ATLANTIC CITY
***½
Canada/France
Small time crooks intermingle in Atlantic City.
An offbeat, understated, stylish character study.
dir: Louis Malle
wr: John Guare
cast: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy

THE BLUES BROTHERS
*½
USA
An ex-con just out of jail joins his brother in a plight to raise money to save their orphanage.
An odd, smug, dragged out mix of variable numbers, celebrity cameos, elaborate car chases and pileups - all of them gratuitous, few of them relieving the overriding tedium.
dir: John Landis
cast: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Carrie Fisher, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Henry Gibson, John Candy, Twiggy, Steven Spielberg

COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER
***½
USA
The life of country singer Loretta Lynn.
A vivid, engrossing and superbly acted biopic.
dir: Michael Apted
cast: Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Leavon Helm, Jennifer Beasley, Phyllis Boyens

DRESSED TO KILL
***
USA
A mysterious, deranged transvestite brutally slaughters a sexually frustrated housewife, with who he shares a therapist.
A ludicrous mix of gruesome violence, copious bloodletting, psychological disorders, soft-core porn and Hitchock homage that does manage to afford several tense setpieces.
dir: Brian de Palma
cast: Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, Angie Dickinson, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz

THE ELEPHANT MAN
***½
USA
In London 1884, a hideously deformed man at a freak show is rescued by a doctor.
Perhaps Lynch's most mainstream and accessible  production, this still makes for an odd and oddly affecting drama with a striking performance at its centre.
dir: David Lynch
cast: John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft, Freddie Jones, Wendy Hiller

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
**½
USA
The rebel forces fight Darth Vader from an ice planet.
Considered by many to be the highlight of the trilogy. Admittedly it is darker, more visually majestic and less idiotic than the first. But also rather boring.
dir: Irvin Kirshner
cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dean Williams, Anthony Daniels, David Prowse, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz, Alec Guinness

THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY
***
Botswana
A bushman sets out to get rid of a Coke bottle that has caused controversy in his tribe, and on his way encounters some of the more ridiculous aspects of civilization.
An unlikely blockbuster, which pretty much wastes a fantastic concept onto mildly amusing slapstick. There's an obvious curiosity value to it though.
dir: Jamie Uys
cast: N!Xau, Marius Weyers, Sandra Prinsloo, Louw Verwey, Micahel Thys, Nic De Jager

KAGEMUSHA
***½
Japan
Akira Kurosawa later came to consider this samurai epic as pretty much a dress rehearsal for his great "Ran" (1985).
For a two-and-a-half hour running time, the plot is a slim one: a sixteenth-century warlord's final wish is that he be replaced by a double and that this be kept secret from everybody but his most faithful followers for three years.
There isn't the amount of warfare and blood-letting you'd expect. This time out, Kurosawa is almost exclusively interested in pondering the Samurai code and what it stands for, but his philosophising is muted. He seems eager to expose the pomp and pageantry of war as hollow at the same time as glorifying it with sweeping panorama shots of impeccably arranged armaments. He doesn't necessarily come up with any observations striking enough to support the ponderous pace. But the majestic vistas and the vibrant lensing make the picture that much more endurable.
dir: Akira Kurosawa
ph: Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda, Kazuo Miyagawa, Asaichi Nakai
cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Kenichi Hagiwara

THE LAST METRO
***½
France
During the Nazi occupation of Paris, a Jewish director hides in the basement of his theatre.
An entertaining though never quite gripping or insightful backstage soap opera.
dir: François Truffaut
cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Poiret, Heinz Bennent, Andrea Ferreol, Pauline Dubost, Sabine Haudepin

MELVIN AND HOWARD
***
USA
Today aggressively quirky sitcoms about well-meaning but uneducated losers of a lower economical bracket are abundant – redundant really. But back at the beginning of the 80s, this must not have been the case. So this awkwardly paced, ostensibly observational farce about a real-life none-too-bright blue-collar mid-Westerner who may or may not have ended up on Howard Hughes’ will was hosanna’d by critics as something fresh and real. It’s well-acted and loose and relaxed on the surface, but beneath the dusty, folksy, gawky veneer, it’s crude, contrived and all too desperate to be loved.
dir: Jonathan Demme
wr: Bo Goldman
cast: Paul Le Mat, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Pamela Reed, Michael J. Pollard

ORDINARY PEOPLE
****
USA
An American family deals with the death of the eldest son.
A moving, remarkably intelligent and perceptive exploration of family, repression and grief.
dir: Robert Redford
wr: Alvin Sargent
cast: Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton, Judd Hirsch, Elizabeth McGovern, M. Emmet Walsh

