Fellow day-laborers view new hire Júlio (Bembol Roco) as a professional drifter who lighted on their unscrupulously-managed construction site just long enough to spend a few months mixing cement before passing through. In point of fact, it’s romance (and proximity to the offices of Chua Tek), not randomness that brought …
Smoothly tuned vehicle for Ida Lupino, delivering a been-around-the-block performance as a lower-bracket nightclub chanteuse who comes to L.A. to visit her kid sister, and comes within the gravitational pull of a suave mobster. A sure feel for the territory, despite the studio settings. Robert Alda, Bruce Bennett, Andrea King, …
It begins as a sort of Claude Lelouchian juggling act -- a backlot romance at Cinecittà studios intermixed with the storyline of the film in production, a biography of Italian writer and communist Cesare Pavese. Only it isn't as fast and agile as Lelouch, and the Pavese ball soon gets …
Late-phase Christopher Plummer plays a soggy ex-Hollywood pro who takes a young punk wannabe filmmaker under his brittle wing. Grumpy old men for the win.
Seventeenth-century French history rewritten as if for TV soap opera: the secret twin brother of the cruel King Louis. (The big throb: the Queen Mother comes face to face with the son she never knew she had, and vice versa.) There is no worthy villain; the action is spotty, and …
Robert Mulligan takes up his special cross-to-bear, the Sensitive Youth Movie: To Kill a Mockingbird, Up the Down Staircase, Summer of '42, et al. The youthful performances here are, as ever, expertly coached and coaxed. And Reese Witherspoon, as the fourteen-year-old heroine, looks ready to take the baton from such …
In 1975 Florida, a series of violent disappearances go unnoticed, and young Annie (Madison Wolfe) is targeted by an ominous white van that stalks her every move. As the menace escalates, her parents dismiss her fears, and Annie is soon plunged into a terrifying nightmare that shatters her world. Based …
Imitative horror movie, offering a haphazard diversity of special effects, and having to do with a 400-year-old Indian medicine man whose latest reincarnation manifests itself as a fetus on Susan Strasberg's neck which grows day by day from a walnut-sized lump to a Quasimodo-sized hump. On the outskirts of the …
A group of friends faces a string of unexpected misadventures on a vacation trip to Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, India. Written and directed by Chidambaram, starring Soubin Shahir, Sreenath Bhasi, Balu Varghese, and Ganapathy.
This plays as part of the 2017 San Diego International Film Festival. The program notes describes Mankiller as, "an examination of the legacy of Wilma Mankiller, who defied all odds to become one of the most influential leaders in the United States. Mankiller overcame rampant sexism and personal challenges to …
Radu Gabrea's film à clef on the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, called here E.V.A., and played by one of his former repertory actresses, Eva Mattes. That's right, actresses. The casting helps point up his bisexual ambiguity, although the actress's shortness of stature throws in a perhaps unwanted hint of Napoleonism. …
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