The great merit of Dr. Strangelove is its bad taste. It is silly to argue that we have the right to say anything we want but that to exercise this right is the height of irresponsibility. Responsible art is dead art, and a sane (no pun intended) film on the bomb would have been a deadly bore.
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the most cogent, comic, and cruel movies to come along in many a year, and one of the best.
The General, made in 1927, best combines the subtle character of Keaton with material that is perfect for his style.
by Bosley Crowther In discussing The Shop on Main Street, I spoke of the characteristic style of many of the Czechoslovakian films of the 1960s
by Bosley Crowther In light of the phenomenal popularity of George Lukas’ 1977 Star Wars, which seems to have done for science fiction movies what
Like Mailer, Dylan is an artist who intended to do something in advance of conventional movies—more poetic, more ‘true’—yet “Renaldo and Clara,” like Mailer’s “Wild 90,” “Beyond the Law” and “Maidstone,” is marked by an absence of artistic intelligence. The picture hasn’t been thought out in terms of movement or a visual plan.
I submit that, if we are going to be moved to thought and action by The Deer Hunter, it ought to be by the implications of its true subject: the limitations for our society of the traditions of male mystique, the hobbling by sentimentality of a community that, after all the horror, still wants the beeriness of “God Bless America” instead of a moral rigor and growth that might help this country.
Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42 is a memory movie, written, directed and acted with such uncommon good humor that I don’t think you’ll be put off by its sweet soft-focus, at least until you start analyzing it afterwards.
Beautiful pictures are not film style. Kubrick’s latter-day work is solipsist and smug, isolated and sterile. For me Barry Lyndon is an anti-film, a gorgeous, stultified bore.
Reservoir Dogs is one of many films, past and present, that either flirt with or fully incorporate homosexual innuendo, expanding the vast symbolic field that homosexuality embraces. Its subtextual strategy mirrors the longstanding suppression and willful concealment of homoerotic desire in our society.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a masterly film, triumphantly original, wittily humane and piercingly cogent
Credo che ormai sarebbe ingenuo venire a raccontare Accattone al lettore. È da un anno che periodicamente l’Italia è costretta ad occuparsene. Il nostro è un Paese buffo. In nessun altro Paese normale un film come questo sarebbe diventato un affare di Stato.
Rain Man is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes. It’s his dream role. As the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, he’s impenetrable: he doesn’t make eye contact or touch anyone or carry on a conversation; he doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.
I don’t want to see any more Westerns. This one is the very end, the end of a craft. This one is deadly . . . Leone’s film is completely indifferent towards itself. All it shows the unconcerned viewer is the luxury that enabled it to be made
D’avance, nous savions que ce serait un événement. Parce que les dix millions de dollars dépensés garantissaient la qualité du spectacle et nous promettaient ce récital d’effets spéciaux, cette fête de l’imaginaire, ce plongeon dans l’inconnu dont le cinéma de SF nous frustre régulièrement.
Whilst L’Etranger is unlikely to hold a major position in Visconti’s oeuvre, it is in several ways remarkable. It is perhaps too easy to underestimate Visconti’s superb ability to render an authentic sense of period (a quality virtually unique to him amongst Western film directors).
These are four key scenes from the main sections of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that can be considered, with some reservations, a cinematic milestone in both the technical achievement and in its aesthetic exposition.
Given the grippingly bizarre settings and situations that Stanley Kubrick’s films favored, what could be more startling than the scene that opens “Eyes Wide Shut”? It’s only the sight of two people who resemble glamorous movie stars getting ready for a black-tie party.
In the history of Ukrainian literature and cinema one and the same title marks the tarn to the modem. Tini zabutykh predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors), a novel by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and a film by Serhii Paradzhanov (Sergei Paradjanov), became milestones in the development of their respective art forms.
Uccellacci e uccellini di Pier Paolo Pasolini affronta coraggiosamente e con novità, sul piano tematico e linguistico, le crisi di valori, di credenze, di sistemi ideologici, che sono caratteristiche del nostro tempo