Movie Reviews
The Fine Arts theater is backsliding once more, returning next week to a pornography policy, a fate almost worse than death, after a year and a fraction as a repertory house. Its swan song is …
In the early Sixties, at the height of enthusiasm for movies as the most universal art form (probably the highest high of enthusiasm since before movies abandoned silence and split into separate tongues), there was …
“I’d like to see you hire a new film reviewer! I’m really sick of Shepherd! He is too down on everything!” (Betty Jo Bums) “The doom and negativism of his reviews are . . . …
One of the puzzles of the movie scene, here and everywhere, is the enduring prosperity and, more, the proliferation of the "hard,” “strong,” "triple-X" movies that are never mentioned by name in the S.D. Union-Tribune …
What kind of people covet the role of critic??? And having posed that question, we have posed, hand in hand, the question .... What is it that differentiates — divides — separates — cuts off — the critics from the audience?
"The New Hollywood,” which is the insurmountable subject of the latest issue of Film Comment and is the inevitable subject of major articles in every magazine from Esquire to Ms., was no less the subject …
One of the certain vulnerabilities in writing weekly about movies is pointed up by the number of my conversations that are initiated by someone, coming from my blind-side, declaring I am insane, wrong, or mentally …
Wednesday, a week ago, Vincente Minnelli was in San Diego to take his place in the series of "Conversations" put on by the Center for Photographic Arts and The Fine Arts Gallery. The director of …
Out of all the feedback to this run-down column — some of it reaching me by way of letters-to-the-editor, point-blank, and some of it by way of grapevine, snaking from the blindside — has crystallized …
During the marathon COMBO auction, on television last week, the only movie-related item to come up for grabs was a one-year pass for two to any of the Spreckels, Broadway, and Tower theatres. It went …
Roberto Rossellini whisked in and out on Francis Ford Coppola’s private yellow-and-black jet, spent a quick day, Sunday last, in San Diego. Fruit salad for lunch at the Marine Room, a guided tour of the …
The most obvious damage done to a movie that has been trimmed, cropped, to fit the TV space, is to the composition of the images. It is like a museum trying to fit a painting of tight squeeze space by knocking off three or four disciples from each end of the picture.
Penetrating vision of life, complexity of plot, depth of characterization — or whatever it is that the movie critics who get quoted in newspaper ads demand for a movie to reach the statue of fiction …
The grand. gray-stone mansion, isolated in lush English countryside — no greener green anywhere-appears from a postcard-distance to be the sort of setting for fantasies of elegant weekend junkets, given to marking time and making …
Snapshot of a weekend in Ischia: From beneath the airliner's silver belly, the landing gear retracts. stiffly like chickens' legs; and the plane's shadow, on the runway below. shrinks rapidly as the distance to the …
Like before any game, ground rules ought to be laid out, plainly, fastidiously, before ticking off the selection of the year past's stand-out movies, The only real requirement is to clarify the criterion for eligibility …