Paul Lukas is the European Underground leader who brings his American wife (Bette Davis) and three children home to the Washington mansion of her mother (Lucile Watson). No other film has so subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution. 1 of 16. next. Intending to blacklist him, the studio head writes his name down on a slip of paper; a secretary assumes that the name is to be added to a party guest list, and so the actor arrives at the home of the studio head who wants to kill him. With Lucile Watson, Maria Ouspenskaya, C. Aubrey Smith, Steffi Duna, and Virginia Field. She states there is no reality in the film, that everything is so cinematically dramatized that it’s hard to take seriously. Instant Watch Options; Genres; Movies or TV; IMDb Rating; In Theaters; On TV; Release Year; Keywords; Prime Video (70) IMDb TV (5) Prime Video (Rent or Buy) (448) Drama (495) Comedy (236) Romance (181) … The writer-director Jean-Luc Godard has a gift for making the contemporary satiric and fantastic. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Reeling. With Vera Clouzot and William Tubbs. Cinematography by Fred Koenekamp; music by Jerry Goldsmith. Henri-Georges Clouzot directed his own adaptation of Georges Arnaud's novel. When Tony, floating on the clouds of romance, is asked, "What have you been taking tonight?" A Malpaso Production, for Warners. With Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne. The film is leisurely in the best sense; you adjust to a different rhythm and come out feeling relaxed, as if you'd gone on vacation. It's a notion that takes some growing used to, but Pauline Kael makes her case persuasively: "Almost every interesting American movie in the past few years has been directed by a Catholic." The present-tense semi-documentary visual style is innovative, the content less so. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In. It's a drag that we're expected to identify with the dull young couple; the tenant with the perverted legalistic mind and the fiendish cupid's-bow smile provides the only gleams of interest. Walter Lang directed; Hermes Pan did the choreography. Gabriele Ferzetti (the weak hero of L'AVVENTURA) is the politician who knows how to get along, and Irene Papas is scarily effective as a survivor--at the end, in her white wedding dress, her black eyes shining, she seems as strong as corruption. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Movie Love. 1. Each of the six parts has a story and deals with an aspect of the war that had just ended. The script, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, isn't up to the best of ADAM'S RIB (1949), but the stars have achieved such teamwork that their sparring is more beautiful than punch lines. Boy (Al Pacino) meets girl (Kitty Winn), but he is a heroin addict and she becomes one. (2 hours and 43 minutes.) Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Lauren Hutton, Harvey Keitel, John Considine, Sissy Spacek, Sally Kellerman, and others perform attentively, but they're undirected, and you can sense their unease as they trudge from one cheerless affair to the next. Bill Travers (after a course of muscle development and a steak diet) was assigned the role of Geordie, who takes up hammer-throwing and meets his match at the Olympics: a 6-foot woman shotputter. For a movie critic to read it now is to experience a mix … Griffith stole from Thomas Hardy, but he stole beautifully. James Mason, in his gloomily romantic period, is, literally, the doomed sailor, and Ava Gardner (looking unspeakably luscious) is an American playgirl in evening clothes who wanders through exotic, poetic landscapes before sacrificing herself to save him. The picture, written and directed by James Bridges, tries to be thoughtful and provocative, but it has nothing to say. The movie lacks urgency, but it's compelling, nevertheless. United Artists. Their whimsical, laid-back alienation is stagnant and irritating; the picture seems drugged. The New York-set movie doesn't tell you much you don't know. Pauline Kael (/keɪl/; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Lillian Hellman's 1941 Broadway play--a cautionary polemical melodrama about the danger of Fascism in the U.S.