It was inevitable that SOMEONE would make a movie about the Unabomber and his troubled relationship with his family and the world. What was less inevitable was that a flick with a rock-bottom budget like Ted would attract the likes of Edie McClurg, 47, as Ted's mother, Jeff Corey, 84, as his professor, and Andy Dick as a sheriff. Ted looks like it was shot on short ends of 16mm film stock a…
Diane Conti, where are you? The guy I saw the movie with wants to know! Diane Conti IS Terry (she's from Manhattan) who moves to Brooklyn and quickly moves in on the leader of the pack. When he tells her he has to brand her (it's a rule), she decides to have him killed! So she moves in on the second-in-command and entices him to Take Over with herself as b…
The execution of Timothy John Evans for the 1949 murder of his wife Beryl and daughter Baby Geraldine eventually led to the abolition of the death penalty in England, but it would be another four years until the real murderer was brought to justice. That was Evans’ neighbor, John Reginald Christie, who murdered eight times over a 13-year stretch, which finally ended with his capture at the …
Teresa's Tattoo is a zany 1994 comedy directed by Julie Cypher and starring Adrienne Shelly in a dual role. First, she's Gloria whose earrings are encoded with NASA secrets and who doesn't know she's been abducted by two bozos. They eat Cheerios while she accidentally drowns in a pool. To cover up their mistake, they abduct look-alike Teresa who “voluntarily went…
Another outstanding first feature at 1990's Mill Valley Film Festival was Terminal Bliss, scripted by its 22-year-old director Jordan Alan, when he was only 18 years old. Alan's drama of young friendships curdled by drugs and betrayal is not only keenly observed, it is also filled with a deep understanding rare in this type of film. Alex the protagonist appears to be a flip, wisecrac…
This is Part One of Jim MacLaine's (David Essex) meteoric rise and fall as a rock and roll star. As the story opens in 1959, Jim is dissatisfied with his drab existence and hopes that rock and roll will lead to a better life. The presence of Ringo Starr in a dramatic role adds to the film's authenticity. Neil Aspinall and Keith Moon supervise the music and David Essex a…
If the Independent Spirit Awards had existed in 1936, These Three would definitely have been a contender. The fact that this film was made at all is a tribute to Samuel Goldwyn's free spirit as a producer. Even though The Children's Hour had been a huge hit on Broadway, lesbians were not allowed to appear in ANY American movies due to censorship by the Hays Office. Goldwyn bought the…
In 1987, the late film historian William K. Everson contributed an important new article on British film noir to Films in Review, hoping that it might lead to a pioneering book on the subject. That it has not (so far) is every film noir fan's loss. In a later interview, Everson admitted that to most publishers, noir means American noir, period; ironic, considering that the roo…
The Thin Blue Line was among the best entries at international film festivals in 1988. This Errol Morris movie is documentary filmmaking at its finest: it entertains and informs, magnetizes audiences, and stirs their emotions. It even helped to free a convicted man who was wrongly convicted for murder. How can a man be wrongly convicted for murder in this day and age? Morris shows us how in 101 ab…
Let's try for just a moment to ignore some of the media ca-ca of the last few years. Before he died on Halloween morning 1993, River Phoenix made a couple of movies that failed to attract wide distribution: Sam Shepard's Silent Tongue and Peter Bogdanovich's The Thing Called Love. If Phoenix were still alive, one would be forced to confess that his acting was going through a b…
The Third Man is a vintage Graham Greene/Carol Reed collaboration about a serious subject. Harry Lime is no good (he distributes bad penicillin that results in brain-damaged children) and only Western hack writer Holly Martins can stop Harry IF he can find him. Actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) is in love with Harry, but she isn't much interested in helpi…
32 Short Films about Glenn Gould was well received when it was first released, but for the uninitiated (yours truly), the structure of the film was too broken up for me to get a clear portrait of its subject.
