German-financed video documentary, focussed on five New York cinephiles, four men and one woman, all of them single and unattached, acquaintances if not necessarily friends. "Film," one of them submits, "is a substitute for life." (Clearly, it was a word-choice of Flaubertian care and consideration not to call the film …
A valentine to all movie lovers. Or else a blackmail note. Part-Truffaut and part-Fellini (part-Day for Night and part-Amarcord), it's a sentimental flashback to a post-war Italian village where, in the eyes of one altar boy, the movie theater supplants the church as the religious house of choice, and the …
Grim survey of the woman's lot in Iran (especially the woman, for whatever reason, outside the law), shot in a stark, spare, semi-documentary style. Like La Ronde (otherwise a very different movie), it has no one focal character, but keeps passing the baton as in a relay race. It can …
First love, and true, and trite too, of a convent-bred, moon-faced, and plushly upholstered Irish lass in the mid-Fifties: "I know I may look like a rhinoceros, but I've quite a thin skin really." Every bump, dip, and detour on the rocky road is clearly marked. Every virtue is rewarded, …
Oriental mysticism, original story by Bruce Lee, James Coburn, and Stirling Silliphant, screenplay by Silliphant and Stanley Mann, eminent mystics every one. Cord, the Seeker (acted by a conceited Muscle Beach type named Jeff Cooper), travels the perilous path leading to Zeton, the Keeper of the Book. David Carradine pops …
Competition for Twilight, assimilated vampires who protect the status quo by reducing their blood intake to moderate sips, precisely the cultural subgroup to embrace the misfit teen. (There are also bad, gluttonous vampires known as Vampaneze: “Vampires suck. Vampaneze rule.”) Competition, sure, but weak competition, self-consciously jokey, storybooky, winky. With …
Bill Norton's elegy on the L.A. counterculture seems to be in the right place at the right time, but lets the opportunity slip right between its legs. Some sidelong glances at the business of dope sales; some intense star-gazing at the twitches of Gene Hackman and the slouches of Kris …
The perennial winner, at a trot, of all Best Movie Ever polls; it was hardly that awesome when it first appeared, but Time has been a favorable ally to this movie, which is, for one thing, a most convenient and crammed storehouse of cinematic tricks already executed or only dreamed …
True-crime drama, about a New York cop with a father and son on the opposite side of the law, wears its heart on its sleeve and squeezes it like a sponge. Scottish-born director Michael Caton-Jones (best films: Rob Roy, Memphis Belle, old-fashioned stuff) doesn't let things get too messy. Excellent …
David Riker's black-and-white vignettes on Latin American immigrants in New York: thin slices of neo-neo-realism, smothered in a gloppy gravy. Sincere but awkward.
In an inexplicable street-corner shootout between a cop and a probationer, a stray bullet hits a six-year-old child and (in a poetic turn of phrase) it keeps travelling -- up and up through the New York City power structure. A foursome of wordy screenwriters -- Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, Nicholas …
Amiable domestic comedy about a nuclear blue-collar family in which everyone’s got a secret, and one’s got several. Writer and director Raymond De Felitta orchestrates some lively passages of household discord, and he has set the action in a flavorful locale, a New England-y “fishing village” in the middle of …
Chaplin scrambles to some of his highest peaks — dancing in the boxing ring, carousing woozily in a nightclub — for the love of a girl who sells flowers on streetcorners, and who is blind, and who is beautiful.
Although it buries the acknowledgment deep in the closing credits and has changed its name in hopes of establishing a separate identity, this is more or less a remake of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, a crest in the current wave of angelmania. A full-color remake, to be sure, and …