My first time around with writer/director Ingmar Bergman. #241 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of comic book movies. The IMDB grab for this movie has always sounded so intriguing:
A knight returning to Sweden after the Crusades seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.
but the bulk of the runtime dances around these issues to the extent that I found this misleading. The film assumes a Christian ontology and disposition which seems at odds with a personified Death. Even allowing for that I did not understand why, if you're supreme-being curious and you are given sufficient reasons to suspect that your time is up, you wouldn't hurry to meet your maker. Moreover demanding sensory evidence of the transcendental reeks of category error. What is served up is a lot pontificating, mostly about women, sex and why the Creator is so elusive. It feels pre-modern in its exploration.
Structurally things start out media res and Bergman takes his time establishing most of the above quote. His knight was a very young Max von Sydow, Death Bengt Ekerot. Gunnar Björnstrand as the knight's squire opines at length. I kept waiting for it to kick into gear but all I got was distraction and evasion, an inarticulate fear of death. There is a fair bit of man looking at the world, woman looking at the man.
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2000. His writeup is more about Bergman's career though. Bosley Crowther at the time.
Unrewarded curiosity about what Jean-Louis Trintignant did after Z (1969). Also an Angie Dickinson jag from Dressed to Kill (1980). She played the wife of L.A. mafioso Ted de Corsia who had more interest in his son Umberto Orsini. Outside hitman Trintignant executed his task just fine but was surprised when a mostly non-speaking and overly inert Roy Scheider tried to execute his. The former was fortunate that Ann-Margret (Carnal Knowledge (1971)) was at such a loose end that she offered to move to Paris with him.
IMDB trivia claims that the French crew — co-writer/director Jacques Deray, co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Ian McLellan Hunter — came to the city for another project that didn't happen, and so opportunistically dashed off a script in 12 days. It's essentially an exploitation piece, in love with yank tanks like Melville was but at least here the streets are made for them. The strong cast cannot make up for the disjointed script; there are several stretches of tedium, especially the car chases.
The daytime cinematography was fine but the street scenes at night were very poor. There was the odd inventive image, like the corpse at the funeral parlour. Talia Shire (Connie Corleone) got the Anjanette Comer role there. It does somewhat function as a time capsule for seedy L.A. at the time, much like Whore (1991) did.
A grab from this was included in Boorman and the Devil (2025) as evidence of how Hollywood took more risks during the new wave. I mostly wanted to see what Christopher Walken did early on in his career. Also for Sean Connery. It proved impossible to care about his romance with Dyan Cannon (Deathtrap (1982)) whose time ran out. Martin Balsam does some solidly fruity work. Directed by Sidney Lumet from a script Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975)) derived from Lawrence Sanders's novel of the same name.
Connery apparently spent a decade in the can as a favour to the mafia (I think). He quickly gets bored with not having money and invests an excessive amount of time organising a heist: he aims to empty out an entire apartment block. The second half shows how that unwinds. But perhaps the point of it all was to observe all the surveillance (on film and audio tape) from a wide variety of interested parties, albeit to no particular end.
The mafia connection was entirely dispensable. The setting and its denizens reminded me of Rosemary's Baby (1968). In its favour was the casting of Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939)) alongside Judith Lowry as a sort of Statler and Waldorf pair who provide some very amusing commentary on proceedings. They should have built the movie around those two.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Roger Greenspun at the New York Times. Both enjoyed Alan King's mafioso.
John Boorman's output is a bit all-over-the-shop; from the accessibly mainstream (Deliverance (1972)) to the amusingly fruity (Zardoz (1974)). Some projects may've functioned if better assembled (Excalibur (1981)). This is a doco by David Kittredge about the making of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).
Having seen none of the franchise and with no interest in it whatsoever was no liability in enjoying the ruefulness on show here. The shoot looked suitably crazy and the claims of supernatural interference are as overheated as everything else. Most of the talking heads (including Louise Fletcher, Linda Blair, Stephanie Zacharek and Boorman himself) say interesting things. (The other, younger directors are mostly filler.) They assert the obvious about the deceased: Richard Burton was a limited actor ("dead from the neck down") with a great voice. The budget limitations caused them to draw inspiration from Black Narcissus (1947) and shoot on sound stages, but it seems the really exciting stuff was shot on location, including the roof of the Warner Bros skyscraper in NYC. Someone claimed that some of Ennio Morricone's score wasn't even music.
