An art director in the 1930s falls in love and attempts to make a young woman an actress despite Hollywood who wants nothing to do with her because of her problems with an estranged man and her alcoholic father.
The true story of Pat Conroy, an idealistic beautiful white teacher who is a grade-school instructor for a group of poor black children in an isolated school.
This is a movie in which you are expected to understand the hero when he tries to explain the difference between being unhappy in New York and in his homeland. “In Russia,” he says, “I did not love my life but I loved my misery, because it was mine.”
I didn’t expect (or want) Twilight Zone—The Movie to be Borgesian, but I did rather hope that John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller—the four young directors who are paying homage to the TV series—would tease us with more artful macabre games than the ones of the old shows.
In the following review, Wilmington assesses Lynch’s use of dark, obsessive, and bizarre visual imagery in Dune, noting that the film as a whole is not necessarily successful.
It doesn’t take long to realize that basically this isn’t a David Lynch movie—it’s Dune. Lynch doesn’t bring a fresh conception to the material; he doesn’t make the story his own. Rather, he tries to apply his talents to Herbert’s conception. He doesn’t conquer this Goliath—he submits to it, as if he thought there was something to be learned from it. He’s being a good boy, a diligent director.
The movie version, adapted, directed, and edited by David Lean, is an admirable piece of work. Lean doesn’t get in over his head by trying for the full range of the book’s mysticism, but Forster got to him.
Empire of the Sun begins majestically and stays strong for perhaps forty-five minutes. It’s so gorgeously big you want to laugh in pleasure. Steven Spielberg takes over Shanghai and makes it his city. And then, first in brief patches and then in longer ones, his directing goes terribly wrong.
John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, based on the Rudyard Kipling short story, is an exhilaratingly farfetched adventure fantasy about two roughneck con men, Danny and Peachy (Sean Connery and Michael Caine), in Victoria’s India, who decide to conquer a barbarous land for themselves.
Peckinpah’s “The Killer Elite” is intensely, claustrophobically exciting, with combat scenes of martial-arts teams photographed in slow motion and then edited in such brief cuts that the fighting is nightmarishly concentrated—almost subliminal.
In Little Big Man, Arthur Penn uses the mode of comic elegy in order to sustain a reverent feeling for the American past without falling into sentimentality
Jack Crabb is 121 years old. His eyes are agate chips; senility seeps through the cracks in his voice. But Crabb is not your average superannuated former Indian fighter. He is Little Big Man, sole survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
In ‘Stardust Memories’ we get more of the same thoughts over and over—it’s like watching a loop. The material is fractured and the scenes are very short, but there was not a single one that I was sorry to see end. ‘Stardust Memories’ doesn’t seem like a movie, or even like a filmed essay; it’s nothing.
Brazil is the kind of ornery, intellectually fuzzy labor of love that is bound to strike some people as just about “the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” and perhaps it will affect others as a picture they want for their VCRs, so they can look at it over and over.
Essentially, Ran is about color and pattern, the formality and pageantry of warfare, and the fun of melodrama.
The Right Stuff has the happy, excited spirit of a fanfare, and it’s astonishingly entertaining, considering what a screw-up it is.
The movie is a demonstration of what, in Huston’s terms, movies can give you that print can’t: primarily, the glory of performers—performers with faces that have been written on by time and skill, performers with voices.
After the early acclaim, The Deer Hunter has been subjected in recent months to an extraordinarily coarse and brutal hazing. Everywhere one encounters people convinced that the movie is racist or fascist, while in the press indignant critics compete with one another in manic overstatement.
John Carpenter’s ‘Prince of Darkness’ is an often strange, sometimes terrific but in the end flawed movie that defies broad categorization in a genre known for occasionally creating rigid protective boundaries between what constitutes a horror film and what is science fiction, despite obvious crossover between these forms.
Now that its title has been changed from Bed of Fear (as it was called when I wrote about Stanley Kubrick’s last picture in Sight and Sound) to The Killing, one need really have no reservations at all. This shrewd, engrossing, complete-in-itself melodrama is the kind of film one had begun to think was no longer possible to make in Hollywood.
The young writer-director-photographer-editor of this unpromisingly titled film has a good deal of talent. He made Killer’s Kiss a year or so ago in New York—on location and in a small studio—and later sold it to United Artists for distribution. He has now directed his first Hollywood film, a melodrama called (also unpromisingly) Bed of Fear.