The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t drawing an audience—they’re inheriting an audience.
Poltergeist, which is about a family besieged by nasty, prankish ghosts, is no more than an entertaining hash designed to spook you. It’s The Exorcist without morbidity, or, more exactly, it’s The Amityville Horror done with insouciance and high-toned special effects.
There wasn’t a single scene in the English director Alan Parker’s first three feature films (Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, Fame) that I thought rang true; there isn’t a scene in his new picture Shoot the Moon, that I think rings false.
Heaven’s Gate” is a numbing shambles. It’s a movie you want to deface; you want to draw mustaches on it, because there’s no observation in it, no hint of anything resembling direct knowledge—or even intuition—of what people are about. It’s the work of a poseur who got caught out.
Pauline Kael reviews “The Long Goodbye”, Robert Altman’s 1973 movie based on Chandler’s 1953 Los Angeles-set novel.
La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita
Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial envelops you in the way that his Close Encounters of the Third Kind did. It’s a dream of a movie—a bliss-out.
Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle” is a view of the top echelon of the slave-labor world — the mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and professors working in a technical institute near Moscow.
The play is essentially an argument between Larry, an aging anarchist (Robert Ryan), and Hickey (Lee Marvin); they speak to each other as equals, and everything else is orchestrated around them.
LʼAvventura is a study of the human condition at the higher social and economic levels, a study of adjusted, compromising man — afflicted by short memory, thin remorse, easy betrayal.
Jan Troell’s broad-backed nature epic on the mid-nineteenth-century Swedish emigration to this country, which was shot in Sweden and here, tells the story of why and how Swedes became Americans.
This movie about war and rape is the culmination of Brian De Palma’s best work. In essence, it’s feminist.
“Intolerance” is one of the two or three most influential movies ever made, and I think it is also the greatest. Yet many of those who are interested in movies have never seen it.
The Last Picture Show arrives just when it seemed time to announce that movies as pop culture were dead.
A magnificent epic on the themes of collaboration and resistance.
“The last American hero” never goes soft, and maybe that’s why the picture felt so realistic to me; it wasn’t until I reread the Wolfe piece that I realized what a turnaround it was. But we believe the worst now — maybe only the worst.
If Brian De Palma were a new young director, Body Double would probably be enough to establish him as a talented fellow. But, coming from De Palma, Body Double is an awful disappointment.
Miss Kael’s view of Citizen Kane is in keeping with what she has written before. It is, she says, a ‘shallow masterpiece’. That is to say, she concedes what is undeniable, the power of the film, but denies it profundity because its psychology is unconvincing.
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie — a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been. The film, directed by Robert Altman, and starring Warren Beatty as a small-time gambler and Julie Christie as an ambitious madam in the turn-of-the-century Northwest, is so indirect in method that it throws one off base.
“Thieves Like Us” comes closer to the vision and sensibility of Faulkner’s novels than any of the movie adaptations of them do. Altman didn’t start from Faulkner, but he wound up there. If he did a Faulkner novel, he might not be able to achieve what people want him to. But “Thieves Like Us” is his Faulkner novel.
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.
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