ACROSS 110TH
STREET
***
AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD
*****
Germany
In 1560, an insane conquistador
takes forty people on excruciating quest to find legendary fortunes in the
South American jungles.
A hypnotic, haunting study of megalomania.
wr/dir: Werner Herzog
ph: Thomas Mauch
ed: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
m: Popol Vuh
cast: Klaus Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Helena Rojo, Cecilia
Rivera
BAD COMPANY
*****
THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON
KANT
***
Germany
An arrogant lesbian fashion
designer falls in love with a young model.
Amusing visual excesses cannot relieve two hours of relentless tedium.
Despite much hysterical introspection, no one comes across the reason
it was necessary to inflict any of this onto celluloid.
dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
cast: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Eva
Mattes, Karin Schaake, Gisela Fackelday
CABARET
*****
USA
In Berlin 1931, an English
translator meets an exuberant American nightclub performer.
A singularly seductive account of the disintegration of Berlin's Golden
Age into the Nazi era, with iconic numbers and performances.
dir: Bob Fosse
wr: Jay Presson Allen
ph: Geoffrey Unsworth
ed: David Bretherton
ad: Jurgen Kiebach, Rolf Zehetbauer
cast: Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, Michael York, Helmut
Griem, Fritz Wepper, Marisa Berenson
THE CANDIDATE
****½
CHLOË
IN THE AFTERNOON
****
France
The last of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales concerns a happily married
bourgeois businessman who spends his afternoons with an old crush,
contemplating adultery. It's the kind of literate, minor-key ethical
quandary that Rohmer executes with such routine knowingness and precision
as to make it seem slight. Though, of course, it's anything but.
wr/dir: Eric Rohmer
cast: Bernard Verley, Zouzou, Françoise Verley, Daniel
Ceccaldi, Malvina Penne, Babette Ferrier, Françoise Fabian,
Marie-Christine Barrault
CRIES AND WHISPERS
*****
Sweden
A wrenching, tortuous probe into the variously battered interior lives of
three sisters and a country maid gathered in an isolated baroque manor at
the turn of the century to watch the eldest die an agonising death.
On a purely formalist level, Ingmar Bergman's film is
impeccable. But it's more than that. Anchored by several of the rawest,
most mesmerising performances singed onto celluloid, it burrows with
hurting, devastating preciseness into the panic of a pain that can
infiltrate and suffocate the soul at its core.
wr/dir: Ingmar Bergman
ph: Sven Nykvist
ed: Siv Lundgren
ad: Marik Vos
cast: Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullman, Kari
Sylwan, Erland Josephson, George Arlin, Henrik Moritzen, Anders Ek
DELIVERANCE
****
USA
Four Atlanta businessmen on a
holiday weekend are menaced by Appalachian mountainmen.
A harrowing, brutal and disturbing assault on human nature as a
concept, as well as the human nature that makes an audience member feel
violated when forced to watch comparatively decent people get brutally
assaulted.
dir: John Boorman
wr: James Dickey
ph: Vilmos Zsigmond
cast: Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, James
Dickey
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE
*****
France
The dinner plans of a group of
friends are continually interrupted.
A witty, sophisticated surrealist exposé of bourgeois artifice and
hypocrisy from an established master of this sort of thing.
dir: Luis Buñuel
wr: Luis Buñuel, Jean-CLaude Carrière
cast: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle
Ogier, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Paul Frankeur, Julien Bertheau
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO
KNOW ABOUT SEX BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
***½
USA
Seven sketches on the subject
of screwing.
A broad and uneven but generally amusing collection.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
cast: Woody Allen, Lynn Redgrave, John Carradine, Lou Jacobi,
Louise Lasser, Tony Randall, Burt Reynolds, Gene Wilder
FAT
CITY
****
USA
John Huston was one of very few old-Hollywood directors to successfully
adapt to the loose, pseudo-modernist pessimism that defined 1970s American
cinema. In this gritty tale of small-town washed-up boxers, he wrestles
with a mannered script and actors of varying styles and skill levels. He
lends it an aura of authenticity.
dir: John Huston
ph: Conrad Hall
cast: Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrell, Candy
Clark, Nicholas Colasanto, Art Aragon, Curtis Cokes, Sixto Rodriguez
|
FRENZY
***½
UK
The wrong man is pursued for
the serial strangulations of London women.