I can think of few things I would LESS like to do than be interviewed every seven years for a movie between the ages of seven and thirty-five. That said, there are few series that are more compelling to watch than Michael Apted's superb 7-14-21-28-35 Up collection. It all began when the director spent a day with 14 English schoolchildren in 1963. There was pug-nosed Paul, and Tony who dream…
Robert Donat, then 30, looks so hale and hearty in this key Alfred Hitchcock film, it's sad to realize that all his performances were a major triumph of mind over matter. A life-long sufferer of asthma, which finally killed him in 1958, the 1939 Oscar winner had to schedule movie roles around his delicate health. Donat is the quintessential Hitchcock hero: funny, charming, a bit of a flake,…
The name of director David Lean conjures up images of blistering heat, frozen tundra, sand dunes, and thousands of extras. From 1957–1984, with one exception, Lean was a director of lavish epics. But there was a time when Lean made small, intimate films like This Happy Breed. It's hard to imagine Robert Newton in an UNDER-the-top role, but that's who Frank Gibbons is and that&…
When President Kennedy honored a group of Nobel Prize winners at a White House dinner, he quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Jefferson's memory has been burnished brightly into our national consciousn…
One of the best movies of 1965 is Fred Coe's A Thousand Clowns, written by Herb Gardner. Jason Robards plays Murray Burns, the sort of parent every kid would love to have: funny, flexible, free, and fearless. The only problem is, he isn't the sort of parent who receives grown-up approval. In fact, he isn't even a parent, although you wouldn't know it from the warm relat…
Among the impressive domestic entries at 1990's Mill Valley Film Festival was Nancy Kelly's Thousand Pieces of Gold, starring Rosalind Chao as Lalu, a reluctant immigrant to America during the 1880s. Even though her father sells her to a marriage broker, she is filled with nostalgia for her family and her homeland. Her first stop on the West Coast is San Francisco's Chinatown,…
Raul Ruiz is much loved by devotees of international film festivals and not particularly well known outside the festival circuit. The presence of the late Marcello Mastroianni in this 1996 movie may attract a few more viewers, but it's still a typical film festival entry, the details of which tend to blur, not over time, but the instant the closing credits start to roll. It is Mastroianni&#…
The best of 1974's American Film Theatre productions had actually been waiting for U.S. release since 1970. Joan Plowright and Laurence Olivier starred as Masha Prosorov and Dr. Chebutikin, Derek Jacobi and Alan Bates were Andrei Prosorov and Col. Vershinin, and Ronald Pickup and Daphne Heard were Baron Tusenbach and Anfissa. Most of the rest of the cast were unknown to American audiences. …
Mohamad Ali Keshavarz tells us that he is really an actor playing a movie director and everyone else in the picture is an amateur. Mrs. Shivah is his assistant director and she wants everything to be just right. Taherek the star (Taherek Ladanian) won't address lines to Hossein (Hossein Rezai) because she turned down his marriage proposal. He confides in the dire…
Sally Ann Howes made a dozen films in the 1940s and ‘50s, long before director Ken Hughes tried to turn her into another Julie Andrews opposite Dick Van Dyke in the 1968 musical dud, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She was, in fact, an enormously appealing juvenile actress, as evidenced by her debut in Thursday's Child, Howes, then 12, plays Fennis Wilson, who has a scholarly life in mind f…
Among the more intriguing entries at 1987's Mill Valley Film Festival was Antony Thomas’ excellent documentary, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done.
Most movies about cults fall into the realm of propaganda, as in, hey kids, don't try this at home with your friends. Ticket to Heaven digs deeper than that, and because it does, it's an intensely frightening film to watch. Nick Mancuso plays a young man who's at a turning point in his life. He's just broken up with someone, he's miserable, he could go one way or…
When Sigmund Freud asked “What do women want?,” he, like many men, probably wasn't listening to the answer. We watched most of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! with clenched teeth. Pedro Almodovar's eighth movie deserves its NC-17 rating and I dread its effects on grown-up weirdos who might be inspired by it. Ricky is an escaped mental patient who falls in love with a drug-addic…
It's always a treat when an underhyped thriller that slips into theatres without the benefit of a press screening turns out to be better than expected. The Tie that Binds, dumped on unsuspecting audiences with the threadbare tagline that it's from the producers of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, is actually pretty good. It boasts terrific performances by Keith Carradine as a psycho, …
At the end of the ‘50s, director J. Lee Thompson wanted to make an offbeat crime film showing the tender relationship between a young killer and a little boy who witnesses his crime. He found himself in the garden of John and Mary Mills one day and watched their 12-year-old daughter at play. Thompson observed what international audiences would soon discover to their delight: that young Hayl…
It probably happens all the time: A little boy traps himself in a Canadian Bank vault with a 63-hour time-lock and everyone spends the better part of 73 minutes trying to get him out before he suffocates to death. When Robert Beatty as Vault Expert Dawson is on the case, you know you've got a rollicking chance for a happy ending. And who IS that actor, 13th on the cast list? Why, it'…
Yugoslavia's Tito and Me has a great deal of the charm of the early “Our Gang” comedies, showing childhood on its own unique terms.
