Masochistic, sub-Le Carre stuff about the dirtiness of spying, adapted by Julian Bond from a novel by John Hale. The performances are solid and subtle, with Michael Caine especially effective, but more valuable are the film’s insights into 80s English conservatism. With foreign news coverage in this country dwindling, even this stodgy 1986 thriller can tell us something about how the English middle class thinks. Simon Langton directed; with James Fox, Nigel Havers, Felicity Dean, and John Gielgud. (JR) Read more
Mamie Van Doren stars with (get this) Mel Torme, Paul Anka, Ray Anthony, Gigi Perreau, Gloria Talbott, Jim Mitchum, Sheilah Graham, the Platters, and Harold Lloyd Jr., playing a bad girl who gets sent to reform school, where Maggie Hayes sets her straight. Charles Haas directed this 1959 film (also known as The Innocent and the Damned), and it’s every bit as junky and tawdry as one might hope. 92 min. (JR) Read more
Passionately lusting after her missing brother, the eponymous heroine (Tiziana Jelmini), a lonely provincial pharmacist, turns herself into a seductress at night, and, to deal with her frustration and amuse herself, perfects a poisioning technique which allows her to polish off an inordinate number of hapless men. Made in 16-millimeter as a graduation thesis at the Berlin Film Academy by Tania Sticklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais, this somewhat stylish and dutifully perverse black comedy, a Swiss/West German coproduction, is fairly watchable, but really nothing specialthe sort of nihilistic exercice de style that invariably turns up as festival fodder because of its relative familiarity. You might have a little fun with it, but you can just as easily live without it. (JR) Read more
