A misnomer. Bram Stoker's Dracula, as we all are aware, is a book, and the film called Bram Stoker's Dracula does not concern itself with a man called Bram Stoker and his relationship to a book called Dracula. This is Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and no mistake. (Yes, it claims …
Pop musical from the Australian stage: Aborigines, hippies, vagabonds, a German-accented racist priest, out on the open road, circa 1969. It does not, let’s just say, travel well. Broad as the Pacific; grotesquely, gruesomely overplayed. With Rocky McKenzie, Jessica Mauboy, Ernie Dingo, Missy Higgins, Tom Budge, and Geoffrey Rush; directed …
The hundred-year-old extracurricular brass band of Grimley Colliery marches proudly toward "Albert Bloody Hall" on the competitive circuit, even as the mine itself faces closure. The filmmakers are too disheartened by Thatcherism to do an out-and-out comedy in the old Ealing Studios style, but their indomitable-human-spirit sentiments prevent a complete …
Was the death of General Patton the result of a mere motor accident, or was he in fact struck down by a high-powered rubber bullet which snapped his neck, without puncturing his skin, at the precise instant his car collided with a strategically parked truck, thus falling victim to a …
Three-hour epic, directed by and starring Mel Gibson, forged from the pages of Scottish history (turn of the 13th Century) that deal with William Wallace, a personage who emerges in this account as part Spartacus (the band of guerrillas that grows to an army), part Jesse James or Josey Wales …
Distaff Death Wish, though it would not be strictly accurate to say that Jodie Foster is playing Charles Bronson. The emphasis is on her psychological wounds after her fiancé is beaten to death and she herself beaten to death's door -- setting up a take-back-the-night feminist revenge story -- and …
The time-setting of this “Orwellian” (as we have all been instructed to call it) future is identified at the outset as “somewhere in the Twentieth Century,” and it is in fact both forward and backward from the present, laden with 1940s clothes and appliances, but further advanced into bureaucratic decadence …
With his follow-up to Shattered Glass, director Billy Ray has made a good start on a pet theme, the human, or peculiarly American, proclivity for deceit. The first, you will recall, told the factual story of the fabricating journalist, Stephen Glass, of The New Republic. This second tells the factual …
A Little Man comedy, Italian-style, not many doors down from Charlie Chaplin and Charley Chase. Each of the tribulations of an immigrant laborer in Switzerland is underlined, encircled, starred, and arrowed, as if with thick black marking pencil, so that you have the urge to clean up the picture with …
Special pleading on behalf of nonunion janitors, mostly immigrant, in a downtown L.A. high-rise. British filmmaker Ken Loach has lost a little complexity, a little reality, in his move to a new neighborhood: Eisensteinian caricatures of bosses and fat cats; a meet-cute and "sweet" romance between the Anglo activist and …
Licia Maglietta, a more loosely wound and comfortably upholstered Natalie Wood, warm and womanly, with a lived-in face and body but an undimmed sparkle, plays a Pescara housewife and intermittent klutz who gets separated from her tour group, including her husband and teenage son, while fishing an earring out of …
Thrills built on a sound psychological foundation: the unease of being a stranger. A Massachusetts yuppie couple, driving cross-country, become separated by car trouble, and the husband afterwards can't find the wife. This situation might call to mind the Dutch suspense film, The Vanishing, except that the trail never cools …
Another truckload of dirt dumped onto the British Empire, with three loyal Aussie soldiers made scapegoats for the sins of British colonialism and militarism in the Boer War. It's sort of an Australian Paths of Glory, and the arguments are presented in a manner difficult to take exception to, or …
Howlingly miscast travesty of the Truman Capote novella: starting at the top with Audrey Hepburn as a backwoods waif turned big-town party girl, down through George Peppard as the heterosexualized neighbor, all the way down to a squinting Mickey Rooney as the Japanese landlord — more Mr. Magoo than Mr. …
Howlingly miscast travesty of the Truman Capote novella: starting at the top with Audrey Hepburn as a backwoods waif turned big-town party girl, down through George Peppard as the heterosexualized neighbor, all the way down to a squinting Mickey Rooney as the Japanese landlord — more Mr. Magoo than Mr. …