My favorite of all the films I had a chance to see at 1991's On Screen: A Celebration of Women in Film Festival was To Cross the Rubicon. Shot on a very low budget, it is not a perfect film and there are no name stars in it, but it does such a superb job revealing the best friendship of two very different women that I wish it had been chosen for the opening night film (instead of Mar…
Gus Van Sant's To Die For is indeed a movie to die for. With a fine-tuned screenplay by the great Buck Henry (who appears in a side-splitting cameo as a high school teacher), To Die For takes an up close and personal look at a cable TV weather girl who will do anything (well, almost anything) to be a network anchorwoman with a household name. Just one thing; she …
I had been looking forward to another Rachel Griffiths movie ever since her award-winning performance as Rhonda in 1994's Muriel's Wedding.
The day after the deadline for this book, Karl Kozak sent me an unsolicited video of his first film by priority mail. It's about a guy in San Diego named Alan Rigatelli (nicely played by David Coburn) who's always a little late. He gets fired and robbed on the same day and, worse yet, his girlfriend leaves him and he leaves the only copy of his first novel in a taxi. Hi…
Award-winning actress Tatyana Vasilyeva stars in Alexander Proshkin's To See Paris and Die. Orekhova (Vasilyeva) and her adult son, Yuri, live together in a room in an apartment shared with many neighbors who are incapable of minding their own business. Orekheva hopes that Yuri will receive a prize in an upcoming music contest, so she tells him that he cannot marry Katya, his …
One of the many exceptional entries at 1990's Mill Valley Film Festival was To Sleep with Anger. It is a wonderfully layered tale of family tensions, magic, and mystery set in a deceptively down-to-earth black neighborhood in Los Angeles. Refreshingly free of stereotypes, the film focuses on the disturbing effect of an intruder named Harry on the basically healthy family who offer him their…
Tommy boasts a number of fine rock stars, as well as Oliver Reed (Frank Hobbs) and (Doctor) Jack Nicholson, who don't let their lack of vocal talent bother them too much. And (Preacher) Eric Clapton is outstanding as always. You'll either love Tommy or hate it, depending on how you feel about Ken Russell as a movie director. Russell's …
The owner of a stamp store gives Ralph a 60-year-old stamp album that happens to include a letter and an enchanted rhyme that will send him (in stamp form) to Australia, China—you name it! Ralph and mischievous 12-year-old Tommy (Anthony Rogers) then begin an international treasure hunt to find a fabulous stamp collection in a mystery location.