Kittredge pumps up Boorman's tyres a bit too much; he is indeed visually creative, wildly so, but his movies tend to philosophical incoherence. This is observed here implicitly by everyone piling on Rospo Pallenberg for not improving the situation. The concept of audience-independent filmmaking doesn't strike me as of much concern now given the huge reduction in the costs of production. Kobek's take on Kenneth Anger is a superior work on that front.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: justice for the heretic. Peter Sobczynksi: "the Boorman film is a stone-cold classic and this is a hill that I am willing to fall upon." He claims that Boorman's crazypants cinema had a revival in 2026. More dished dirt at the film's IMDB trivia page. There is a grab of Friedkin mouthing off in this doco but I can only imagine how much better it would've been if they'd been able to interview him too.
A pointer from Peter Sobczynksi's review of Verity (2026) and some Brian De Palma completism. Notionally a psychosexual/erotic thriller and it is indeed prurient and lurid, ploughing the track for not only Basic Instinct (1992) (amongst many others) but also The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
The movie is split into halves with a thick seam in the middle, bridged somewhat by Michael Caine's shrink in one of his blander performances. The first is languid, focussing on clotheshorse/socialite/housewife Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo (1959)) who is all hot and bothered in NYC. The scenes of her looking for some attention in an art gallery mostly work before it degenerates into a slasher. Last/call girl Nancy Allen (the Mrs De Palma of the day, The Last Detail (1973), Robocop (1987)) takes over and proceeds to run around trying to crack the case while avoiding the same fate. The late exposition dump was very unwelcome, as was the concluding "it was only a dream" bookend scene. Somehow she (and De Palma) didn't go all Mrs Robinson (1967) over gifted geek/mama's boy Keith Gordon.
Dickinson got the harder task and the better end of the movie, but her efforts to draw attention to the fine details of her activities (the frustrated discarding of a lonesome glove, a missing wedding ring, a letter diagnosing VD) seem misplaced in this very unsubtle production. Getting bored with what I was shown (so many scenes linger, trying to amp the tension) I started to wonder if De Palma wasn't also trying to play identity games ala David Lynch's far superior Mulholland Drive (2001). But the ladies are all blondes.
Roger Ebert: three stars. De Palma was trying to mime the Hitchcock style. Vincent Canby. IMDB trivia. Enough body doubles to confuse everything.
Inevitable as it's Looney Tunes. Essentially a joke-conceit — Wile E. Coyote gets fed up with the failure of Acme's devices and sues them — overstretched to feature length. The cartoon parts are generally funny but the human elements are poor: Will Forte as a loser, ambulance-chasing lawyer, John Cena as a high-level Acme functionary, Lana Condor as something relatable for Gen Y or Z or alpha. Eric Bauza's voice work is nowhere as good as Mel Blanc's; Bugs Bunny just didn't sound right at all, so much so that I'd've preferred something generated by AI. And surely the Road Runner does not say "beep beep".
Even the source material by Ian Frazier stretched the joke too thin. James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch did the overstretching in the writers' room.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed director Dave Green, focussing on how the movie was sprung from the Warner Bros purgatory. Peter Sobczynksi: it's not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). A movie about the release of this movie may've been more fun. And so on, way beyond my attention span.
A jag from Falling Down (1993) via Ebbe Roe Smith who acts here. Written by Daniel Petrie Jr. Directed by Jim McBride.
Lead Dennis Quaid is a slightly bent police lieutenant in New Orleans. The only available woman in town, Ellen Barkin (Tender Mercies (1983), Down by Law (1986), Sea of Love (1989)), works for the D.A. and has reason to suspect that the cops are in on a mafia/wiseguy murder or two and a heroin stash. Ned Beatty got the John Goodman role, an amiable police chief, leaving John Goodman with little to work with. Things generally go as they must in a winsome, comedic mode. It's a bit Howard Hawks with Lisa Jane Persky doing the Hildy role well enough that I wish she'd been the focus. There's so much mumbling that I missed boatloads of dialogue and most of the character's names. Barkin is game but not my idea of a good time. She's at her best when she's chewing some man out. There are some funny bits but I felt I was more laughing at than with.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Clearly I missed the depths, the eroticism and the characterisation. Vincent Canby was far less convinced.
An improbable jag via screenwriter Norman Wexler from Saturday Night Fever (1977). He got some help from Gary DeVore in adapting a story by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati. Directed by John Irvin whose CV is littered with dreck like this with the singular redeeming exception of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). Ill-advised Arnie completism.
