ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
****½
USA
A 35-year-old widow hits the
road in search of a singing career and self-discovery.
A warm, captivating character study, with numerous knowing nods to
Hollywood women's pictures of the 40s and 50s. It's regularly passed over
in Scorsese retrospectives, which is a shame since it's very possibly his
best work.
dir: Martin Scorsese
cast: Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Kris Kristofferson, Diane
Ladd, Billy Green Bush, Jodie Foster
ALICE IN THE CITIES
****
Germany
A disillusioned photographer in
USA is left to accompany a young girl on the way back to Germany.
The performances and crafting regularly veer towards incompetence, particularly in
the early sections. But these are only minor distractions from Wenders'
subtle, gradually affecting buildup of the central relationship. A quirky
take on melancholy pervades the film. It anticipates
the aesthetic Jim Jarmusch would adopt a decade later.
dir: Wim Wenders
wr: Wim Wenders, Veith der Furstenberg
cast: Rüdiger Vogler, Yella Röttlander, Lisa Kreuzer, Edda
Köchl
AMARCORD
***½
Italy
Growing up in a small Italian
town in the 30s.
A reportedly autobiographical series of bizarre vignettes, much loved and
highly representative of the director's more indulgent phase.
dir: Federico Fellini
cast: Puppela Maggio, Magali Noel, Armando Brancia, Ciccio
Ingrassia
BLAZING SADDLES
****
USA
A modern black worker becomes
sheriff of an 1860s Western town.
A wild, outrageous Western parody that eventually goes very far over the top. But nobody will mind. Kahn's deadpan pisstake of Marlene
Dietrich is the most gut-busting of many highlights.
dir: Mel Brooks
cast: Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Slim Pickens, Harvey Korman, Madeline
Kahn, Mel Brooks
CHINATOWN
*****
USA
L.A. 1937, a private detective
takes on a simple case and uncovers higher corruption.
A film noir homage and an enthralling example of
the genre it eulogises. A complex, moody
and atmospheric thriller, it boasts stunning contributions in every department:
tight writing, inspired direction, evocative cinematography, detailed
sets, a haunting score and unforgettable performances.
dir: Roman Polanski
wr: Robert Towne
ph: John A. Alonzo
m: Jerry Goldsmith
pd: Richard Sylbert
cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston
THE CONVERSATION
****
USA
An expert wiretapper feels
responsible for bringing about a murder.
A rigorous character study generally held in high regard.
It's
awkward at times, but Hackman's
remarkable performance and the inventive sound work keep you involved.
dir: Francis Ford Coppola
cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic
Forrest, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall
EFFI BRIEST
****
Germany
In 19th-century Germany, a
teenage girl is married to a baron and has an affair with one of his
friends.
A sensitive study of naive youth destroyed by
a merciless social system, which gains in resonance as it slowly builds
towards its delayed but nevertheless affecting end.
dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
cast: Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, Ulli Lommel, Karl-Heinz
Böhm, Ursula Stratz, Irm Hermann
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER
****
Germany
A young man who has spent his
entire life locked in a cellar is found abandoned in the the town square
of Nuremberg in the 1820s.
There is never an attempt to make Bruno S. resemble Kaspar's true age
of 16, though this stops being distracting early on. The setting is vivid,
the lensing remarkable and the humanity - both when repugnant and
reassuring - always fascinating.
wr/dir: Werner Herzog
ph: Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein
cast: Bruno S., Walter Landegast, Brigitte Mira, Willy
Semmelrogge, Hans Musaus
FEAR EATS THE SOUL
****
Germany
An elderly woman marries an
Arab worker, thirty years her junior.
Fassbinder's strange melodrama is more gripping for its angry attack of
the racist attitudes prevalent during the period than it is for its flashy
homaging of Douglas
Sirk's regularly homaged 1950s women's pictures.
wr/dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
cast: Brigitte Mira, El Heidi Ben Salem, Barbara Valentin,
Irm Hermann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Gauhe, Karl Scheydt
THE FRONT PAGE
**½
USA
A successful Chicago reporter
plans to retire and marry, while his editor goes to extremes to retain
him.