Skippy Homeier was all of 13 years when he stunned Broadway audiences with his electrifying performance as Emil Bruckner, a Hitler youth transplanted into the midwestern American home of his uncle, Professor Michael Frame (Ralph Bellamy), where he soon launches a verbal assault on his Jewish aunt-to-be, Leona Richards (Shirley Booth). Independent producer Lester Cowan r…
Long before the 1996 divorce of T.R.H. Charles and Diana, The Prince and Princess of Wales (with frumpy Camilla Parker-Bowles unnamed, but widely believed to be THE contributing factor), Bertrand Blier explored a similar mystery in this 1988 French film. Why does Gerard Depardieu (hey—has anyone said anything mean about HIS stomach lately?) prefer his frumpy secr…
The next time you get in a fight with your spouse and drive your convertible off the road, whatever you do, DON'T BLINK THE LIGHTS. Not only is your marriage probably doomed anyway, but some guys in another car might think it's a signal and throw $60 grand (the root of all evil) in your car. This is the lesson NOT learned by Jane and Alan Palmer (Lizabeth …
Watching Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance is like being chained to a blind date with a 14-year-old motor mouth. You know his batteries will run down eventually, but in the meanwhile you find yourself entertaining the stray fantasy that Godzilla will turn up and flatten the kid. Mailer wanted his film noir to be “a murder mystery, a suspense tale, a film of horror—…
Jim Belushi is a good actor, but I've never really thought of him as Mr. Sex. Nevertheless, he has two sex scenes in the first 18 minutes of Traces of Red, a so-called thriller with a great beginning, a great ending, and an absolute mess of a middle. The movie looks like it was shot one way and then re-edited and re-mixed in a patch job. (For starters, most of the film is a flashback…
Tracks, seen from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran, took the Cannes Film Festival by storm, and it certainly offers some fine ensemble acting. The movie was filmed on a train without permission, and it's more than obvious. Paul Glickman tries hard with the camera work, but the overall picture has a hurried, jerky quality. Maybe Henry Jaglom was trying to emphasize how honest his screenp…
The previews for Trading Favors make it look like one of Brian Krakow's wet dreams: Nerd Lincoln Muller (Devon Gummersall) links up with Bad Girl Alex Langley (Rosanna Arquette) and they do wild and wacky things all the way to sunset…and beyond! If you rent this one expecting a comedy, you'll note that it plays like one until things turn ugly and it…
If I were to list even a fraction of the grim things that occur during the course of Trainspotting, it wouldn't sound anything like much of a laugh. But neither did the bald plot of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, or its protagonist Jimmy Porter. The spiritual descendant of 1956's Angry Young Man may well be Mark Renton, who lives, in 1996 fashion, by slipping in and out of…
Trees Lounge marks Steve Buscemi's debut as an indie filmmaker after making dozens of films for other indie filmmakers. He wrote the main part of Tommy Basilio for himself, of course. Tommy is a 31-year-old screw-up, only he looks several years older than that. It's an important distinction, because he makes out with 17-year-old Debbie (Chloe Sevigny), the daughter of h…
Unhappy living with her whipped son (John Heard) and nagging daughter-in-law (Carlin Glynn), an elderly woman (Geraldine Page) makes the trip to Bountiful, Texas, which no longer exists except in her happy memories. Her traveling companion is Rebecca DeMornay, who responds to her in an empathetic way that her family does not. The much-honored Geraldine Pag…
Although White is highly regarded by admirers of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy, for me, it was the least involving segment of the three. The story revolves around Karol, a Polish hairdresser (Zbigniew Zamachowski) whose marriage to gorgeous French wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) is dissolving. Dominique wants Karol out of her life, out of their Paris hairdressing s…
The life of Julie de Caurcey (Juliette Binoche) is shattered. Her composer husband Patrice (Hugues Quester) and five-year-old child Anna have been killed in a car accident. She decides to withdraw from life and all her former associations and possessions (except for a blue crystal lamp) and live alone. Needless to say, her friends have things to say and do…
Valentine (Irene Jacob) hits a dog with her car. When she returns the injured animal to its owner, she meets a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant, who has a ball with the role). The judge enjoys listening in while his neighbors whisper sweet nothings to their lovers on the telephone. Valentine isn't exactly crazy about the hobby of her new acquaintance, but sh…
Trouble in Mind has one of the lushest, most evocative scores ever, with a fine rendering of the title song by Marianne Faithfull. The cinematography and the soundtrack give the film what Alan Rudolph fails to supply as writer/director: a mood straight out of 1940s film noir. Rudolph, always an intellectual tease, uses the aura of other times and places to play Games with Time and Place. Yo…
There's plenty of trouble with this adolescent would-be comedy.