--is housebound and fearfully lofty. Score by Antoine Duhamel. Maybe people were impressed by its serious and poetic intentions, evidenced by the film's having no one higher in rank than the sergeants who take over when their lieutenant is killed, and by the stylized recurrence of such lines as "There's no sense in it--no sense at all" and "That's the way it is--sure as little apples, that's it." It's a promising beginning--too promising for what follows. Ray continued the story of Apu in APARAJITO/THE UNVANQUISHED and THE WORLD OF APU/APUR SANSAR, and the three films, all based on a novel by B.B. Instant Watch Options; Genres; Movies or TV; IMDb Rating; In Theaters; On TV ; Release Year; Keywords; Prime Video (31) … He brings it his air of eminence, and the film led to a TV series featuring him. Certifiably one of a kind. Cinematography by Lee Garmes; music by Franz Waxman. With Michael Beck, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, David Patrick Kelly, David Harris, Dorsey Wright, James Remar, Thomas Waites, Roger Hill, and Marcelino Sanchez. The director, Lewis Milestone, brought the film a visual style, and Robert Rossen's script (from the Harry Brown novel) emphasizes that these civilians turned soldiers are just stumbling about, wondering what's going on. One of Griffith's greatest box-office successes, and a film that influenced several Russian epics. In this situation, courage and caution are almost irrelevant, and ordinary human responses are futile and archaic--yet nothing else is left. Awarded the Golden Palm at Cannes. (It is said that the studio was out to break Hayworth; she certainly doesn't seem to be getting a fair shake here.) Review of Diner (1982) by Pauline Kael for The New Yorker — 22 Jun 2018. After flunking a couple of suicide attempts, he begins to write plays about imprisonment and then to stage them, and his activities win him his release. A great many people are inexplicably hooked on this weeper about the unlucky wartime love affair of a duke's nephew (Robert Taylor, trying to act aristocratic) and a dancer (Vivien Leigh). And they sing "In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia." There is the choreographer Jerome Robbins (who conceived the stage musical) to convert the street rumbles into modern ballet--though he turns out to be too painstaking for high-powered moviemaking and the co-director Robert Wise takes over. Pauline Kael' Reviews by antoniomendes1222 | created - 14 Jul 2014 | updated - 23 Nov 2014 | Public Refine See titles to watch instantly, titles you haven't rated, etc. Louise Brooks, a great--almost impersonal--beauty who set styles in the flapper period, and whose straight hair and bangs were imitated all over the world (and were used as the model for the Dixie Dugan comic strip), left Hollywood in 1928 at the height of her career and went to Germany for the role of a lifetime. The film has some inadvertent humor: the children of this liberal couple are the most highly disciplined little prigs imaginable. But in terms of how the sequences are planned, and how they build, it's an unusual, near-perfect piece of film craftsmanship. Sydney Pollack directed; from Arthur Laurents's novel. In French. Clarke, got the idea from a wartime newspaper item: the Canadian government transferred title to the room in which the exiled Princess Juliana was about to bear a child to the Netherlands; in this way the child would technically be born on Dutch soil and thus be a legal heir to the throne. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg, from the script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, based on a novel by James Mills. They do a classic soft-shoe shuffle outside a saloon; Hardy's lolling elephantine grace has never been more ingratiating. But it's a tall tale: a fiction derived from early Westerns. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Deeper into Movies. By far the best version is the parody done by Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman on TV.) Bing Crosby is the sailor; the spoiled heiress is Carole Lombard; he doesn't bat her around the way the hero of Lina Wertmüller's shrill SWEPT AWAY does. With Jean-Paul Belmondo, Madeleine Robinson, Bernadette Lafont, Jeanne Valerie, and-as Léda-Antonella Lualdi. He's a dour giant obsessed with his giantism. Directed by Herman Shumlin. D.W. Griffith took a creaking, dated stage melodrama and turned it into a melodramatic epic. This film critic has awarded movies a score of 67% on average. Julien Duvivier's psychological thriller is a devastatingly effective job of visual storytelling. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) Stanley … But there were also some hugely popular 70s films, such as this one and DIRTY HARRY, in which the old values returned in a corrupt, vigilante form under the banner of "law and order." Herself (archive footage) Blog Posts . 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