A nasty, leaden and claustrophobic version of an often - and usually better
- filmed story. It's put together by a dream team, the notion of which makes
its unpleasantness all the more puzzling.
dir: Billy Wilder
cast: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, David Wayne, Carol Burnett,
Susan Sarandon, Vincent Gardenia, Allen Garfield, Austin Pendleton
THE GODFATHER PART II
****½
USA
Michael Corleone retains his
position and reflects on his father's rise to power as a struggling
immigrant.
A thoughtful, contemplative sequel, statelier than its predecessor and
about as satisfying.
dir: Francis Ford Coppola
wr: Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo
ph: Gordon Willis
cast: Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall,
John Cazale, Lee Strasberg, Talia Shire, Michael V. Gazzo
THE GREAT GATSBY
***
USA
In 20s' New York, an enigmatic
gangster attempts to rekindle a pre-war romance.
The brilliance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel lay not in its
melodramatic storyline, but in its dislocation of the American Dream, its
sense of an irretrievable past as
well as its nostalgic evocation of the Roaring Twenties. This reasonably
diverting if soulless adaptation sticks to the plot quite closely, though
it never rises above an air of
1970s artifice let alone 1920s nostalgia.
dir: Jack Clayton
cast: Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Sam Waterson, Scott Wilson,
Karen Black, Lois Chiles
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
**½
USA
Second-rate, forgettable Bond.
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MIRROR
***
USSR
An artist's memories of life in
Russia during WWII.
Generally impenetrable childhood reminiscing, with some
poignant passages.
dir: Andrei Tarkovsky
cast: Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Margarita Terekhova, L. Tarkovskaya,
Philip Yankovsky
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS
***
UK
Hercule Poirot solves a murder
aboard a snowbound train.
A big money adaptation of a
popular mystery novel. It feels written for a smaller screen.
dir: Sidney Lumet
cast: Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Wendy
Hiller, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Anthony Perkins,
Michael York, Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark, Jacqueline Bisset,
Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geourge Coulouris, John Gielgud
THE
PARALLAX VIEW
****
USA
A Watergate-era conspiracy thriller with an identity crisis. It's torn between the
prestige of a grim social conscience and the release of being able to
break into a bar brawl or a car chase when things slow down. Individual
sequences are more impressive than the whole, the plot doesn't add up in
retrospect and it's ultimately difficult
to take the film as seriously as you're asked to take it. But it's stylish, vaguely disconcerting
fun while it's on.
dir: Alan J. Pakula
ph: Gordon Willis
m: Michael Small
pd: George Jenkins
cast: Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels, Paula
Prentiss, Kelly Thorsden, Earl Hindman, Chuck Waters, Bill Joyce, Bettie
Johnson, Bill McKinney
THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY
****½
France
Buñuel returns to his roots with this, his most blatantly
surrealist picture since he left André Breton's famous circle in 1932. He
abandons his perfected style of building a point with eloquence, and cranks up hardcore on
the shock and sensationalism. The picture is a bunch of tenuously linked
episodes where very strange things happen - with highlights including a
dinner party where the notion of food is presented as vulgar and the
dramatised disappearance of a young girl who is vocally present all along.
dir: Luis Buñuel
wr: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière
cast: Monica Vitti, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Piccoli, Jean
Rochefort, Adolfo Celli, Michel Lonsdale, Adriana Asti
STAVISKY
***½
France/Italy
With elegance and icy precision, Alain Resnais mounts an ode to 1930s art
deco with bits of political intrigue interspersed involving an exiled
Trotsky and a Russian con man who half-inadvertently helped shape French
history for the next decade.
dir: Alain Resnais
ph: Sacha Vierny
cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, François Perier, Anny
Duperey, Michel Lonsdale, Claude Rich, Gerard Depardieu
THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS
****
USA
A fugitive couple kidnap a
patrol officer on their way to reclaiming their son, fostered out while
they were in jail.