Ex-FBI agent Arnie is tasked with cleaning up the Chicago mob. The setup makes a minimal amount of sense but soon enough the filmmakers fumble the plot. It has no redeeming features.
Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars, presumably because he could laugh at the Chicago settings. Vincent Canby: Arnie is the thinking kid's Stallone.
A Frederic Forrest jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Conversation (1974). Directed by Joel Schumacher (A Time to Kill (1996), some ill-advised Batmans, etc.). Written by Ebbe Roe Smith.
The central conceit was to give the Los Angeles of the day a big broad unsubtle serve, and as such it functions as a time capsule. Michael Douglas led. As a fed-up veteran he went looking for his inner Matthew Modine/Vincent D'Onofrio in an effective, bland and just sometimes explosive performance much like what he did in The Game (1997). Barbara Hershey was his placeholder ex-wife, Lois Smith fine as his concerned mother. Robert Duvall ran on a parallel track, a cop on his last day who is married to Tuesday Weld, to whom time has not been kind. Her histrionics are somewhat amusing. Rachel Ticotin, radiant as Duvall's ex-partner/protege/daughter surrogate. Forrest played the surplus store operator that Chef may've become if he'd made it, and of course he doesn't make it. Dedee Pfeiffer is soaked when Douglas shoots up her burger joint.
Douglas's straight walk from somewhere west to Venice Beach reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's in Straight Time (1978) and more figuratively Burt Lancaster's swim. He decided he's not going to take it any more. The racism lacked the cutting edge of Spike Lee's east-coast Do The Right Thing (1989); here the "Korean" shop keeper is deemed insufficiently white to escape Douglas's rampage. The ganglands were better observed in Boyz'N'Hood (1991) and Venice Beach by White Men Can't Jump (1992). There is a minor-note No Country for Old Men (2007) ruefulness in the Douglas/Duvall pairing. Cliches abounded.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Some easy scapegoating here but he'd prefer you to blame Wall Street. Vincent Canby also noted the similarities with The Swimmer, albeit the John Cheever original. Valentino D. Harrison, the kid who instructs Douglas on how to use the missile launcher.
Prompted by Dwight Garner's review of a collection of Nik Cohn's articles and a sense of eventual inevitability. Englishman Cohn wrote the source material (Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (1976)) that Norman Wexler (Serpico (1973)) massaged into a script that John Badham (WarGames (1983)) directed.
John Travolta's first big-screen splash, and it got him a deserved Oscar nom. The dialogue is mostly very amusing but he and it are let down by a scenario that struggles for plot when it should've settled for character and scene: disco and the Bee Gees, they speak loud and clear, then and now. It does function as a time capsule for some part of Brooklyn and the graffiti-encrusted subway that only our main man is brave enough to use. The elements of romcom involving dream-dancer/girlfriend Karen Lynn Gorney (David and Lisa (1962)) provide little heat or light, unlike the polyester suits. Brother Martin Shakar pulling the ripcord on the priesthood seemed totally irrelevant.
The cinematography is generally fine in mostly a realism style, out on the streets, but flags in the discotheque: the lights at the same height as faces erase features and there are too many shots from below that occlude the important stuff.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars at the time and four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. This was Siskel's favourite film; Ebert keeps circling back to La Dolce Vita (1960) as some kind of biographical touchstone. Janet Maslin. IMDB trivia: instant retro. Who even knew there was a sequel (1983)? Directed by Sylvester Stallone! — one star from Roger Ebert.
Samantha Morton completism. On the pile since forever, mostly because I've struggled to get started with all of Lynne Ramsay's movies; this was the first I managed to get all the way through. She directed a screenplay she co-wrote with Liana Dignini based on Alan Warner's book with the same title (1995). Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's mention of a a new book by Anwen Crawford on this movie.
It's Christmastime in or near Glasgow and some people have seen enough of those. Morton responds to her boyfriend's departure by going out partying with her bestie Kathleen McDermott. After recovering she decides to pirate the manuscript of his novel and spend his money on a jaunt to Andalucía, Spain but not before slicing up his mortal remains. Finally, a use for the great Scottish outdoors! The packaged tour encourages industrialised, putatively hedonistic but actually just bad behaviour; McDermott takes to it like a thawed-out fish but Morton seems mostly disconnected until she encounters a boy who has also lost someone. There's a scene that I took to be a homage to Manuel from Fawlty Towers (~ 1975). Morton drags McDermott up the coast a bit where they're sort-of running the bulls. A publisher comes through with more money than Morton could ever dream of but the bestie cannot imagine leaving Glasgow. Morton departs, alone.