PEPI, LUCI, BOM
***
Spain
Pedro Almodóvar's first feature serves no purpose other than to shock - and in this sense it still succeeds. With a half-assed half-plot about the bizarre sex lives of three women in Madrid as basis, Almodóvar's main premise is to depict as many different kinks as he can squeeze into 80 minutes. Along these lines, he brings up and sexualises just about every type of human waste you could imagine, as well as several that wouldn't necessarily cross your mind. Your options are to laugh or be offended. It's easier to laugh, especially during a commercial for an extraordinarily practical brand of women's underpants.
wr/dir: Pedro Almodóvar
cast: Carmen Maura, Eva Siva, Olvido Gara, Félix Rotaeta, Cecilia Roth

PRIVATE BENJAMIN
**½
USA
Despite her best efforts, this Goldie Hawn vehicle is just about as unfunny as the rest of them.
dir: Howard Zieff
cast: Goldie Hawn, Eileen Brennan, Armand Assante, Robert Webber, Barbara Barrie, Mary Kay Place, Harry Dean Stanton, Albert Brooks, Sam Wanamaker

RAGING BULL
****
USA
Probably the most hosannaed of Scorsese's pictures, his biography of prizefighter Jake La Motta is an indictment of male values founded on aggression from a man who has made a career of gawking at such values with the awe of a schoolboy. A tension persists throughout the movie between the raw tragedy of La Motta's self-destruction and Scorsese's infatuation with the movie gangster. It's that much more uncomfortable to witness the patently despicable acts that define La Motta's persona, filtered as they are through the cinematic codes of on-screen machismo which for decades have sneakily rendered such behaviour acceptable. The committed rawness of the performances and dialogue and the slow-mo extreme-close-up brutality of the violence play off the glamourising movie-ness of Scorsese's orchestration, charging La Motta's tale of damage and devolution into the realm of the operatic. It's a shame therefore that in the crucial moments Scorsese hurtles it into the realm of the redundant: he taints the final, visceral impact of his movie with some undergrad-level solemn posturing, capping things off as he does with no less than a quote from the Bible.
dir: Martin Scorsese
wr: Paul Schrader, Mardik Martin
ph: Michael Chapman
ed: Thelma Schoonmaker
cast: Robert de Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, Nicholas Colasanto

THE SHINING
***½
USA
The caretaker of an isolated hotel goes insane and his family suffers.
King's manipulative commercialism and Kubrick's meticulous stylising make for an expectedly uneasy combination. The end result is heavily flawed, not in the least for exhibiting Nicholson's worst performance, but also tense, chilling and compulsively watchable.
dir: Stanley Kubrick
ph: John Alcott
cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Barry Nelson, Scatman Crothers

STARDUST MEMORIES
***
USA
Woody Allen often brings up masturbation in his movies but the only time he made a movie entirely structured around it was this self-assured variation on Fellini's 8½. He lifts from Fellini the aggressively autobiographical, self-aggrandising slant, the stark monochrome, the dream-like fluidity and the army of funny-faced extras. And he contributes nothing of his own. It's an empty, polished pastiche of a movie, filled with lovely visuals and lovely tunes, none of which resonate.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
ph: Gordon Willis
cast: Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling, Marie-Christine Barrault, Jessica Harper, Tony Roberts, Helen Hanft, John Rothman, Louise Lasser

WHO'S SINGING OVER THERE?
***½
Yugoslavia
A misguided Yugoslav Film Academy in 1996 overlooked Dušan Makavejev's entire oeuvre and voted this slight if likable surrealist-tinged farce the best Yugoslav film of all time. It concerns a disparate bunch of rural eccentrics aboard a creaky bus to Belgrade on the eve of Nazi invasion. The lunacy takes on a bittersweet flavour in the lead-up to the grim finale. An irrepressible Gypsy with an accordion and a pubescent support vocal pops up regularly to present variations on a very catchy folk tune.
dir: Slobodan Sijan
cast: Pavle Vujisic, Dragan Nikolic, Danilo 'Bata' Stojkovic, Aleksandar Bercek, Neda Arneric, Milivoje Tomic, Tasko Nacic, Boro Stjepanovic, Slavko Stimac, Miodrag Kostic, Nenad Kostic, Bora Todorovic

YET TO SEE:

AIRPLANE!;
BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ;
THE BIG RED ONE;
BREAKER MORANT;
BYE BYE BRAZIL;
CARNY;
THE CONSTANT FACTOR;
THE CONTRACT;
DEATHWATCH;
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF;
FAME;
FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES;
GLORIA;
THE HANDYMAN;
HEAVEN'S GATE;
INSIDE MOVES;
LOULOU;
MAN OF IRON;
MELVIN AND HOWARD;
MOSCOW DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TEARS;
MY AMERICAN UNCLE;
NIJINSKY;
THE NINTH CONFIGURATION;
OBLOMOV;
RESURRECTION;
SPECIAL TREATMENT
THE STUNT MAN;
TRIBUTE;
UNDERGROUND U.S.A.;
A WEEK'S VACATION;
WILLIE AND PHIL