Both bizarrely funny and subtly gripping. The accents are
tough-to-impossible to penetrate, but the action moves so fast and the actors are so full of conviction, you barely
care what they say.
dir: Steven Spielberg
cast: Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, Michael Sacks, William
Atherton
THE
TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE
****
USA
The way that most shady movie foreigners decide to hijack planes and banks
and such, marvelous enunciator Robert Shaw and his uneducated crew take
control of a subway train and demand $1m of the NYC mayor in exactly one
hour. Walter Matthau is stuck negotiating between them. The nerve-wracking
tension is flavoured with satirical jabs that at times come off a tad glib
given the circumstances. But the plot is addictive.
dir: Joseph Sargent
cast: Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector
Elizondo, Earl Hindman, James Broderick, Dick O'Neill, Lee Wallace, Jerry
Stiller, Doris Roberts
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
****
USA
Five teenagers are terrorized
by cannibals in rural Texas.
Gruesome, stifling low-budget splatter horror. Notorious and
greatly influential - not necessarily for the better, but its own skill
and impact is undeniably impressive.
dir: Tobe Hooper
cast: Marilyn Burns, Allen Danzinger, Paul A. Partain, William
Vail, Teri McMinn, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunner Hansen, John Dugan
THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!
****
USA
A joyous, infectiously nostalgic compilation of highlights from nearly 100
MGM musicals.
THIEVES
LIKE US
*****
USA
At the height of his remarkable mid-career period Robert Altman made this
oddly neglected gem about a trio of Depression-era bank-robbers in the
mid-West, the youngest of whom falls in love with a naive girl who helps
them out. It's a striking and strikingly vivid inversion of the numerous
romanticised depictions of the period. In a sense it's the anti-Bonnie and
Clyde (as well as the anti-You Only Live Once): a raw, realist portrait of
grimy people doing grimy things, partly out of desperation and partly out
of knowing no alternative - and, unlike Nicholas Ray and Arthur Penn (and
countless others), Altman avoids the trap of glamourising or in any way justifying the
violence. He does however come up with his own kind of poetry and a
language of romance with a freshness to it, which eschews nostalgia and
which is no less poignant for it.
dir: Robert Altman
wr: Calder Willingham, Joan Tewkesbury, Robert Altman
cast: Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, Bert
Remsen, Louise Fletcher, Ann Latham, Tom Skerritt, Al Scott
THE TOWERING INFERNO
**½
USA
A skyscraper catches fire.
An embarrassing star-studded disaster of a disaster film,
even if it perversely entertaining.
dir: John Guillermin, Irwin Allen
cast: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Faye Dunaway,
Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Vaughn, Jennifer
Jones, O. J. Simpson, Robert Wagner
LES VALSEUSES
****
France
The sexual misadventures of a
pair of aging thugs.
A wandering, gruesome and outrageous sex farce - in many ways
it would play as an archetype of French film to those who don't watch French film.
dir: Bertrand Blier
wr: Bertrand Blier, Philippe Dumarcay
cast: Gérard Depardieu. Patrick Dewaere, Miou-Miou, Jeanne
Moreau, Brigitte Fossey, Isabelle Huppert, Michel Peyrelon, Gérard
Boucaron, Jacques Chailleux
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE
***½
USA
A suburban housewife, the wife
of an erratic blue-collar worker, is showing signs of mental disorder.
Unpleasant but compulsive viewing. There is constantly the feel of an
impending trainwreck, and it seems this was precisely the makers' goal.
dir: John Cassavetes
wr: Katherine Cassavetes
cast: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Katherine Cassavetes,
Lady Rowlands, Fred Draper
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
****½
USA
Brain surgeon Frederick
Frankenstein returns to his grandfather's castle.
A hilarious parody of the many Frankenstein movies, with gorgeous
monochrome photography that brings warm memories of the original.
dir: Mel Brooks
wr: Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks
ph: Gerald Hirschfeld
cast: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr,
Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Keneth Mars, Gene Hackman
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