Generally superior tear-jerker tries to push all the right buttons but eventually surrenders to it's own sense of melodrama. [1283]
SHIRLEY MACLAINE, DEBRA WINGER, JACK NICHOLSON, JEFF DANIELS, JOHN LITHGOW, DANNY DEVITO
Terrible over-rated and contemptible attempt to acquire cheap prestige for so-called "serious" treatment of nuclear holocaust theme. Testement makes this one look like a one-dimensional soap opera. Director and writer completely forgot that the tragedy of nuclear war is not in the spectcular destruction but the unspectacular details of destruction. [568]
Doesn't work for some reason. Williams is good, and the rest of the cast is good, but the movie just never congeals the right way, a flaw that is also suggested by the book. Always seems like it should have been funnier and more poignant than it really was. You get the feeling that author John Irving had something in mind that didn't quite translate into his work. [543]
Good documentary, but obviously not ideal technically. See Last Waltz for definitive rock music movie. Less interested in the music than in Woodstock as a cultural totem. [542]
Take away the innumerable copies of this basic idea and style and you would have one very original, scary film. [452]
Claude Raines plays a tangibly evil Nazi sympathizer, and Ingrid Bergman helps Cary Grant expose him. Interesting "sophisticated" relationship between Grant and Bergman. [283]
Very powerful, striking film, based on the true story of John Merrick (?) whose body became deformed as a result of disease. Excellent performances by Hopkins and Hurt and Anne Bancroft. [231]
Grossly inferior film remake of French classic. [140]
RICHARD GERE, VALERIE KAPRISKY
Pretty good crime thriller, with Bogart appropriately sardonic as private eye Sam Spade, and Mary Astor as the mysterious femme fatale. Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are colourful as the villains. As Hitchcock observed, most movies are a series of incidents and situations and it doesn't really matter what the people are after so long as they are after something. [75]
Powerful drama about coup in Chile, diluted somewhat by Lemmon's stock characterization of outraged naive righteousness. Spacek is good. Set in Chile in 1973, and American student and his wife are caught up in the military crack down after the coup. [67]
Powerful but somewhat aimless docudrama on American supporters of Russian revolution. If it was ever as good as claimed how come it seems so obscure today? [53]
All Contents Copyright © Bill Van Dyk 1985 All Rights Reserved
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