Nearly three million square miles of tripe. A Ferber-esque epic of a “delicate English rose” who takes over her late husband’s cattle ranch in rugged northern Australia on the eve of World War II, a Cimarron Down Under, with a sprinkle of Aboriginal magic, and a thick coat of high-gloss …
Perhaps Israel Horovitz, the author author, identified himself too closely with his protagonist, and thus assumed that anything falling within his experience would be sure to engage our sympathy. However that may be, he has not given any shape to the mass of troubles burdening a good-hearted Broadway playwright: troubles …
The title of writer-director Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary is, fittingly, more than a little misleading. Its real subject isn’t the literary wunderkind behind the tellingly titled The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things; nor is it the celebrity culture that rushed to acclaim his fervid, fetid stories of youthful misery. Instead, …
Paul Schrader recounts the life and death of Bob Crane (1928-78), ephemeral star of TV's Hogan's Heroes, obsessive womanizer (exploits he would copiously document in photographs and on primitive video), and unsolved-murder victim. This is a story of the Dark Side in which the lightweightness of the main character (very …
This Italian horror movie comes on strong. Ahead of the credits we are shown four fast suicides, all of them messy, and immediately afterwards we are sent into the city morgue to watch white-aproned actors fondling uncooked meats that are supposed to represent human innards. Before the movie is five …
For at least the first 50 of its 100 minutes, Andre Øvredal’s coroner horror story is nearly flawless, starting with the opening camera crawl around a bloody crime scene that comes to rest on the partially buried, fully nude body of a beautiful young woman. (Yes, “beautiful” sounds creepy here, …
The fifty-fourth and final film of Yasujiro Ozu, in his most rigid and repetitive style. The theme, of father abandoned by daughter in marriage, has been done by Ozu with greater emotional impact. (Where? Was it in Early Spring? No artist outside of novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett gives the memory more …
Growing up in the Amazon rainforest gave Autumn the rarest of friendships – a lost jaguar cub she discovers named Hope. When a tragic event forces Autumn to leave Hope for the unknowns of New York City, she dreams for years of going back to the rainforest and her friend. …
Joan Chen's worlds-apart followup to her first film, Xiu Xiu, the Sent-Down Girl, brings together Richard Gere and Winona Ryder as the perfect couple: he'll never grow up, and she'll never grow old. (Peter Pan Complex and heart condition, respectively.) A cure is possible, for either or both, but not …
Ingmar Bergman's characters suffer from many things, one of them being logorrhea. They talk directly to the camera, they talk solitarily to themselves, they talk to framed photographs, and of course, when given the chance, they talk each other's ears off, but even then their gaze tends to wander into …
With this, the seventy-nine-year-old Eric Rohmer completes a cycle of four films begun a decade before, "Tales of the Four Seasons." What sets it apart from other Rohmers, what gets you to straighten up in your seat, is the greater generational mix in the cast of characters. There are still, …
Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical tale of a family of Russian immigrants in Baltimore spans something like fifty years -- sufficient in some people's minds to qualify any movie as an "epic" or "saga" -- but for the most part it spans only about five of them, from post-Second World War to …
Probably the best 1959 movie made in 1972. Bill Wilder's latest opus hides beneath its Samuel Taylor romantic comedy facade, several layers of undertones, issuing from the director's complex blend of sourness, sentimentality, and corn. Playing off Jack Lemmon's patented brash American businessman, Juliet (sister of Haley) Mills lives up …