Category: Film

The stars of Notorious, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, are reunited for Stanley Donen’s 1958 film—with a title that may or may not be an allusion to Hitchcock’s masterwork. The action also runs somewhat parallel: Bergman is in love with Grant, but he keeps putting her off for reasons that remain mysterious. A fine light […]

An animated gloss on George Orwell’s anti-Soviet fable, rendered in dull, grayish tones by the British team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor (1955). Why is it that cartoons made for adults inevitably bore both adults and children? Louis de Rochemont, of “The March of Time,” produced; the film has more than a trace of […]

The nebbishness of Woody Allen’s Bogart-worshiping film buff has started to date badly, revealing an uncomfortable strain of narcissism beneath the fumbling charm, but this is still one of his most appealing performances, perhaps because Herbert Ross’s pedestrian direction reins in some of Allen’s ego excesses (1972). But the dramatic center of the material—Allen falling […]

This documentary puts on display five years in the lives of a large family scattered in West Virginia, Chicago, and New York; but it took former Chicagoan Mark Rance nine years to make it.

Otto Preminger’s 1970 film of Marjorie Kellogg’s novel about three social rejects who try to make a home together: a disfigured girl (Liza Minnelli), an epileptic (Ken Howard), and a paraplegic homosexual (Robert Moore). Typical of the bizarre material Preminger was attracted to late in his career, though the style hesitates between no-stops melodrama and […]

Robin Williams seems generally repressed in his first dramatic role, as the sheltering hero of John Irving’s best-seller, yet the most charming moments in this 1982 film are pure Williams shtick—when he’s making cute to the woman he wants to marry (Mary Beth Hurt) or fooling around with his kids in the front yard. He […]

Woody Allen’s first film as a director (1968), in which he plays Virgil Starkwell, Public Schmuck Number One. This ragged collection of gags and sketch fragments was reportedly pieced together from an incoherent mass of footage by ace film doctor Ralph Rosenblum, yet whatever its genesis, Allen’s scraggly rhetoric evolved into the dominant comic style […]

Not Walt Disney, but a 1975 science fiction film based on Harlan Ellison’s World War III story. The survivors of the nuclear holocaust are divided into two camps—the roving bands of scavengers on the surface and the passionately bourgeois citizens of “Topeka,” an artificial community buried five miles underground. Director L.Q. Jones worked as an […]