Film

...She is first seen in Boston, in the fall of 1978, ranging over the nuclear question with other doctors while a practicing pediatrician and faculty member of the Harvard Medical School...

...an official voice asserts: The schools will keep the children in for recess...

...There's no danger...

...An amusing and utterly inconsequential work, which will be most enjoyed by knowledgeable—and tolerant—film buffs...

...But not to worry...

...Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid Carl Reiner's black-and-white gumshoe thriller—a cinematic tour de force conceived part in homage to, part in spoof of, 1940s and early 1950s films noirs...

...The film follows her throughout 1979, as she promotes her recently published book (Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do) on a talk show, becomes increasingly concerned with balancing the demands of wife, mother, professional, and activist, and despite her fear of flying sets out on a barnstorming media and speaking tour of her native Australia...

...Grease 2 Return to "All-American" Rydell High (the high that never was)—circa 1961—with its leather-jacketed T-Birds, Pink Ladies, and other assorted adolescent fauna...

...Well acted, sharply written (by David Williamson, based upon his successful play), funny, and appalling...

...Just before one "atomic maneuver" in the deserts of the West, a military briefing officer informs his credulous men that "watched from a safe distance this is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man...

...Clips from more than twenty vintage flicks are seamlessly integrated into a typically complicated private eye yarn starring Steve Martin, who has conversations with Barbara Stanwyck and Veronica Lake, is sapped by Alan Ladd, shot by James Cag-ney, and vamped by Ava Gardner...

...No Place to Hide, produced and directed by Tom Johnson and Lance Bird, is a thirty-minute film focusing on propaganda promoting fallout shelters and the notion that "You can beat the A-Bomb...

...and an interpretative narration written by John Crowley and spoken by actor Martin Sheen has been added...

...Don't worry about yourselves," he assures them, "you'll be OK...

...And it is both outrageously funny in a black, absurdist way, and disturbing...

...A motion picture can unwittingly serve many ends, however, and I'm worred about how The Atomic Cafe has been taken by younger audiences...

...You need only recall the leveling of Hiroshima (documented earlier in the film) and the devastation lavishly sewed up in the Army's own test films, and imagine an explosion 1,600 times more powerful to realize how shamelessly we've been lied to...

...And we see masses of troops, wearing no special protection but only badge-like radiation detectors to tell whether they have received a "lethal dose," resolutely advancing into the fallout zone of a recent blast...

...This is an exemplary portrait, not of a Movement Superstar, but of an unpretentious, intelligent, energetic woman who has accepted the challenge of acting on her convictions...

...We were lucky...

...One clip from a civil defense film demonstrates just how "easy" all this is, as a father, responding to an air raid warning, leads his family down to a basement shelter...

...This work has quite a different feel and tone, however, resulting in part from a different production strategy...

...This is dismaying enough on the face of it, but it helps to know that there has been an abnormally high incidence of cancer among the troops participating in the tests, and among the good people of St...

...The movie boasts a few hy-perenergetic song-and-dance numbers, but the rest is food for cretins...

...The most interesting themes are insufficiently developed— for example, the entrance of malign spirits through the television set—and the abundant special effects are often less horrific than kooky, but it is a surprisingly beautiful movie which affectingly exploits a number of deeply held childhood and parental fears...

...One of few serious considerations of this serious issue I've ever encountered...

...It's a feature-length compilation film, nicely weaving together archival material of the 1940s and 1950s: military training and information clips, civil defense films, newsreels, clips from period television programs and commercials, radio broadcasts, and popular songs...

...The Atomic Cafe deserves both clear-headed and politically responsive viewers...

...There's nothing to do now but clean up the broken glass, relax, and wait for instructions from the authorities...

...She is in Sydney when she hears of the "accident" at Three Mile Island and reacts angrily to this unwelcomed confirmation of the dangers she'd been warning about...

...It boasts, above all, some of the most spectacular production design and art direction ever imagined—a combination of sleaze, punk, and futuristic high tech...

...We have decided to live as if we were safe," Sheen summarizes, "knowing we were not...

...The myths of simple, effective, duck-and-cover civil defense, limited nuclear warfare, and the negligible effects of exposure to radiation are as alive today as they were several decades ago...

...It's another compilation, exploiting much of the same archival footage used in The Atomic Cafe...

...exclaims another paterfamilias, after a simulated blast...

...The story strives for credibility of no sort, and the acting, as always, is sub-mediocre—but the absence of such qualities is not likely to disturb the legions of Trekkies who've come to dissociate such artistic niceties from the voyages of the Starship Enterprise...

...An investigation of motives and effects, filtered in good part through the consciousness of an extraordinary ex-stripper (Linda Lee Tra-cey) turned poet and performance artist...

...An election-night party, peopled by middle-class suburbanites, degenerates into a psycho-sexual debacle...

...The Atomic Cafe gives historical perspective for reconsideration of these issues, and suggests that the only sane response to greet official voices of reassurance is profound skepticism, though outright derision would be more like it...

...Much of the business seems to come, however, from young Villagers who first get stoned, and then "trip" to and through the movie...

...nothing could be more revealing and occasionally more hilarious than the original dialogue and voice-overs...

...Realized essentially as an (pver)extended dramatization of such 1950s lyrics as "Teen Angel," it is quite as moronic and soppy as the earlier Grease...

...Poltergeist Steven Spielberg, along with George Lucas, has been charged with inaugurating a regressive trend in American filmmaking, and in Poltergeist (written and produced by Spielberg, directed by Tobe Hooper) he gives us the most Pro-Family movie to be seen in decades—a horror film of the haunted house subgenre, of and for the suburban American family...