Morton's character is deliberately underexplained, which would have been fine if she exhibited a bit more of the quiet/internalised desperation about her Scottish situation that came out in one line about how many years she has until she can draw a pension. Mike Leigh did a better job on that front in All or Nothing (2002); perhaps I was insufficiently sympathetic to track the subtleties here. McDermott mostly just giggled all the time, a good time girl who also lacked character development. She's more rusted on to Glasgow but we're not shown why; her excitement at the prospect of an Englishman coming to visit her suggests she should also be eyeing the exits. One thread is how money cleaves people from their situations and generally decreases social adhesion.
The camerawork is often very jittery, trying to evoke some urgency from outside the frame when there is or could be enough going on within it. At other times it superbly captured some messy and/or sublime imagery. There is a lot of unselfconscious nudity. I missed a fair chunk of the dialogue, at least sometimes due to the sound mix. I didn't find it all that emotionally involving, which was perhaps the point.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars and an inaccurate review. A Critic's Pick by Elvis Mitchell. The source novel "felt like an answer to Irvine Welsh's book Trainspotting (1993)". (Women are from the west, men the east?) "A nihilist road movie." And some hefty caveats. Stephanie Zacharek at length. That shot of Morton on a balcony against this expanse of Spanish hotel is very striking. All claim the boyfriend's suicide is selfish but it did provide Morton with the means to escape and start her own life.
Eventually inevitable Deborah Kerr completism. She's very young here, playing a Sister who would be superior in an Anglican order of working nuns, sent from Kolkata to her own semi-private Kafiristan to enlighten the natives. We're shown in flashback that she was abandoned by a brainless Irishman set on making money in America. This appears to have inoculated her against the charms of males, incarnated in the valley by David Farrar who looked like the 1980s matinee idol Richard Chamberlain (The Thorn Birds (1983)) with tonsils to match. Sabu (The Thief of Bagdad (1940)) as The Young General may also have been expected to have interested the Sisters but he of course goes for the lowborn, apparently-mute Jean Simmons (in brownface and cheap jewellery).
All the nuns looked the same to me (all wearing a fair bit of makeup) which made it a relief when fruity Kathleen Byron (Sister Ruth) got out of her habit and did the Brides of Christ (1991) thing. All are histrionic and overwrought to some extent which is exacerbated by the film barely showing their quotidian existence. At times it dons the camp motifs of classic horror (obtrusive music, insufficiently-motivated histrionic cackling laughter, shadows, ...) to bewildering effect. I didn't really grasp what the point of it all was.
The Technicolor cinematography is sometimes amazing, especially given that it was shot on sets in England and Ireland; it got Jack Cardiff an Oscar. Written and directed by Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger. Based on a novel by Rumer Godden.
Someone at the New York Times. IMDB trivia: indeed the valley is populated by people from all over Asia.
So improbably connected to Ninotchka (1939) that I had to watch it. Also some misguided Arnie completism. Directed and co-written by Walter Hill (The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979)). Harry Kleiner and Troy Kennedy Martin helped with the screenplay.
This movie is mostly boring. Arnie plays a Russian cop with Garbo-esque rigidity in what was one of his least amusing performances. He's paired with Chicago cop James Belushi who continually runs at the mouth. Peter Boyle can't do this straight stuff (a police chief) too well. Larry Fishburne with the shit-eating grin, not yet large. Richard Bright. Notionally they're on the trail of cocaine-importing Russian (Ed O'Ross) via his wife Gina Gershon and some black power cats run by Brent Jennings from his prison workout set. Brion James, informant, copped the usual abuse.
So, many strong players but not well cast. The minor characters were more interesting.
Roger Ebert: three stars, probably inflated by the Chicago setting. Vincent Canby: should've gone straight to video. It would probably be deemed a second-screen effort these days.
And even more Ernst Lubistch completism with a dash of curiosity about Jimmy Stewart's early career. Samson Raphaelson derived his screenplay from the play by Miklós László.
Quite tame by Lubitsch's standards. Stewart is a clerk in a gift shop in Budapest with better taste than his boss or coworkers. Spunky Margaret Sullavan comes in, looking for a job, impresses with her mad skills in unloading a tacky music-box-ish cigarette receptacle on a susceptible woman and is hired on the spot. Both keep up a correspondence with a mysterious, sophisticated other. We do not get to see much of the letters. The boss, Frank Morgan (The Wizard of Oz (1939)), has some domestic difficulties. Things go predictably for the most part.
