Ironically, this Spielberg-Lucas collaboration (1988) came closer to reviving the classic character animation of Disney in its heyday than Disney’s simultaneously released Oliver & Company. What we get is a kind of dinosaur Bambi featuring an all-prehistoric casta tale about growing up set in an adventure about a survival trek. Spielberg reportedly found the original cut too scary and violent, and changes were expensive. Some of the action sequences feel abbreviated, but the overall handling of landscape and character is well done, and some of the old Disney mysticism about parental and ancestral roots manages to shine through. Not a masterpiece, but nicely crafted. Don Bluth directed. G, 70 min. (JR) Read more
Producer-writer-director Ken Russell updates the last novel of Dracula’s Bram Stoker (known as The Garden of Evil in the U.S.), about the discovery of a somewhat vampiristic ancient anti-Christian cult built around a giant white worm in rural England. For once, Russell’s over-the-top conceits are anchored in a fairly humdrum horror story and allowed to flourish mainly at privileged moments of hallucinatory delirium; the rest of the time the storytelling is serviceable if occasionally lumpy. But the mad campy momentswhich chiefly involve snake woman Amanda Donohoe slinking around in various stages of undress or in dominatrix outfitsare worth waiting for. With Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, Peter Capaldi, Sammi Davis, Stratford Johns, and a great many B-film accessories, including snakes, worms, dildos, caves, dungeons, and tatty special effects (1988). (JR) Read more
The title tells all, or almost all, about this 1958 release in which Gloria Talbott discovers that her husband (Tom Tryon) is an alien monster, and that aliens are mating with earth women. Gene Fowler Jr. produced, directed, and scripted (with Louis Vittes). Other roles are played by Ken Lynch, Maxie Rosenbloom, and a German shepherd. (JR) Read more
This provocative, grim Australian adventure thriller, attractively shot in ‘Scopewritten by Mac Gudgeon and Jan Sardi, and directed by Michael Pattinson and Bruce Mylesconcerns the atomic bomb tests conducted by the British government on the Australian mainland between 1953 and 1964, and their disquieting aftereffects. A professional cameraman (Colin Friels) discovers that the death of his cameraman father in 1953 was not accidental, as he supposed, and most of the film focuses on his quest for the telltale footage shot by his father that led to his murder. Charges that thousands of aborigines died because of the tests, the unearthing of a radioactive World War II jet bomber, and the theft of home movies from the hero’s flat all become part of the disturbing mystery, much of it based on fact. With Donald Pleasence, Jack Thompson, and Natalie Bate. (JR) Read more
Sam Shepard directs his own script in a comedy-drama set in Minnesota. Just as an eccentric family is about to celebrate the 100th birthday of Gramma (Nina Draxten), Bertrum (Charles Durning) has an accident while racing his buckboard as Mel, the family horse, looks on. Bertrum tries to convince his oldest daughter Kate (Jessica Lange) to shoot Mel in revenge, and various complications ensue. This is far from being the abysmal failure many critics claimed it to be, although the minimal narrative development takes some getting used to. While Shepard’s focus in much of his theater work has been essentially on Marlboro men, for better and for worse, here it’s basically concerned with the absence of same, and the eccentricity and/or insanity that this seems to create in the womenfolk. The premise is certainly questionable, but some of the theatrical turns coaxed out of the actresses are worth watching, and the overall flavor, curiously enough, seems more evocative of Tennessee Williams than of earlier Shepard. With Tess Harper, Donald Moffat, Ann Wedgeworth, and Patricia Arquette. (JR) Read more
A silly science fiction quickie (1956, 83 min.), directed by Fred Sears and featuring Ray Harryhausen special effects of various national monuments being demolished (Orson Welles borrowed a few clips for his F for Fake). With Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor. (JR) Read more
John Lithgow stars as a Vietnam combat veteran who lives with a group of other veterans in a forest in the Pacific northwest, and who begins to make contact with his son (Ralph Macchio), whom he hasn’t seen since he was an infant. Overall, this is a good, sensitive job, with fine, understated performances by the two leads as well as by Kerrie Keane, Denis Arndt, Reb Brown, and Jamey Sheridan. While the plot is not devoid of melodramatic contrivance, the film at least has the merit of suggesting that the trauma of Vietnam for this country is a two-way streetpredicated not only on the inability of certain veterans to cope with the present, but equally on the incapacity of a younger generation to cope with the pastand the beautiful use of natural locations (the film was shot in British Columbia) is especially fine. Directed by Rick Rosenthal from a script by Robert Stitzel, which is based in turn on a story by Stitzel and Deedee Wehle. (JR) Read more
