A dramatization of the twenty-year correspondence between New York litterata Helene Hanff and a London book dealer she never met. This basic material, with its excessive necessity for voice-over recitations, will hardly commend itself beforehand as very intrinsically cinematic; and the deep-rooted reverence for books at the core of it …
A terrible embarrassment for anyone old enough not to be babysat. The terriblest moment: four suburban white kids improvising a blues version of the plot-so-far in front of a nightclub audience of glowering blacks. The peaks of excitement: the Crystals singing "Then He Kissed Me" at the very beginning and …
A vivid demonstration of parental indulgence: Susanna Hoffs, the lead singer of the Bangles, is directed by her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, in a youth comedy about the pre-commencement blowout (or Last Chance Romance) at Pacifica College. It would have been better, or anyhow a shorter route, to go for …
Hard-boiled private-eye hokum, with a wire crossed into the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, resulting in a major power outage at the end, after getting by on dim bulbs till then. A black-garbed, bearded, be-ringed, pointed-fingernailed mystery man named Louis Cyphre (equals "Lucifer," get it?) hires a wisecracking Brooklyn gumshoe named Angel ("Of …
Pleasantly inane political thriller, with Charles Bronson a reluctant bodyguard to the First Lady -- or as she is known in the trade, "One Mama," or as she is more informally known to those aware of her views on women's rights, "Madame Battle-axe" and "the Iron Maiden": "Let's just say …
Louis Malle's autobiographical war film, about the harboring of three incognito Jewish students in an exclusive Catholic boys' school, makes a nice companion to his Lacombe, Lucien -- nice and quiet and well-mannered, where the earlier one was more aggressive and apt to ruffle feathers. It's something of a corrective …
Gabriel Axel's film, from a story by Isak Dinesen, treats of two spinsterly sisters devoted to Good Works on the Jutland Coast near the end of the last century, of how they came to have a French maid, and of how the maid, after fourteen years of gratuitous service, came …
Isn't the world ready for the return of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello? Hasn't the world of movies, that is, skidded far enough downhill that the old beach-ball epics might seem almost average -- or slightly above? The old ones, maybe. This new one, however, has skidded downhill right along …
Barbet Schroeder, a tepid-blooded romantic with a trainbearer's attachment to society's runaways, has found here another recipient worthy of his attentions: a Charles Bukowski simulacrum named Henry Chinaski, full-time, round-the-clock drunkard who periodically rouses himself from a stupor to jot down some lines of lavatory-wall literature. Since Bukowski himself has …
Pretty effective piece of sentimental fantasy (in science-fiction clothing), with an interesting inversion of the usual sense of scale. A couple of self-reproducing flying saucers (a mama and a papa, with babies on the way) come to the aid of tenement dwellers threatened with eviction. The odd twist is that …
Billed as "a romantic thriller in the tradition of the master of suspense" (you know who, don't you?), this is one of the few such tradition-followers that gets up from its knees and stands eye to eye and/or goes toe to toe with The Master. Part of the reason for …
Occultist moonshine, centered around the imported-from-Cuba underground religion of santeria. There is an authentic element of anthropology and cultural relativism ("Name me one religion in which atrocities have not been committed in the name of God"), and more than the usual dosage of psychology, human interest, and "fine acting." That …
The very ample one, to be precise, and very troubled one, of Brian Dennehy, who has come to Rome to organize a tribute to his 18th-century idol, Etienne Louis Boullée, a "visionary architect" who actually built "virtually nothing." Peter Greenaway, of The Draughtsman's Contract etc., manages to compress the most …