The identity shenanigans struck me as Shakespearean. The scenario wants us to believe the characters are somehow not materialistic despite their privation and work as salespeople. The women are all hysterical to varying degrees, and Sullavan's self-reflection pointed to the later psychologicals. Jimmy Stewart got to spin a yarn, much like in Rope (1948).
Frank S. Nugent at the time: genial and tender.
And still more Ernst Lubitsch completism. He directed a screenplay from the very strong team of Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950)), Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, based on an original story by Melchior Lengyel (To Be or Not to Be (1942)). It seems this was the first thing I'd seen Greta Garbo in and it's coincidentally her highest-rated feature at IMDB. Over several nights.
Three Soviet comrade-stooges are sent to Paris to flog some jewels expropriated from an Russian aristocrat (Ina Claire, reminding me a bit of no-fuss Piper Laurie in Twin Peaks) who just happens to reside there. She finds out about this in the usual screwy/small world way and her not-as-rusted-on-as-she-thought paramour Melvyn Douglas offers to help her lay claim to them. Garbo is sent to close the transaction (so the people don't starve) and of course she and Douglas meet cute and so forth. The romance is heavy-handed and the entirety is all very predictable but is made bearable by some very funny dialogue.
Garbo started out as robotic as Arnie as a fake human Soviet apparatchik but softened into dreaminess on return to privation in dreary Moscow. I was so envious of her ability to ignore irrelevant bullshit all the way along. Her performance got her an Oscar nom. Bela Lugosi appeared late-on as a commissar.
Frank S. Nugent: "gay and impertinent and malicious." This was in the time when Stalin wasn't yet beyond the pale. IMDB trivia: are we really to believe that Arnie studied Garbo's performances?
At the 14.30 session Reading Cinemas West Lakes (Adelaide), cinema 6, for 13 AUD on their cheap-ish Tuesday. I was aiming to be the last person in Australia to see Christoper Nolan's latest on a big screen, as I may have been with Tenet (2020), but I had to share that honour with at least one other bloke. The house lights did not come up at the end.
Nolan maladapted Homer and directed. Ludwig Göransson's score is bombastic, obtrusive and often unnecessary. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is sometimes effective but often jittery and uncertain of what it wants us to see; I can't imagine David Lean going for this. The length was excessive. Sepia, murky, grim. The third movement was witless after Uberto Pasolini's The Return (2024) and similarly suffered from a poorly cast Telemachus (here Tom Holland). Anne Hathaway did what she could as Penelope but never got to stick it to her man like Juliette Binoche did. (Throughout she sounded much like Catwoman to me, without that prosthetic motorcycle.) And similarly for Odyssean Matt Damon against Ralph Fiennes, all John Brolin wannabe. (His performance was a long way from Cillian Murphy's triumphant effort in Oppenheimer (2023) and so the blame lay with him.) Robert Pattinson did what he could, camping it up. Benny Safdie as an Agamemnon we hardly got to see. John Leguizamo, effective, so long since Romeo + Juliet (1996). Himesh Patel!
So much for the sausagefest, another generation of Hollywood blokes going to war just like their elders did in The Thin Red Line (1998). Amongst the women was Charlize Theron in nothing more than a perfume ad, making me wonder why there wasn't room for Sharlto Copley too. Lupita Nyong'o, strong and underused. Zendaya as Athena, not persuasive, not great. Samantha Morton got an inspired scene as Circe which actually laid bare the problem with the whole thing: too much important material was dealt with only in cursory exposition. It made me wish that she was the focus of the whole show, that it was less All Our Tragic (2014).
The multitrack mashup was not hard to follow for the most part, or perhaps it just didn't matter. It's sexless; the Sirens were in longshot, the two matrimonial scenes all angst. I felt the trip to Hades was a bust. A wooden horse dragged up the sand, unheroically. The same horse, burning. An outro like the distended ending of Lord of the Rings: loads of not-very-convincing exposition, exit west, as if nobody saw 25th Hour (2002). "Zeus's Law", of hospitality for the stranger, totally bogus; the Greek gods themselves were capricious and not lawful. As everyone knows.