A strong, disturbing picture (1988) in which Meryl Streep’s beauty and talent and director Fred Schepisi’s intelligence are both shown to best advantage, without easy points or grandstanding. Streep stars as Lindy Chamberlain in the true-life story of a bereaved mother of a nine-week-old daughter in Australia who was tried for her child’s murder, despite the absence of a body, weapon, motive, or clear evidence. Sam Neill costars as Chamberlain’s husband Michael; the script was written by Schepisi and Robert Caswell, based on the book Evil Angels by John Bryson. 121 min. (JR) Read more
One of the most striking Soviet films thawed out by glasnost, this 1967 feature by Aleksandr Askoldov was apparently controversial because it expresses overt sympathy for the Jews who were persecuted during the Russian civil war and because the lead character is a pregnant woman who challenged traditional stereotypes. As a first feature, the film is in many respects remarkable, if not an unqualified success. The black-and-white ‘Scope images are often clearly influenced by the silent Soviet masters, and the use of subjective camera is especially striking, but the film is only intermittently effective as a narrative. Still, anyone with an interest in the subject or in Soviet cinema shouldn’t miss it. In Rusian with subtitles. 108 min. (JR) Read more
One of the likely prototypes of the 1987 pastiche Amazon Women on the Moon, this low-budget effort from 1953 was originally shot in 3-D and also released under the title Rocket to the Moon. Written by Roy Hamilton and directed by Arthur Hilton; with Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, and Marie Windsor. Elmer Bernstein, of all people, supplied the music. 64 min. (JR) Read more
A tedious English feature based on the real-life big train robbery of 1963 that made off with over two and half million pounds, directed by David Green from a script by Colin Shindler. Rather than work this material into a thriller, the filmmakers choose to focus on the domestic problems of one of the robbers (rock star Phil Collins) and his wife (Julie Walters), including their protracted, unhappy stay in Acapulco. The cinematography has the ugly, overlit look of British TV commercials, and the corny pop score is even more alienating; a few approximate stabs are made at social commentary, but to little avail. With Larry Lamb, Martin Jarvis, Sheila Hancock, and Anthony Quayle. (JR) Read more
As the ultimate middle-class comedy director, Paul Mazursky had a grand time in the late 60s and early 70s toying with the titillations offered by the counterculture without ever really succumbing to them, and this movie, about mate swapping, was one of his most successful (at the box office) ambivalently pitched forays in that direction. The results are pretty obnoxious and only intermittently funny, but certainly characteristic. Mazursky and Larry Tucker scripted, and the foursome are played by Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliott Gould, and Dyan Cannon. (JR) Read more
One certainly can’t accuse German filmmaker Percy Adlon (Celeste, Sugarbaby) of opting for the tried and true in his first American effort (1988). A hefty Bavarian tourist (Sugarbaby’s Marianne Sagebrecht) splits from her husband and finds herself stranded at a truck-stop motel near the Mojave Desert, run by a black woman (CCH Pounder) who has just broken up with her own husband. Gradually, the hausfrau brings some light and magic into the lives of all those around her, and even gets a nightclub magic act going. With the help of cinematographer Bernd Heinl and some occasional oddball editing, Adlon gives his film a rather distinctive look. Unfortunately, the film’s curious conceits remain implausible even on a fantasy level, and most of the satirical possibilities are either sidestepped or fumbled; despite some superficial resemblances to Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, there is almost none of that film’s cantankerous charm. The film is actually closer to Pollyanna, and Pounder’s stagy performance seems especially out of sync with everyone else’s. With Jack Palance, Monica Calhoun, George Aquilar, Darron Flagg, G. Smokey Campbell, Alan S. Craig, Ronald Lee Jarvis, and Christine Kaufmannvery much of an all-weirdo cast by design, but it doesn’t really get the movie moving. Read more
Woody Allen’s 18th feature (1988) gives us more Scandinavian gloom and culture vulturism about guilty, well-to-do non-Jews in Manhattan, shot by Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist in suitably drab weather and loosely patterned after Wild Strawberries. The intellectual protagonist, well played by Gena Rowlands (she’s a philosophy professor, natch), is suffering a midlife crisis, focusing on her love life and her decision not to have children; she’s also trying to write a book, and her imagination and memories are stimulated when she overhears the psychiatric sessions of a pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) in the flat below. Allen has assembled a sterling cast that also includes Philip Bosco, Betty Buckley, Blythe Danner, Sandy Dennis, Gene Hackman, Ian Holm, John Houseman (in one of his last performances), Martha Plimpton, David Ogden Stiers, and Harris Yulin, but at best they can only make the self-flagellation marginally more bearablethey can’t really transcend the aura of glitzy, suicidal chic that makes this an insult to intellectuals and a piece of posturing phoniness designed to awe spectators who like their psychodramas third-hand and upscale. To Allen’s credit, however, at least one of the laughs in this film is intentional. (JR) Read more
