Category: Film

It lacks a certain grace in execution, but this SF/romantic comedy-thriller, directed by Nicholas Meyer from his own novel, is clever and well calculated. Malcolm McDowell is H.G. Wells, pursuing Jack the Ripper (David Warner) into 1979 San Francisco, via his time machine. The plot gimmick occasions some funny and warming scenes, particularly when Wells […]

A contemporary Irish film noir about a young man from the southern free state who crosses into Northern Ireland to purchase contraband goods, accidentally wrecks the borrowed van he’s driving, and must deal with the anger of the van’s owner, his gypsy father-in-law. The old man is killed in the argument, and the boy goes […]

The hopelessness of human life as represented by a marathon dance contest in the darkest 30s. The material is simple and irresistible, and Sydney Pollack stages it well (though without transcending the essential superficiality of his talent). Jane Fonda offers the first signs that she inherited something more than her father’s jawline, and Gig Young […]

Justin Ackerman’s 1982 documentary about the Khmer Rouge’s continuing battle with Vietnam for control of Cambodia. It contains the only footage to be shot in the areas of the country held by Pol Pot since the 1978 fall of Phnom Penh. Chicago premiere.

Brid Brennan plays the title character, a young woman returning to the Belfast she hasn’t seen since she was a school girl. As she moves through the strife-torn city, looking up old friends and family members, directors Pat Murphy and John Davies draw parallels baetween her personal quest for freedom and the struggles that grip […]

The German film historian Lotte Eisner, who should know, finds this 1923 production to be one of the finest and most controlled of expressionist films. Directed by Arthur Robison, an American working in Germany, the film is the story of a husband who murders his unfaithful wife, and is then consumed by the standard expressionist […]

Jewish humor and self-conscious attacks on the conventions of the western make this Elliot Silverstein farce fitfully funny. Jane Fonda stars as the proper eastern lady who becomes the west’s most notorious outlaw; Lee Marvin is hilarious in a dual role as a drunken pulp hero and his supremely evil twin brother (1965).

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in a dual role as the swashbuckling twins of the Alexandre Dumas tale. Gregory Ratoff directed this independent production from 1941; Akim Tamiroff and Ruth Warrick costar.

A funny, raunchy film by Dusan Makavejev—a paean to the liberating power of dirt, as in both grime and smut. The setting is squeaky-clean Sweden, where an American woman (Susan Anspach) married to a stuffy businessman (Erland Josephson) falls in with a colony of Yugoslavian immigrants. It’s a one-joke movie, without the depth or formal […]

Errol Flynn at the end of his Warner Brothers tenure, in a 1948 remake of a 1926 John Barrymore vehicle (history, clearly, was getting ready to repeat itself). Viveca Lindfors is the beautiful queen whom Flynn must save from the clutches of her disloyal ministers; Alan Hale, Ann Rutherford, Robert Douglas, and Raymond Burr costar […]