Night and the City is based on a Jules Dassin B-movie from 1950 (same title), but its true spiritual antecedent, I suspect, is Sweet Smell of Success, the wonderfully ambivalent melodrama about the pleasures and corruptions of New York night-life in the late fifties, starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster.
Can the sentiment of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket be anything but mere attitude—death-enthralled chic?
Kubrick has, in one big jump, discovered new possibilities for the screen image. He took on a large challenge, and has met it commendably.
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.
Roland Joffé’s epic film is well-meaning and technically superb.
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.
The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying.
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.
A Clockwork Orange is a characteristically frosty piece of film-making, shorn completely of sentiment, working through brilliant ironies and dazzling dramatic ideas that please us, provoke our laughter, galvanize our intellects, win our admiration—but never touch our hearts.
The Last Picture Show arrives just when it seemed time to announce that movies as pop culture were dead.
Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity runs about four and a half hours . . . but, in terms of moral, intellectual, and emotional absorption, it is one of the shortest movies of the year.
The Sorrow and the Pity is, first, a record. Second, it is a reminder. Third, most important from any view, The Sorrow and the Pity is a fine film.