Heavy entertainment from Sydney Pollack. It spends so much time lining up its journalistic-ethics issues that it is stymied as a romantic thriller, and at the same time, or at a different time, its romantic-thriller obligations sidetrack and dilute the issues. The basic situation here is not hard to imagine …
Vapid paranoid thriller about mind-control through TV commercials. Surely the ad business, to say nothing of this movie, ought to be on guard against more pertinent and persistent evils than the insertion of subliminal political messages in TV spots for No Sweat anti-perspirant. The name of one of the bit …
The slobbiness inherent in the subject -- women's professional wrestling -- is not as overwhelming as might be feared. For all the undoubted appeals to T-&-A fanciers, and for all the distant Rocky parallels played up in the ads, this turns out to be a surprisingly downbeat comedy, with a …
Such expectations of John Landis as have been bred by Animal House and The Blues Brothers might prompt one to overemphasize the humor element here. That element is not far to seek, but much of it is limited to the inveterate wiseguyism of a couple of happy-go-lucky American backpackers afoot …
Out of this elegiac comedy on Old Age and the Changing Times, Burt Lancaster's fans ought to get the same sort of sentimental tingles that John Wayne's got from True Grit. His role here is as a small-time numbers runner (and part-time poodle walker) who disdains the swanky new casinos …
Pleasant enough, if rather pat, romantic comedy about two Alabama losers, a twenty-dollar prostitute and an out-of-trim palooka, hooking up and heading toward California with nothing but dreams in their pockets. Sally Field is something of a problem, tending, whenever she attempts to be comical, to exhibit behavior that has …
Morally neutered sex comedy, by Bertrand Blier, about a fourteen-year-old girl setting her cap for her thirty-year-old stepfather, a failed jazz pianist. A goodish amount of time is spent trying to make you feel sympathy for the two, to put you in a receptive frame of mind (since one of …
In a way, this is a filmed record of Antonio Gades's flamenco ballet (i.e., ballet with shoes) based on the Garcia Lorca play of the same name. Only it is a stripped-down version of that ballet (no scenery, no lighting effects, nothing but a barren studio with a mirrored wall …
Billy Wilder, who takes as his source material a French farce by Francis Veber, and who seems in general at a loss for original ideas, banks heavily on the very unoriginal idea of teaming Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon (for the third time in a Billy Wilder movie and fourth …
Marcel Proust, just the way you always pictured him: the milky eyes, the dark bags beneath them, the coughing and wheezing, the twenty-four-hour-a-day pajamas and robe -- all the sundry signs of a sensitivity so great that it compels him, for example, to insulate his room with cork. What the …
Anglophilia on the rampage. The factual story concerns two rival British runners, one a Christian (and a charmer of an actor: Ian Charleson), and the other a Jew, who appear to be heading toward a showdown in the 1924 Olympics until Fate (not always the best plotter) finds a way …
A radical case of Art for Art's Sake, a limp spaghetti Western in which the 3-D process becomes the sole raison d'être. All the action is funneled into the camera lens: bats fly at it, rats scamper at it, spears and flaming arrows are flung at it (these are the …
Rocky romance: rocky as in shaky, bumpy, stormy; also Rocky as in Mountains. The sort of newspaperman whom Paul Sorvino brought back to life in Slow Dancing in the Big City -- the Jimmy Breslinesque Voice of the People whose column is avidly devoured by every mugger, hooker, and cab …