Bernardo Bertolucci combines a pamphleteer's penchant for straight, party-line ideology and a best-selling novelist's flair for wanton sensation: heaps of flesh, blood, and excrement (of both the literal and figurative sort). In its breadth, if not in its detail, this maxi-budgeted extravaganza could loosely be termed "novelistic." But just whose …
Kooky-kinky crime comedy about a modern-day Billy the Kid who holes up with his loot in Room 222 at the Heartbreak Hotel and entertains a monotonous parade of weirdos. Lisa Bonet takes first prize, if not the cake, as a scrupulously honest, sotto voce, tattooed call girl. With Patrick Dempsey, …
Fiery display of rhetoric: persecutors of gays are Nazis. Literally, in this case. A frenetic opening-up and pushing-around of the Martin Sherman stage play about the end of the free-and-easy decadence of Berlin between the wars, the S.S. crackdown on "deviants," and the flowering relationship of two prisoners in Dachau. …
Russ Meyer's supreme -- or maybe just extreme -- achievement in high spirits and low morals, having to do with an all-girl rock-and-roll group (The Carrie Nations) travelling to Hollywood and falling into wayward, wicked, and weird ways. The whirlwind tour of Tinsel Town and the finger-snapping, bus-rocking, cross-country trip …
A sleepy-eyed 15-year-old schoolgirl (Adèle Exarchopoulos) begins a torrid love affair with an older, wild-eyed artist (Léa Seydoux) that could possibly end in infidelity. As if three hours weren’t enough to tell this paper-thin story, we won’t know what happens to the couple until part two arrives. This year’s Palm …
Andrew Dice Clay in concert: one of the soon-forgotten controversies of 1990. Some thought that his Brooklyn-bred, leather-jacketed, pompadour-coiffed, filthy-mouthed persona is vile enough to be spoken of in terms of an organized boycott. Others, or at least he himself, thought the vileness is all right because it's just a …
Lumpy potage of Sixties politics, "revolutionary" sex, and ravenous cinephilia, whipped up by Bernardo Bertolucci. Last Tango in Paris would seem to be the career milestone -- or is it millstone? -- to which the filmmaker here reverts: same city, same era, same revolution. Yet the recipe's main ingredient turns …
The Parisian johns served by two young, clever prostitutes never quite see them as people. But the women are so intensely observed by magazine writer Anne (Juliette Binoche) that their risky lives lift her from middle-aged blahs as a mom and wife. They eroticize her imagination, not just her feminism. …
The erotic events in the Emmanuelle sequel attain a sort of daily-diary humdrumness: one day, a lesbian in the pleasure cruiser's dormitory; next, a tattooed polo player in the men's locker room; next, naked Oriental masseuses in the public baths; next, three soldiers in the Jade Garden nightclub; and on …
Divine chases fame all the way from high school to the electric chair -- a mock tabloid tragedy by John Waters. "Give us something twisted, give us something warped," the fashion photographer's entreaty to Divine, as she madly shakes her walrus-like body, might well be the motto of the entire …
Todd Solondz's cruelly evenhanded comedy, tougher and subtler than his Welcome to the Dollhouse, with sophistication now outbalancing (but not eliminating) sophomoricism. The bitter little vignettes in illustration of aloneness, alienation, despair, maladroitness, malformation, and similar human conditions, are structured rather like a TV soap opera, centered around three grown …
The familiar storyline of a woman's sexual awakening is apt to feel like a long slog to any spectator not as enchanted with the woman as is the director. Since the woman in question happens to be Anais Nin, the director in question, Philip Kaufman, can count himself a member …
The Boy Wonder of silent movies has been reduced to directing stag films downstairs in his own home, while the sounds of freeway construction, off in the distance, threaten imminent destruction. Some of the feelings for Hollywood's Golden Age and for the dilemma of the commercial artist, sullied but still …
A revisitation of the advent and aftermath of what we might call, with more literal meaning than usual, the seminal work in "adult" films of the modern era, or what Camille Paglia calls, with her characteristic amount of self-restraint, "an epochal moment in the history of human sexuality." It's a …
It has, coincidentally, a few things in common with mere pornography: the almost nonstop lovemaking; the unwavering ardor and infinitely renewable energies of the lovers; the perfect, lithe, perspirationless bodies of the actors; the flattering, orange-y Playmate of the Month lighting; the voyeuristic, anti-psychological point of view; the standard themes …