Do-gooder documentary, co-directed, co-written, and co-photographed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, focuses on eight children in the Calcutta red-light district. Their lives and prospects are as awful as you would imagine, and the film's image is as awful as you have come to expect in the DV era. (The …
A half-breed Vietnam veteran re-enters the world of men, after a peaceful term of forest seclusion and communion with woodland creatures. His do-good tendencies land him soon in terrible trouble with the law, a band of motorcycle marauders, and a co-ed in a bikini; and his devastating karate, reluctantly unleashed, …
The All-American boy grows up playing soldier in Massapequa, Long Island, is further instilled with the fighting spirit on the high-school wrestling team, gets recruited by the Marines ("There is nothing finer, nothing prouder, nothing standing as straight ..."), goes to Vietnam, gets disillusioned, gets shot, gets paralyzed from the …
Repertory cinema. Remake of the Garson Kanin play -- Galatea Goes to Washington -- starring Melanie (Wee Little Voice) Griffith as Judy Holliday, John (Good Enough) Goodman as Broderick Crawford, and Don (Coppertone) Johnson as William Holden. The pro-education and anti-materialist sentiments haven't dated; and Griffith, though she lacks Holliday's …
Brick-thick chunk of whimsy, from the children's books of Mary Norton, about a species of wee folk known as Borrowers, one family of whom infests the house of the Lenders in a rose-hued, time-warped fantasyland. The Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians coexist well enough in the same space until they are required …
Breezy Brazilian romantic comedy, a piece of fluff, a mere wisp, beginning with travelogue shots of Rio (a rainbow over the bay, soccer on the beach, etc.) and ending with the stock scene of a lover's mad dash to the airport. In between, there's one amusing bit of an adult-education …
A tug-of-war over the body and soul of a charismatic women's emancipationist, ca. 1875, between a repressed lesbian and a Southern gentleman of the old school ("He's an enemy of our movement and our sex. You must fear him"). But the emancipationist has an interest in the gentleman too, as …
A fledgeless lark involving three callow lunkheads embarking together on lives of crime. The debuting director is Wes Anderson, who affects jazzy, jaunty, New Wavy mannerisms which of course by this time are pretty Old Wavy, or Shore Drifty. And he favors squared-up and steam-pressed compositions for a homely deadpan …
Unpalatable promo for California wines, more broadly a paean to good old American know-how and a chance, at the same time, to stick it to the French, the British, the Old World. A competitive wine tasting in the Bicentennial year of 1976, boiled down as “a bunch of hicks taking …
Jean Renoir's hoorah for the free human spirit: a stagy and sentimental story about a no-good bum and would-be suicide who is fished out of the river and then stubbornly resists all of his bourgeois benefactor's attempts to lead him along the road to rehabilitation. Michel Simon, his leonine head …
Well-spent efforts, early, toward documenting the East Los Angeles barrio, the houses, the streets, the youth-gang style of dress, the low-rider car culture, etc., all very slickly photographed (nothing less would do justice to the wax jobs on the cars). This documentary detail is sufficiently exciting to make one deeply …
Weepie about a sheet of fabric softener in a tumble-dryer of emotion. The sheet (Outdoor Fresh Scent) is Gwyneth Paltrow, a willowy widow whose husband went down on Infinity Flight 82 out of O'Hare. Then, a year later, along comes a Tall Dark Handsome Stranger (Ben Affleck, Mr. Nonchalance) who, …
Ethnic epic covering much the same ground, a year later, covered by American Me, only less of it and at greater length: three hours of heavily accented and sometimes English-subtitled snarls and sneers, directed by Taylor Hackford with his customary disdain for subtlety. (Floyd Mutrux receives a screenwriting credit on …
David Carradine works small miracles with his loose-jointed, shuffle-footed, hands-in-pockets postures; and his Woody Guthrie impression becomes, at the same time, a generalized Depression impression, nicely self-contained. The higher-up creative people are more overbearing in their similar efforts to hit and hold a one-note Depression mood. Hal Ashby's direction keeps …