Michael Caine as a bargain-basement Lothario with a heavy accent on cockney crassness, and with a cocksure understanding of where your sympathies and your scorn are supposed to fall. Like most movie ne'er-do-wells, particularly those who garner Oscar nominations, he melts into self-pitying sobs somewhere near the end. Directed by …
Gillo Pontecorvo's re-staging of the Algerian struggle for independence tries for a journalistic effect — an historical epic in a newsreel idiom. But this effect really owes less to the grainy black-and-white image than to the selectivity of information, the slanting of same, and the editorializing. The cast — well-chosen …
One of Quentin Tarentino's favorite spaghetti westerns screens at the Digital Gym.
Antonioni tackles Swinging London, and the city is shaken up on the play. Not much swinging among the natives; a large amount of imported Antonioni sobriety (pantomime revelers acting out the truism that life is a game, a Yardbirds concert at which the audience appears to be in the grips …
Antonioni tackles Swinging London, and the city is shaken up on the play. Not much swinging among the natives; a large amount of imported Antonioni sobriety (pantomime revelers acting out the truism that life is a game, a Yardbirds concert at which the audience appears to be in the grips …
A Christmas Memory, the 1966 Emmy Award–winning short film originally made for ABC, joined two other Capote tele-adaptations to form the theatrical release, Trilogy (1969). Capote wrote — and, in the case of A Christmas Memory, narrated — the screenplays, and Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Rancho Deluxe) …
Roman Polanski's scabrous black comedy set in a decaying Northumberland castle aswarm with chickens by day and owls by night, and swamped by an impossible tide. In spite of the setting, it has a very un-English feel. Polanski operates by his own indecipherable rules (making them up as he goes, …
Vera Chytilova's unbridled experiment in color, collage, cartoonish sound effects, and changeable image quality. For all the sensory excitements, in this story of small-scale devastations committed by two amoral girlfriends (in a world, we are reminded, prone to devastations on a mass scale), it should not escape notice that the …
Bruce Brown's surfing documentary follows two surfers — Michael Hynson and Robert August — in search of the perfect wave.
Kiddie-matinee science fiction: an atomic submarine and crew are reduced to germ-size and are injected into a scientist's bloodstream in order to perform a delicate brain operation from the inside. The ridiculousness reaches dizzying heights as the special-effects department comes up with what look like grade-school demonstration models, in papier-maché …
The initial Clint Eastwood-Sergio Leone collaboration, its sardonic storyline lifted from Kurosawa's Yojimbo and re-located in a comic-book Italian version of the American West. (Not by any means the initial "spaghetti Western," but the one that opened the floodgates.) Deeply devoted to perspiration, whiskers, squints, and Ennio Morricone's bizarre tweedles …
Filmed during the practice sessions for and the actual running of the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix, the immediacy of the camerawork became such a huge contributor to the narrative force that the film still cries out for a big screen treatment. And not the comparatively puny and nightmarish IMAX shoeboxes …
Alain Resnais inundates this pensive political thriller with homely details: the tidy and deliberate unpacking of an underground agent at the finish of a routine, eventless, perilous mission; the exchanged intimacies and cups of coffee among long-time comrades; their plain, quiet sweaters and overcoats. Of course, Resnais is interested in …
Caper film starring Audrey Hepburn as the daughter of a wealthy art forger who must steal a statue from a Paris museum in order to protect her father. Peter O'Toole and Eli Wallach costar.