Before watching this I only read Emily Wilson's fine essay and listened to Jason Di Rosso's take which I interpreted as a pan. He did not interview anyone. Of course reviews are legion. Peter Sobczynski was emotionally unmoved; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) makes for the better rewatch. Dana Stevens: matinee swords-and-sandals at all scales. Too much too shallowly drawn. Christos Tsiolkas: debts to Terrence Malick. Humourless. Too many strands. Damon showed "range and quiet strength as an actor" in the scene where he is tied to the mast so he can listen to the Sirens. (I wasn't as entranced.) Many ineptly-staged scenes such as the sacking of Troy. Daniel Mendelsohn had expectations that Nolan could finesse the material but of course there's more Nolan than Homer in the result. Pedestrian dialogue throughout. And so on and on.
Ernst Lubitsch completism. He directed a screenplay by Samson Raphaelson who had help from Grover Jones in adapting Aladár László's play.
Very funny screwball. The setup is similar to Read My Lips (2001): Miriam Hopkins thinks she has found her next mark in the form of Herbert Marshall (sporting hair like Robert S. McNamara's) as does he. Fortunately both realise that they have found something far more valuable in each other and things are halcyonic until they come across the very glamorous widow Kay Francis in Paris. She's disinterested in running her husband's family's perfume company or in her Thomson-and-Thompson suitors, making her easy prey for Marshall's suave shtick. They meet in a scene where purses stand in for Cinderella's clogs. Things proceed as true love must.
The Art Deco modernism is spectacular. Hopkins got the best lines but is unfortunately onscreen for the least time. IMDB trivia suggests it was a long way from complying with the Hays code. Clock faces indicating hours spent in passion!
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 1998. Mordaunt Hall for the New York Times at the time.
Jean Renoir directed and co-wrote with Charles Spaak. Set during World War I but almost entirely disregards the violent aspects to instead focus on the decay in class solidarity amongst the European gentry. Erich von Stroheim (Sunset Boulevard (1950)) played the German side of that, Pierre Fresnay the French. Lead Jean Gabin represented the working class who demonstrated their own enduring comradery across racial (and some national) lines in the full knowledge that they were getting stiffed; revolution was in the air but the upper classes did not seem to know that things had to change.
Most of the action occurs in several officers' camps where English and French are detained by Germans. There's a staged performance, something like what's in Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). The French have sex on the brain, as in Costa-Gavras's Shock Troops (1967). The English cross-dress. There's a great scene where the Russians receive a crate of books from their caring Empress and a touching romance at the end.
In two sittings. Jean Gabin struck me as a French Robert Mitchum (in affable mode).
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. The Great Escape (1963). Casablanca (1942). Frank S. Nugent at the time.
A smoogery of footage and audio from the Apollo manned moon missions, some of it great, much of it overly familiar. Too often I wanted to know who was speaking and that got increasingly frustrating, as did the authentically hokey bits and fatuous narration. Despite that it could've gone much longer. Brian Eno's incidental music is too obtrusive, worse than Vangelis's for Cosmos (1980), or perhaps it was Carl Sagan's tonsils that made the difference; these space cowboys declaimed like schoolboys. Over two nights.
Caryn James for the New York Times at the time: "It's not a bad idea to ignore the narration ... the better to appreciate its astonishing visual spectacle." Terrence Rafferty in 2009 (?): "At first ... you wonder whose voice it is, but after a while you stop wondering." Or maybe you don't. Achieved essentially Soviet collectivism through elision of individuality.
Al Pacino's first role in a feature film. He has a very brief scene as a cocky/sleazy Fonz-like character in a Brooklyn dance hall, reinforcing lead Patty Duke's lack of self esteem as she comes of age. She moves to "the Village" (apparently Greenwich Village) to get away from her stodgy parents and their vintage fashion. There she encounters and gets involved with a man, an architect down from Connecticut who is also trying to rediscover or reinvent himself through painting female nudes. She undergoes some of the requisite personal development but of course hasn't thought most of it through. The ending was a bust.
The majority of the runtime is colour and as such it sort-of works as an NYC time capsule, at least of making movies in that city. Could you really ride a Honda scooter in the pedestrian lanes in those days? And rent that enormous apartment on 10 USD an hour? A. Martin Zweiback's screenplay cleaves overly closely to the source material (due to him and Stanley Shapiro). Fred Coe directed. It reminded me of Adrienne Shelly's work with Hal Hartley (The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990)) but without (enough of) the artifice.
Roger Ebert: three stars. His art is terrible. Vincent Canby. Knives out and fair enough.