There is a comfort in the notion that we live in a world that allowed
Hitchcock's career to continue some ten years after his extended,
magnificent prime and into the permissive 70s, where he could lace with
gratuitous nudity his standard fixations of tainted sexuality, sadistic
serial killings and an innocent hero hounded by both sides of the law. The
picture does take inordinately long to set itself up and it lacks drive at
further points, but when Hitch can have his fun with it, it's amusing,
titillating
and entertaining.
dir: Alfred Hitchcock
cast: Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Alec McCowen, Anna Massey,
Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Vivien Merchant, Billie Whitelaw
THE GODFATHER
*****
USA
It's not a perfect film. Women barely get a word in, the sound recording
is paltry, and the whole thing reeks of the 70s when it's meant to be set
in the 40s. It's a flawed film. But it's a great film. It boasts cracking
dialogue, grand performances and several of the most creative depictions
of violence committed to screen. It features so many intensely thrilling
moments, it's practically made up of them. They blur into each other. The
whole thing becomes one three-hour-long intensely thrilling moment.
dir: Francis Ford Coppola
wr: Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola
ph: Gordon Willis
ed: William H. Reynolds, Peter Zinner, Marc Laub, Murray
Solomon
m: Nino Rota
cast: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James
Caan, Robert
Duvall, Richard Castellano, Diane Keaton, Richard Conte, Talia Shire,
John Cazale
IMAGES
**½
USA
Robert Altman's 'Repulsion', wherein Susannah York plays a schizophrenic
and deeply pretentious children's storybook writer, who is never sure whether she is seeing her
dead husband, her living husband, her lover or a hallucination.
There are awful, awkward scenes of York talking to herself. In
order to signal to the viewer that Something Is Not Quite Right Robert
Altman employs the kind of mystic-eerie noises that have since been
popularised by J-horrors. And that is all that his picture finally amounts
to: a turgid, inflated J-horror.
wr/dir: Robert Altman
cast: Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, Cathryn
Harrison, John Morley
JUNIOR
BONNER
***
USA
A Sam Peckinpah dramedy(!) about a rodeo drifter catching up with his
estranged family in the new existential-crisis-laden West. Considerably
less savage than most of Peckinpah's work and - though not necessarily for
this reason - less engaging. It doesn't go anywhere you don't see coming
in the first twenty minutes, and Peckinpah's earnestness gets the better
of him in several sequences.
dir: Sam Peckinpah
cast: Steve McQueen, Robert Preston, Ida Lupino, Ben Johnson, Joe
Don Baker, Barbara Leigh, Mary Murphy, Bill McKinney
THE
KING OF MARVIN GARDENS
***
USA
The unwieldy minds behind Five Easy
Pieces turned out this intriguing failure as a follow-up. Where
'Pieces' was built on stray vignettes that gained clarity in retrospect,
this moody mess unfolds in tentative metaphors for acute alienation that possibly
once spoke to a demographic that is now extinct. The actors achieve a
certain coherence in their performances, so in all likelihood they were
working off a
sturdy core objective. But the latter has made it to the finished film only in
hazy bits and pieces.
dir: Bob Rafelson
ph: Laszlo Kovacs
cast: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia
Anne Robinson, Scatman Crothers, Charles Lavine, Arnold Williams, John
Ryan, Sully Boyar, Josh Mostel
LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT
***½
USA
Two girls off to a rock concert in the city end up raped and tortured to
death by a gang, which in turn ends up having to spend the night at the
home of one of their victims.
The plot and general flow of events never shows much consideration for
logic and plausibility. Teenage girls are punished for smoking weed and
going to a rock concert, the villain is a psychopathic, pedophilic convict
on the run, and there's some irrelevant slapstick with dumb cops. Scenes
of crude dialogue and resolutely wooden acting are followed by ugly,
shocking, realistic scenes of rape and abuse. In light of Craven's later
established skill at deadpan parody, and considering that in this picture he
often goes out of his way to incorporate just about every jarring horror
cliché that ever existed, it's especially tempting to just take this
whole thing as a sick joke. Or it might just, in all earnestness, be the
worst film ever made. Either way it doesn't for a second fail to hold your
attention. It's essential viewing.
wr/dir: Wes Craven
cast: David Hess, Lucy Grantham, Sandra Cassel, Marc
Sheffler, Jeramie Rain, Fred Lincoln, Gaylord St. James, Cynthia Carr
MY CHILDHOOD
*****
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
***½
USA
A neurotic film critic
struggles to find a woman.
A clever, enjoyable but forgettable star vehicle,
lacking Allen's later insight.
dir: Herbert Ross
wr: Woody Allen
cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Jerry Lacy, Susan
Anspach
SLEUTH
**½
USA
In an enormous Tudor mansion swarming with kitsch, Laurence Olivier is let
loose in a mine-is-bigger-than-yours competition with his wife's younger
lover, Michael Caine. You won't be surprised to find the piece was
originally written for the stage, but you might be surprised to discover
two acting giants regularly and, at times, hideously misjudging their
performances. It gets exhausting about 20 minutes in, and it runs well
over two hours.
dir: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
wr: Anthony Shaffer
cast: Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine
SOUNDER
***
ULZANA'S
RAID
****
WHAT'S UP, DOC?
***½
USA
Four suitcases are accidentally
switched in a hotel.
A hit-and-miss throwback to Hollywood screwball comedies of the 30s -
particularly those of Howard Hawks - that hits more often than it misses,
though it lacks
polish and the stars lack charisma.
dir: Peter Bogdanovich
cast: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Kenneth Mars, Austin
Pendleton, Madeleine Kahn, Mabel Albertson
|