Search

Under Siege (February 9, NBC) Brazil Worst-case scenarios are not the same as screen-plays. In the Holocaust and Apocalypse School of Dramaturgy, however, aspiring writers are encouraged to scab the [...]

Someone should make a movie about the Greek civil war. It has all the elements of great epic drama: three millenniums of antecedent history, unremitting tragedy of literally mythic proportions, [...]

In the early stages of William Hurt's performance as Molina, the Brazilian transvestite and petty pederast trapped in a prison cell, a well-born bit of Brit-lit apocrypha popped into my [...]

They're blaming the ravages of time--that defenseless scape-goat--for Laurence Olivier's costly gaffe at the Academy Awards, where he neglected to announce the five nominees for Best Picture, and instead blurted [...]

Born in the U.S.A., christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee did what any red-blooded American lad in the 1970s would do if given half a chance: drop out of community college, [...]

Years ago, in a student quarter of London, there was an Indian restaurant of no great distinction other than its custom of serving a side dish, with all its meals, [...]

In one short spell, Tootsie is nominated for an Oscar for best picture and Julie Andrews is nominated for best actress for impersonating a man in Victor, Victoria; La Cage [...]

A Room With a View At first glance, A Room With a View appears to belong in the stately home of Masterpiece Theatre, that middlebrow structure built of blocks of [...]

The Hitcher Going my way? The figure of the hitchhiker keeps popping up in the American imagination in each generation to exploit a nightful of fears and a long day's [...]

Parting Glances The most difficult assignments in the cultural workplace is the task of transcendence, of moving beyond the restrictions of common consciouness to produce a work of art or [...]

Down and Out in Beverly Hills Beverly Hills! In the immortal words of George Shelton, regular panelist on the beloved radio program It Pays to Be Ignorant, 'I usta woik [...]

In the cultural economy of Hollywood, The Color Purple is a countercyclical event. It is long, complex and ideological in a time when the mass mind is supposed to have [...]

Karen Blixen had a vivid imagination. In her life, as in her craft as the pseudonymous writer Isak Dinesen, she spun Grimm and gothic tales from woolly strands of memory [...]

Sugarbaby is immediately recognizable as one of those new Euromovies with the look of a perfume commercial and the erotic tension of peep-show porn. It's got Fassbinder all over its [...]

Fool for Love Awide expanse of Western desert in the windless afternoon. The camera's lens, like a lone eagle's eye, sweeps over the stones and chaparral and settles on a [...]

Mixed Blood is a film out of another school and time--Andy Warhol's Factory of twenty years ago, where a certain oddball realism was developed, taught and presented in such films [...]

What do men want? If you asked filmmakers thirty years ago you'd get perfectly reasonable, straight-forward answers like 'to catch a big fish,' or 'to shoot down Japanese airpanes,' or [...]

Britain after the war was lovely and squalid, a paper poppy from the past in the dead land of defeat. The engine of empire which had driven culture and society [...]

On the other hand, Jagged Edge is only about chemistry. Put Glenn Close in a test tube with Jeff Bridges, shake for a couple of hours and see if you [...]

My father used to say there were two kinds of doctors. Stand-up doctors had medical degrees, so you stood up to greet them when they entered the room. Sit-down doctors [...]

News from the national auteur observatory high in the Hollywood hills is that comet Spielberg is plunging precipitously into the darker regions of infantilism, from whose bourn few producers ever [...]

War and remembrance are pivotal perches for Birdy, but the perspective in Alan Parker's novelistic film (from the pseudonymous William Wharton's 1979 novel) is wary and wounded like a fallen [...]

Vietnam has suffered invasions, interventions and expeditions by every great power in this century; it has endured the visits of foe and friend, from Robert McNamara to Jane Fonda; it [...]

Alea was right on the button in 1968, when bourgeois existence bumped into revolutionary history around the world on campus, rue and rice paddy; when style and substance clashed in [...]

Not one of the current spate of fantasy epics achieves classic stature, but a few have considerable charm, originality and wit. The best is Starman, John Carpenter's yuppie update of [...]

The Terminator is likeable in its thumpy way precisely because it is low-budget, tacky and transparent. Supergirl, another space-help-wanted cartoon, suffers from lowered expectations as well as tired blood. Superman [...]

Forgettable for so many reasons, Akron, Ohio, is nevertheless memorable as the seedbed of devolution theory and practice in America. It was there that the sadosynthetic rock group Devo began [...]

Brian De Palma stands, or rather lies, in the great tradition of self-destructive filmmakers who cannot help but kill the thing they love: their movies. With anmimal abandon, he tears [...]

Every so often, Bloomingdale's runs an elaborate promotion that involves re-creating an exotic locale inside its cavernous confines, the better to sell the clothes and cosmetics of another culture to [...]

John Sayles make movies to scale--or is it movies to go? Alongside the vast supermarket of Hollywood epics, blockbusters and high-concept product, his cinema of convenience is sparsely stocked with [...]

My Beautiful Laundrette Colonialism and its discontents could become the central epic of British life in the next period, just as social class and its contradictions have dominated the insular [...]

F/X If The Hitcher is a B movie with pretentions, F/X is a B movie that is comfortable and almost complacent in its category. Like Richard Rush's more ambitious The [...]

What ever happened to all those nice kids from New York City's High School of the Performing Arts who vowed to live forever in Fame? Well they've all been auditioning [...]

In Mask, Cher is once again on the outside track of her generation, the dark side of Yuppiedom, the ass-end of the new femininity. Her Rusty Dennis is a runaway [...]

Desperately Seeking Susan has a different spin and spirit from Mask. Susan Seidelman's funky farce is grainy, witty and slapdash, where Bogdanovich's expert melodrama is shiny and serious. Susan's setting [...]

There were six showings of Memories of Underdevelopment, the classic chronicle of bourgeois alienation in revolutionary Cuba, over two days of a warm March weekend at the Film Forum, the [...]

The nuclear holocaust has already happened as The Terminator begins, and the usual postcataclysm mopping up is in progress--the kind of Hobbesian nightmare projected in The Road Warrior, Blade Runner [...]

One of the best things about Stranger Than Paradise is the total absence of yuppie characters, values and equipment from the screen. It is not easy to find such relief [...]

By the time you read this--indeed, by the time I write this-- preparations may be under way for a United States invasion of Nicaragua. In Managua, they have been expecting [...]

There's also a tornado in Country, Jessica Lange's film (for convenience, she can be called the auteur) about contemporary farm life in Iowa. Due north and half a century away [...]