If you're looking for a movie on video with a little more respect for its subject than, say, 1991's Hook has for Peter Pan, 1970's The Railway Children is a fine example. Director Lionel Jeffries wisely tackles this much-loved children's book on its own terms. The story opens when the police arrive to take Father Charles Water-bury into custody straight after a holiday …
Martha Coolidge is among the best working directors in America today, and she should have received an Oscar nomination for Rambling Rose. One of the drags of the pre-Oscar media buzz is seeing a bunch of guys sitting around a table yakking about how fine directors like Coolidge aren't “ready” to be an Oscar nominee because it's Demme's “turn” this y…
Showgirls was a mess from start to finish, but anyone who spent years enjoying Elizabeth Berkley as intellectual feminist Jessie Spano opposite Mario Lopez as A.J. Slater isn't going to give up on her after one terrible movie. (Who'd give up on Kyle MacLachlan or Gina Gershon or Robert Davi or director Paul Verhoeven?) Random Encounter is a much more low-key and far les…
An hour and 45 minutes into Tom DiCillo's The Real Blonde, I noted with gratitude that it was over and I could go home. To be grateful to leave a film by the writer/director of indie classics Living in Oblivion and Box of Moonlight is indeed a sad realization, but the grim fact is that there isn't a whole lot going on in The Real Blonde. Joe and Mary have been living together …
This film about a hypocritical Latin American dictator was co-produced in Mexico, Cuba, and France.
The Christmas season terrifies me more than anything that could possibly go bump in the night. The only reason I saw Reckless at THAT time of year was because, with Craig Lucas as the screenwriter and Mia Farrow as the star, I were reasonably sure that it would supply a strange and skewed take on the holidays. And it does. Mia Farrow is a blissful housewife with a wonderful life except for one thi…
Independent producer Sol Lesser was pleased when The Red House played to packed houses, but whether that was due to the tremendous performances by Edward G. Robinson and Judith Anderson or to the passionate make-out sequences between gorgeous Tibby (Julie London, 21) and strapping Teller (Rory Calhoun, 29), the boxoffice receipts don't say. The Red House is an un…
The Red Poster tells the story of 23 members of the French Underground who were killed by the Nazis in 1944.
When my friend John lay dying a dozen summers ago, he wasn't interested in any disease-of-the-weak movies. He'd yell, “Get me Modesty Blaise!” or “Get me Fantastic Voyage!” or “Get me The Wizard of Oz!” The more escapist the fare, the better he liked it. I think that John would have liked Red Ribbon Blues, though. It's a very broad sat…
Red Rock West went nowhere until San Francisco's Roxie Cinema picked it up for an extended run. (1990's Kill Me Again, another good film noir by John Dahl, only played in the San Francisco Bay area at the Geneva Drive-In.) With an appreciative audience, its sharp script and on-target performances became obvious. Nicolas Cage IS Mike, who tries to get out of Red Rock Wes…
A crowd pleaser at 1991's Mill Valley Film Festival is The Refrigerator, a movie that will strike terror into the hearts of anyone who's ever walked into a kitchen.
Upstairs Downstairs and The Duchess of Duke Street became television classics for a variety of reasons. Each was a sharply observed examination of an irretrievable time with a very definite bias: that the working classes learned to adjust to a changing world in a way that the aristocracy could not. This perspective, along with appealing characters, nostalgic detail, and beautifully crafted scripts…
Reno's Kids: 87 Days Plus 11 is the first documentary feature by actress Whitney (Dorothy Baxter on NBC's Hazel, 1961–65) Blake.
Most films about madness glamorize the subject or shift the point of view to a sane observer. Roman Polanski's 1965 British film Repulsion provides a rare screen examination of insanity from the perspective of the person who is going mad. Twenty-one-year-old Catherine Deneuve portrays Carol Ledoux, a quiet manicurist who loses her grip on the most fundamental aspects of her routine life. Br…
While recognizing that American cinema in the 1990s would not be what it is today without Quentin Tarantino and acknowledging his originality and talent AND being forever grateful that he cast Lawrence Tierney in such a terrific role here as Joe Cabot, Reservoir Dogs is not the sort of flick I can watch over and over again. Many guys of my acquaintance can and do—I can't and don�…
For the world's worst chess player, movies about chess are catnip for my soul. This one's my favorite. Ingrid Thulin is so beautiful and so haunted as Dr. Michele Wolf, a concentration camp survivor who endures the nightmare of Dachau only to return to Stanislas Pilgrin, the sociopathic chess champion played by Maximilian Schell. He's in the middle of a hot and heavy affair wi…
I watched Return of the Secaucus 7 with a devotee who treasured every frame, every expression, every line of this film. I, alas, found it dull, dreary, and depressing, and its running time of 110 minutes barely endurable. In real life, I would deliberately lose an invitation to such a reunion. As a viewer, all I could think was how sad life can be, that anyone could look forward to such a gatherin…
Tommy, his sister, and their friends work their magic to free Charles Meriweather from the Bluenose sailing ship stamp he's been imprisoned in for 60 years.
Zero Mostel won the 1961 Tony for Rhinoceros—so who better to re-create his original Broadway role on film? And who better to turn Eugene Ionesco's play into a fun, wacky movie than Tom O'Horgan, the original director of Hair? Reunite Mostel with Gene Wilder, his Oscar-nominated co-star for The Producers, add Oscar nominee Karen Black and Tony nominee Joe Silver to the ensemble, and voila! Who says theatre on film has to be dull? It was inept misfires like this one that contributed to the demise of the American Film Theatre.
Simon (Jason Andrews) bootlegs dubs of New York's underground bands to sustain his grungy life.