...The film's producer-directors (Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Raf-ferty) decided—wisely, I think—not to impose a narration on their found materials...

...Can you sweep up the debris of nuclear holocaust with a dust pan and broom...

...Eight Minutes to Midnight: A Portrait of Dr...

...George...

...By the end of 1979, she has resigned her position at Harvard and assumed the presidency of Physicians for Social Responsibility...

...George, Utah, learn from a radio broadcast that a wind shift is blowing the fallout from an atomic explosion their way...

...Since Hiroshima and the birth of the fear that what we have done unto others may be done onto us, the writing—the real American Graffiti—has been on the wall...

...to commitment and activism...

...Are these viewers, I wonder, so numb that they are able only to appreciate the film as an atomic version of Reefer Madness...

...Sci-fi gumshoe-thriller set in rain-sodden Los Angeles, 2019 A.D., starring America's ubiquitous summertime hero, Harrison Ford...

...Her experience with children as a cystic fibrosis specialist and her growing conviction that nuclear development constitutes "the greatest public health hazard the world has ever known," had led her to become a largely self-taught expert on the medical consequences of nuclear radiation...

...And as this revealing film suggests, it is the stuff of nightmares...

...Helen Caldicott (directed by Mary Benjamin), was a 1981 Academy Award nominee for best documentary film...

...The effectiveness of Eight Minutes to Midnight is due in part to Caldicott's growth as an extraordinarily articulate and compelling opponent of nuclear madness...

...An aging Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) returns to active duty to save the Earth from the vengeful rage of Khan (Ricardo Montalban), an old enemy who seems to have overdosed on Paradise Lost...

...The Atomic Cafe—the title is taken from an Arco, Idaho, tavern pictured in the film—is a timely and brilliantly realized work tracing the development of atomic culture in America, and the efforts of the government and press to mislead the public on nuclear warfare and weapons testing...

...M Hits and Misses Don's Party A deliciously nasty film from the late 1970s by Australian director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant...

...there is an eerie electronic score by Brian Eno...

...Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan The popular television space adventure, suitably enhanced for the big screen with Dolby stereo and spectacular special effects, the latter provided by Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic...

...More penetrating, and executed with a bit more cinematic flair, than most motion pictures coming from Israel...

...At the Waverly theater in Greenwich Village the film is packing them in...

...and at the massive May 6 anti-nuclear protest in Washington D.C...

...If there's an explosion," he calmly lets them know, "we'll wait a minute after it's over and we'll go upstairs and take a look around, see if it's all right for us to clean up...

...In another Army film, the citizens of St...

...Caldicott's personal and political development...

...A housewife, reassured, dutifully shuts her window...

...Eight Minutes (the title comes from the symbolic doomsday clock in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) traces the life of its subject throughout the years 1978-1980, a critical period in the nuclear debate and in Dr...

...Several such works have opened recently in New York, and they are among the best movies I've seen this year...

...to the Native American Uranium Mining Conference in Grants, New Mexico...

...Perhaps the most ludicrous (and deceitful) of our Government's propaganda efforts has been the hustle to convince Americans that we can survive nuclear attack if we'll only observe elementary precautions...

...Some of these make it onto public television, but they are rarely well advertised (Mobil doesn't support social documentaries) and generally run at late or inconvenient hours...

...Deeply held beliefs lead her to increasing commitment to the anti-nuclear movement...

...Blade Runner An action-packed Hollywood ragout which should attract the audiences that reveled in last summer's Raiders of the Lost Ark...

...You can be safe...

...Just a bit of shattered glass...

...The non-fiction film has a long and honorable tradition—the very first films to enjoy theatrical exhibition were the "documentaries" of Lumiere—and the best of them deserve a better fate and broader audience than motion pictures made for narrow educational and industrial purposes...

...And No Place to Hide relentlessly documents the atmosphere of the paranoid-schizophrenia so pervasive in the late 1940s and the 1950s...

...Upon her return to the United States, she first makes a stop in Har-risburg, then speaks to demonstrators at the site of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons arsenal near Denver...

...I'm not sure just why this is: whether they are tripping on the film's mad comedy, or getting off on the clips of nuclear explosion, even more awesome than the special effects in Star Wars...

...It is both an engaging portrait of the prominent anti-nuclear activist, pediatrician, and author, and, unintentionally, I believe, a surprisingly effective work of agitprop in the anti-nuclear cause...

...The Vulture A controversial Israeli film based on a novel by Yoram Kaniuk which exposes the psychic disruptions resulting from the nation's recent wars and the commercial enterprises—the peddling of memorial shrines and albums—which exploit the confused bereavement of the wars' survivors...

...I hope not...

...The most poignant and grotesque ironies of Atomic Cafe will most likely be felt by those with some knowledge of the real destructiveness of nuclear weapons, and of recent disclosures bearing on the medical consequences of earlier testing...

...Not a Love Story A disturbing, searching feature documentary on pornography, produced by the National Film Board of Canada's Studio D (founded to provide a forum for women filmmakers and their concerns...

...But while there is no authorial text, the work is given meaning and coherence through intelligent selection and artful reediting of what was already available...

...In the course of all this, Caldicott becomes increasingly concerned with weapons development and the dangers of nuclear warfare ("the ultimate medical disaster...

...The editing here is less flashy...

...But it is due in even greater part, I think, to the film's success in depicting a process which leads a rather ordinary person (in 1970, the subject reveals, she was a "housewife who had never talked in public before, and a rusty g.p...