Post-apocalyptic children’s film, sufficiently dark for any full-bloom pessimist, about the remnants of humanity in a run-down underground city, and the two teenagers in search of an exit. Impressive physical production (Terry Gilliam at his greediest could not have asked for more), though the escape route gets a bit theme-parky. …
A slice of "kinetic" cinema (or what would be called "hyperactive" if it were a child) that grabs you by the shirt collar and shakes the living daylights out of you: an antsy camera, fast-motion, split-screen, yellow flashbacks, a loop-the-loop storyline that keeps circling back on itself, a tangential digression, …
A look into the urban snake pit. What writer and director John Sayles (also editor, also bit-player) sees down there is a lot of writhing and slithering, or at any rate a lot of intertwined storylines and mobile, long-take camerawork. The latter puts a long leash on the actors, including …
Basic, bare-bones crime film about a double-crossed jewel thief with a score to settle ("I'm my own police"). John Irvin's no-nonsense direction is a little short of style (the credits sequence -- grainy black-and-white imagery of the snaky lines of L.A. freeways -- raises false expectations), but it pushes the …
An all but unbeatable tsk movie from Roland Joffé. (Shot of a cart-pulling beast of burden with its ribs showing through its hide. Tsk. Shot of a noseless leper. Tsk.) A crane-powered consciousness-raising project about the slums of Calcutta, it steers clear of the spiritual content of the story (taken …
Bloated fantasy, set in a dark dank Nowheresville, further removed from the World As We Know It through the overuse of wide-angle lenses. A mad inventor -- isolated on a man-made floating island in the company of identical sextuplets, a matronly midget, and a disembodied brain inside a tank of …
Dead End Kids on Dead End Hill, high above the beaches of Rio, a boil-down of a Brazilian TV series. Any resemblance to City of God is not strictly incidental. (Fernando Meirelles, the director of that other City, worked as co-producer on this one, directed by Paulo Morelli.) The fashion-conscious …
The opening shot of a train entering a tunnel -- the sexual symbol that passeth no one's understanding -- does much to lower whatever expectations you can muster up for a late-period Fellini film. The subsequent spectacle of Marcello Mastroianni milling around at a radical feminist convention with the look …
Jamesian literary tale without the concentration, the ardor, the resonance: an Arab-American academic attempts to secure the co-operation of the family for a biography of a suicided one-book author in Uruguay. A James Ivory film post-Ismail Merchant (d.2005), but still with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to do the screenplay and Anthony …
Passable showcase for one of America's consistently funniest actors, Jack Palance. His role here is the rare intentionally funny one, as distinct from the gunslinger in Shane, let's say, or Castro in Che: a hard-bitten trail boss and honest-to-God Marlboro Man (striking a match for his ever-present cigarette across his …
The fact that this is a sequel doesn't help it to a faster start than its forerunner. It dilly-dallies for over half an hour in the Big City, introducing a new character (Billy Crystal's hapless younger brother Jon Lovitz, taking up a space vacated by Bruno Kirby), and establishing the …
John Travolta takes the part of a cocky, cynical personal-injury attorney ("I can appreciate the theatrical value of several dead kids") who cannot be shamed into pursuing a class-action suit against a small-town tanning factory and environmental polluter until he can connect the defendant to some deep pockets: Peter Pan …
A Western only by the technicality of its setting: California gold country, 1867. Michael Winterbottom, who earlier brought Jude the Obscure to the screen, takes the plot premise from Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, but most everything else from Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller: the jerry-built town, the brothel, the …
Costa-Gavras gives up politics for romance, a sort of guns-for-butter deal, and he appears to have gone into delirium from the sense of release. His script, from a Romain Gary novel, has a luxuriant, exhilarating quality, something like walking across mattresses, and the storyline, about two lost souls who literally …
For its mountain-lake summer-resort setting, this is the most bracing -- climatically if not intellectually -- of Eric Rohmer's even-tempered Contes Moraux. Other material assets are a couple of dusky-complexioned actresses: a skinny, wiry-haired adolescent and a mature, handsome woman novelist who gets an aesthetic pleasure out of the sentimental …