Rich and Strange is an early Hitchcock film that's widely available, but rarely discussed. It's a comedy and just what the title says it is. Joan Barry (1902–89) had previously dubbed the voice for Anny Ondra in 1929's Blackmail. She has very little onscreen chemistry with actor Henry Kendall (1892–1967), who was reportedly gay. Except…
Ricochets evolved from an Israeli army training film into the theatrical release it became.
Ripe is a seedy-looking film about two screwed-up sisters. Monica (Dawson's Creek) Keena and Daisy Eagan are Violet and Rosie, who exit from the family car seconds before their parents are burned to death following an accident. The opening flashbacks suggest that the “14"-year-old girls may have been abused as children, so they take off for Kentucky without a backwards …
There is probably no subject that both men and woman lie about as much as sex, but moments into Rita, Sue & Bob Too it seems that the filmmakers are out to set some sort of a record for sexual dishonesty. Just for starters, we are asked to accept that the line “Can either of you put a rubber johnny on?” would trigger unbridled lust in two 16-year-old babysitters when their 40-…
River's Edge was one of the most disturbing movies of 1987. Tim Hunter's study of how a high school gang reacts to the murder of one of their friends showed a conscience-free group, easily led by the always stoned Crispin Glover. The only one with any feeling for the dead girl seems to be Keanu Reeves, who went on to deliver impressive performances in Permanent Record and Dangerous L…
No-budget noirish crime/romance set in the swampy, low-rent Florida area between Miami and the Everglades.
Steven Spielberg first attracted critical attention in 1971 when he directed a television movie called Duel starring Dennis Weaver. It's a suspenseful little saga about a battle to the death between a compact car and a truck, but there's very little character development, so Duel doesn't have much in the way of repeat value. A similar film with a lesser reputation emerged in A…
Yves Montand, Laurent Malet, and Miou-Miou dignify a watery script about a political father and son who clash in the aftermath of Franco's death.
Robert et Robert is Claude Lelouch's valentine to the so-called losers of the world, and it would be difficult to find a more heartfelt salute. Based largely on the history of actor Jacques Villeret, who plays a real-life character based on himself, Robert et Robert shows the warm and funny friendship shared by a pair of bachelors seeking wives through a computer dating service. They never …
Unless it's spoofing old educational short subjects, Mystery Science Theater 3000 drives me nuts. I don't care if that guy and the robots want to yak through Dating Do's and Don'ts, but I want to HEAR Beverly Garland and Marie Windsor, not THEM, okay? I don't think I'd mind watching movies with Mark Rappaport, though. He does his homework, he knows how to …
Rockers, helmed with assurance by Theodoros Bafaloukos, is a fascinating first film, both for its lively reggae music, and for its intriguing variation on the Robin Hood theme.
Have Nick (Kurt and Courtney) Broomfield and Michael (Roger & Me) Moore ever met? Just asking! Although they both have in-your-face interviewing techniques, Roger & Me is a much weightier documentary than Kurt and Courtney. After all, 30,000 people found themselves unemployed when General Motors left Flint, Michigan. For GM chairman Roger Smith to turn his…
Well, It just goes to show that artists can be their own worst critics. This film remained unreleased until 1996 because the Rolling Stones were concerned that they had been upstaged by the Who. In fact, Rock and Roll Circus was a great show then and would be a great show today with no qualifications. It's fun to watch John Lennon at his goofiest, to hear Sympathy for the Devil with the ori…
Laurence Harvey (1928–73) is such a snide cad. He could have been the new George Sanders, except he didn't outlive him by very long. As Joe Lampton, he is an opportunistic slime, heartlessly seducing a rich man's daughter to advance himself. The woman Joe really wants is Alice (Simone Signoret, 1921–85), unhappily married to a twit named Geor…
Here's the deal: Helena Bonham Carter is in love with Julian Sands, but she settles for Daniel Day-Lewis (who isn't cute like he was in My Beautiful Laundrette, but rather resembles a gopher). What on Earth is that unhappy lovesick girl going to do? This is the central story of E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, along with the usual meticulous examination of Edwa…
The Rosary Murders does an admirable job of tackling one of film's most unyielding subjects. It is extremely difficult for non-Catholics and Catholics alike to understand the vow of silence taken by Catholic confessors when human lives are at stake. Perhaps only another priest can identify with the agony faced by Father Donald Sutherland when he hears the confession and learns the identity …
Stanley Kwan's Rouge is an extremely interesting ghost story about a lovely wraith who returns to Hong Kong in the 1980s searching for her lover, with whom she had made a suicide pact over half a century before.
At the risk of sounding cranky…forget it, I don't care...Ruby in Paradise DOES make me cranky! Ashley Judd is a wonderful actress, and I hope she wins an Academy Award some spring night in the not-too-distant future, but watching Ruby in Paradise is like watching (1) grass grow, (2) paint dry, (3) writers write, AND (4) pigeons …
Remember this when you read a book of reviews or even a single review, really. When The Rite of Spring was first performed in 1913, with its composer in attendance, it was BOOED! Quite rightly, Igor Stravinsky, then 31, said, “Go to Hell!” and kept right on being Igor Stravinsky for another 58 years. When The Rules of the Game first premiered in 1939, it, too, was booed! Even worse, …
The late comic Frankie Howerd (1921–92) was a great favorite in Great Britain, but he's still an acquired taste for many Americans. He was in excellent company for The La-dykillers, Mouse on the Moon, and Carry on Doctor, and his co-stars here give him terrific support for this first film. The premise is that the bad guys have hidden 200,000 pounds on the airport bus &#…