penn's Dust Bowl fairy tale, in crackling crisp color, about two romantic runaways, a would-be Robert Taylor and a would-be Jean Arthur, who build a legend around themselves with crime headlines, publicity photos, and sophomoric poems, who achieve sexual success in a wheat field after some earlier worries about …
Rapid pileup of events and characters: an actress, a novelist, a corpse, an escaped convict, a capitulating politician, a Nazi spy, a Jewish nuclear scientist, among others. Personal concerns collide with global ones, in the best tradition of the wartime romance; and the plush production and photography (some lovely effects …
Self-conscious evocations of Halloween, Carrie, The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, and Jaws are never elaborated to the point of either plagiarism or parody. Hardly more than winks of an eye, they nonetheless do an even larger job of conjuring up the entire history and foremost conventions of horror films in …
A movie that needed, that cried out, to be made: a hefty slice of heretofore unsampled cultural history, carved out of the San Fernando Valley, cradle of the porn-film industry. The precise snippet of the timeline -- sufficiently lengthy to qualify as "epic," especially at a two-and-a-half-hour running time -- …
Post-apocalyptic chic. In metallic monochrome, in sterilizing shafts of light, in portentous slo-mo, Denzel Washington safeguards the only extant copy of the King James Bible, with his archer's bow, shotgun, pistol, and terrible swift sword: the new Messiah. One of many head-scratchers is why on earth the tin-pot town boss …
Two more cents' worth of testimony, and not another penny, on coming-of-age in the 1950s, taken from a novel by William Kotzwinkle. Its trustworthiness is pretty well indicated by the recurrent use of a musical theme from Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns of a decade later. With Chris Young, Keith Coogan, …
This "fictionalized re-enactment" of events following the release of The Blair Witch Project revisits the Maryland wilderness with a fly-by-night tour guide and his party of sightseers: a psychic Goth, a militant Wiccan, and a married pair of nonfiction authors. (Bad actors, every one.) Aside from the continual references to …
A true curiosity, up the alley of the professional psychologist more than of the casual moviegoer: a neo-Depression escapist romantic comedy about an affluent black Lothario who loves 'em and leaves 'em dangling, and who has the tables turned on him ("Call me?") and discovers the meaning of true love. …
Scare story about white-collar drug abuse -- and in fact moderately scary, for all its somber predictability. James Woods, who worked so memorably with this same director in The Onion Field, is tuned naturally to the proper idling speed and barely has to touch the gas pedal. Sean Young, Steven …
For anyone who heretofore hadn't encountered the character on HBO, Borat Sagdiyev will need an introduction. He is one of the personas of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen on Da Ali G Show, a Kazakh TV reporter dapperly dressed in a dove-gray suit, bristlingly mustachioed, blissfully sexist, superstitiously anti-Semitic, and …
I feel like I'm in a bad Tales from the Crypt episode, notes the wisecracking P.I. on a missing-person case. He's almost right. It's a bad Tales from the Crypt feature film, a pun-happy romp in a mortuary-cum-whorehouse (hence, "getting stiff among the stiffs," and so forth), whose madam is …
Romanticized Mexican madonna and child. Satirized Anglo housewives. Villainized lawmen. Existentialized hero. Tony Richardson's experience with British working-class dramas in the days of the Angry Young Men prepared him well for the bleak landscape -- both natural and industrial -- around El Paso, Texas, and he gets much mileage (or …
The illegal alien problem provides a backdrop (no more than that) for a standard revenge drama, with Charles Bronson his usual implacable self as the avenger. Out of carefulness not to be offensive, none of the Mexicans is characterized as anything beyond a symbol, and all the serious villainy is …
And then, caught without I.D. in a raid by La Migra, deported to Tijuana, there to stay till the end of the movie. Some social comment along the way, little of it funny, much of it schmaltzy. But the real purpose of this spin-off from his recorded spoof of Springsteen's …