The Godfather is, furthermore, and by critical consensus, a stunning confirmation of my claims for Coppola’s talents: vividly seen, richly detailed, throbbing with incident and a profusion of strikingly drawn characters
Blasphemy is by no means dead in Britain, as the recent condemnation of Gay News, for publishing a poem portraying Christ as homosexual, reveals. But The Life of Brian has nothing about it as shocking to the faithful as this, and is saved indeed from blasphemy by its sheer vulgarity.
Escape from Alcatraz opens with the camera panning across San Francisco Bay and the bridge, and then to the grim, gloomy island of Alcatraz. The first sequence, as the credits come up, shows the arrival, through rain and darkness, of a prisoner for the “Rock”: it is shot in tight, constricted close- up and mostly in shadow.
Lontano dal cinema di formule e procedimenti a cui rimanda soltanto per la sua mole produttiva, Barry Lyndon si situa in quella zona dove il cinema è invenzione, ricerca, esperimento. Ma dove tutti, coraggiosamente e confusamente, cercano, Stanley Kubrick trova. Non domanda, risponde.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the most innocent of all technological-marvel movies, and one of the most satisfying. This film has retained some of the wonder and bafflement we feel when we first go into a planetarium: we ooh and aah at the vastness, and at the beauty of the mystery. The film doesn’t overawe us, though, because it has a child’s playfulness and love of surprises.
Bertolucci is trying to transcend the audience appeal of his lyrical, psychological films. He is trying to make a people’s film by drawing on the mythology of movies, as if it were a collective memory. 1900 is a romantic moviegoer’s vision of the class struggle—a love poem for the movies as well as for the life of those who live communally on the land.
Angst-dark primary colors—reds and blues so intense they’re nearpsychedelic, yet grimy, rotting in the thick, muggy atmosphere. Cities that blur into each other. Characters as figures in cityscapes or as exiles in rooms that are insistently not home. And, under it all, morbid, premonitory music.
The Taviani brothers have learned to fuse political commitment and artistic commitment into stylized passion. Their film Padre Padrone has the beauty of anger that is channelled and disciplined without losing intensity.
Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with Straw Dogs, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art.
An extraordinarily well-made new thriller gets the audience sky-high and keeps it up there—The French Connection, directed by William Friedkin, which is one of the most “New York” of all the recent New York movies.
In this film, one knows that Bertolucci knows who he is and what he’s doing; young as he is, he’s a master director. Except for the unconvincing and poorly staged concluding sequence, the flaws in The Conformist are niggling.
This movie expresses what it means to be young with the lyricism and narcissism and self-consciousness of the intelligent young.
Some of the trick effects might seem miraculous if the imagery had any lustre, but Return of the Jedi is an impersonal and rather junky piece of moviemaking
Così come il mito americano C’era una volta in America è crudele e sentimentale, come gli anni ’30 è più reale di un sogno ed è solo un sogno.
«Credevo fosse un’avventura. E invece era la vita… » (J. Conrad) … Riprendendo questa frase nel corso di un’intervista, Sergio Leone si riferiva al tempo trascorso da quando ebbe l’idea di trarre un film dal libro di Harry Grey A mano armata a quando, finalmente il film è riuscito a farlo
Eighty thousand years ago, on broad primeval plains, Naoh (Everett McGill), the bravest warrior of the spear-carrying Ulam tribe, and two fellow-warriors, Amoukar (Ron Perlman) and Gaw (Nameer El-Kadi), are sent out on the sacred mission of finding fire and bringing it back to the Ulam.
Kael critiques “The Exorcist” for its shallow shock value and questions its cultural impact, calling out its lack of genuine depth or terror.
Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range that is dizzyingly sensual.
Critical disappointment with Eyes Wide Shut was almost unanimous, and the complaint was always the same: not sexy. The national reviewers sounded like a bunch of middle-school kids who’d snuck in to see it and slunk out three hours later feeling horny, frustrated, and ripped off.
L’ironia di Kubrick resta sempre fredda, il suo umorismo sereno, forse perciò più toccante. Si limita a prospettare l’eccezionale come raggiunto e quindi divenuto usuale, quotidiano, fine a se stesso.
If you’re among the millions of people who have read the book, you probably expect the actors to be more important than they turn out to be. The movie is amorphous; it’s a pastoral about the triumph of the human spirit, and it blurs on you.
Get the best articles once a week directly to your inbox!