An attractive cast in a proletarian romantic comedy about a Porto Alegre copy-machine operator, and would-be cartoonist, with a major crush on a neighbor whom he watches through a pair of binoculars. "No girl," he confides in voice-over, "dreams of spending her life with a photocopier operator." Writer-director Jorge Furtado …
An interplanetary traveller with pale skin and orange hair touches down in spooky New Mexico, "The Land of Enchantment," and on the strength of several electronics patents he skyrockets to the very heights of high finance ("I want you to begin negotiations with Eastman-Kodak immediately"). The elliptical narrative style tends …
According to screenwriter Susan Coyne, during the writing of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ sweat-free creative process consisted of listening to the harmonies of everyday life that surrounded him. Marley? The name of a rickety waiter at the club. The setting? Decided upon after a new nanny was overheard telling …
Decades in the making, Terry Gilliam's dream project finally sees the arc light of day... for one night only.
When we meet Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel, playing serious), he is scrawling equations on the floor of a Hindu temple. Because for him, “an equation has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” Take that, science vs. religion! But alas, God isn’t in the academic …
That would be a Des Moines video-store clerk who drops in unannounced on his London-dwelling brother on his own birthday. The brother, more to get rid of him during an important business dinner than to give him a proper birthday present, signs him up for a participatory role-playing game called …
Hitchcock's remake of his own 1934 thriller. Many people claim to prefer the earlier version. But Hitchcock did not go to all the trouble to do it again because it had gone so well the first time; and he got it better, if still not perfect, the second time. (He …
A vacationing couple in Switzerland is whisked back home, swept into a political assassination scheme and a search for their kidnapped child — a characteristic Hitchcock notion about the little surprises that can quicken the heartbeat of middle-class normalcy. So characteristic, in fact, that Hitchcock made the same movie again, …
A vacationing couple in Switzerland is whisked back home, swept into a political assassination scheme and a search for their kidnapped child — a characteristic Hitchcock notion about the little surprises that can quicken the heartbeat of middle-class normalcy. So characteristic, in fact, that Hitchcock made the same movie again, …
But perhaps himself more. François Truffaut's lightweight sex comedy of the same name has been turned by Blake Edwards into a showcase for Burt Reynolds - Burt Reynolds, that is, and his waviest toupee, his wolfman beard, his yellow-tinted eyeglasses, his cowboy boots and Levis, his casual jackets and sweaters. …
François Truffaut's sitcom about a compulsive skirt-chaser begins with a funeral attended by a Busby Berkeley all-girl chorusline dressed in black, and it continues throughout its lengthy length as a girl-watcher's cavalcade of slim calves and pert faces. If cuteness can ever reach a level of lewdness, Truffaut will probably …
Trisha Ziff directs this engrossing account of real-life nightcrawler Enrique Metinides. The tenacious photojournalist — he’s devoted his life to purposefully placing himself in the wrong place at the right time — has been taking official police photos since age nine. (As a child, it was not unusual for him …
Sports documentary on a daredevil expedition by the Japanese athlete, Miura, to ski in the thin air of Mt. Everest's summit. It lacks the suspenseful immediacy of a Wide World of Sports special event on ABC-TV, but it has the advantage of a high-quality, crisp, wide-screen image. And it is, …
The first Coen brothers film to disappoint. That's not to say it's not good, certainly not to say it's not even as good as their first, Blood Simple, when there could be no expectations and so no disappointment. The brothers have not suddenly lost their touch. They do for Billy …
John Huston at long last realizes his plan to adapt the Rudyard Kipling story, which he first took up, twenty years earlier, as a project to star Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Whether it's because of the new age, or Huston's old age, or simply the increased distance from the …