An animal picture for highbrows. Robert Bresson's episodic chronicle of the martyrization of a humble donkey is a sort of Christian existentialist version of Will James's horse story, Smoky, only not so credible in its plotting. Among devout Bressonites, this is sometimes said to be one of his supreme achievements, …
One can easily get lost in the tricky business of signposting the episodes as "real" or "fantasy" in Buñuel's account of a frigid bourgeois housewife's moonlighting at a swank Parisian brothel. (Sunlighting, actually: she's not Belle de Nuit.) The subtitlist for the original U.S. distributor came to his own dubious …
Ousmane Sembene's slim, lithe tale of a Senegalese maid who emigrates to France to take a position in a bourgeois apartment, and who, her optimism dimmed by the cloistered drudgery, stages a rebellion that takes the form of moodiness and indolence. To make clear the causes for complaint and cultural …
Arthur Penn's Dust Bowl fairy tale, in crackling crisp color, about two romantic runaways, a would-be Robert Taylor and a would-be Jean Arthur, who build a legend around themselves with crime headlines, publicity photos, and sophomoric poems, who achieve sexual success in a wheat field after some earlier worries about …
A half-breed Vietnam veteran re-enters the world of men, after a peaceful term of forest seclusion and communion with woodland creatures. His do-good tendencies land him soon in terrible trouble with the law, a band of motorcycle marauders, and a co-ed in a bikini; and his devastating karate, reluctantly unleashed, …
It is not altogether easy to do such an uninteresting version of such an invincible story as the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot affair. One slight handicap here is the cast (Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero), none of whom can sing, but all of whom engage in some intense competition to exhibit the …
The script is a patchwork of five plays by Shakespeare, principally Henry IV, Parts I and II. Its richest vein is the elegiac, and accordingly it makes a fitting last gasp for Orson Welles as a director (it was, after all, the last full-length feature completed by him) — and, …
The first and only film of Alexander Askoldov, and reportedly the last film under glasnost to be brought out from the Soviet closet, where it had been shut away for twenty years. Reasons for this disciplinary action — never mind any "official" ones — might conceivably have something to do …
Paul Newman stars as an abused inmate who suffers from a failure to communicate. If you liked The Shawshank Redemption, well, I don't know how you'll feel about Cool Hand Luke, but they've got a few things in common, and Paul Newman is a helluva lot prettier than Tim Robbins.
Starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson.
King Hu’s masterwork is guaranteed to out-Marvel any of the major blockbusters on this summer’s release schedule. Hearken back to 1457 AD, a time when hard-hearted eunuchs governed China. The country's most powerful undercover operations have been divided in two: the Imperial Guard, dressed in white, and their black-clad counterparts, …
The able-bodied performances of Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp, and the crisp, bracing, atmospheric images of Nicolas Roeg do a gloriously good job of bringing the Thomas Hardy classic to life. They do a better job of it than, for example, the old MGM studio used to do. …
Campy vampire movie directed by pedophile dwarf Roman Polanski and starring the second Mrs. Polanski, Sharon Tate.