Three years before The Graduate, Buck Henry, then 34, wrote and co-starred in this quirky early indie about naive young Jack Armstrong (played by stage actor Tom Aldredge, then 36), who comes to The Big City and gets taken advantage of by just about everyone in Manhattan. Henry plays the role of T.R. Kingston with wicked glee, and Joan Darling, then 29, is most appealing as the city …
True Confessions, a United Artists release with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall giving two of the best performances you'll ever see, was barely noticed when it first hit theatres, for reasons which escape me—it's a great movie! Like Cutter's Way, another 1981 United Artists release, it is quintessential neo-noir, a re-invention of the genre for the ‘80s. Loosely…
Donna (Annabella Sciorra) and Michael (Ron Eldard) are getting married.
If you liked Adrienne Shelly in The Unbelievable Truth, you'll enjoy seeing her as Maria Coughlin in Trust.
It was the last Saturday night in November, 1933, exactly one month before Christmas. The body of one of the best and brightest young men in San Jose had just been found, and his two confessed killers were in jail, awaiting trial. Only there was no trial. The town's angry citizens tried and executed the defendants that night, and California governor Sunny Jim Rolph praised their actions as …
Writers are seldom captured well on the silver screen. Either we get Gregory Peck slumming his way through F. Scott Fitzgerald's drunken escapades in Beloved Infidel or we get the agonies but not the ecstasies of The Brontë Sisters. Leave it to Peter Falk to deliver a full-blooded interpretation of a radio writer in Tune in Tomorrow, a delightful homage to the soap operas that domina…
Carole Landis (1919–48) was one of the loveliest starlets who ever tried to make a splash in Hollywood. She deserved a better legacy than to be chiefly remembered for her morgue photograph in Hollywood Babylon (a persuasive argument AGAINST suicide if you've even achieved a flashlight beam's worth of fame!). Turnabout is brought to us through the co…
A concept-driven movie about a $20 bill and the people who hold it, however briefly.
Patsy Kensit wants to be a movie star in the worst way. Twenty-One is a skin-deep study of a skin-deep character involved in skin-deep relationships. Kensit is in virtually every scene, unlike Lethal Weapon 2 or the ill-fated Chicago Joe and the Showgirl or Absolute Beginners in which she drifted in and out of the protagonists’ lives. Kensit's character Katie has sex with a married m…
Hungary's official entry in 1974's San Francisco International Film Festival was 25 Fireman's Street, a puzzling, disturbing movie directed by Istvan Szabo. This beautifully photographed movie focuses on the residents of a soon-to-be-demolished building. Their memories, dreams, and fears are shown in unsparing detail, as well as their uncertain daily lives: a young girl jumps …
Twilight of the Cockroaches/Gokiburi is anthropomorphism at its most extreme. Japanese animator Hiroaki Yoshida creates plenty of sweet little creatures with highly appealing faces in the hope that we will identify with a kingdom of humanized cockroaches. If you can accept that premise, you may not have any problem with the rest of the film, including the following line from a “roach…
Hayley Mills was Walt Disney's top teen star in six films made between 1960 and 1965, but by 1968, she was scrambling to create a new cinematic identity for herself. It didn't help the fans who wanted her to stay a child forever that she was madly in love with 54-year-old director Roy Boulting. Her career choices from 1966–69 compounded the difficulty. Although Mills’ t…
Twister is THE movie to watch the night that the cable system blitzes out and you're NOT in the mood to watch A Man for All Seasons. Writer/director Michael Almereyda keeps a cool grip on the antics of an oddball family headed by Harry Dean Stanton. Crispin Glover is part of the clan, so that should tell you something. At the time of its San Francisco engagement, I kept asking if Glo…
I used to go to a theatre that showed a lot of international flicks without subtitles. I figured it would be my only chance to see some of these things, so I'd show up anyway and plow through a single-spaced four-page synopsis and try to struggle through the movies as best I could. Jimmy Smallhorne, who founded the Irish Bronx Theatre, has assembled an impressive cast for his first film as …
True confession: I was no great admirer of Audrey Hepburn's unreal screen image throughout the ‘50s and most of the ‘60s. Born into quasi-royalty, she was, for a time, everyone's idea of a fairy princess, forever teaming up with male stars who were old enough to be her dad or even granddad, admittedly starving herself to remain 35 pounds underweight as a Givenchy manneq…
Fred Ward and Suzy Amis do their best to bring Neal Bell's ultra-contrived play to life onscreen.