Film

...Carpenter says he wanted to make the scariest movie ever, but the result, relying heavily on special effects and leaving little to the imagination, is more revolting than horrific...

...The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas The Balcony, it ain't—nor will this stupid cornpone movie do anything to help revive a languishing genre...

...One further shot—which seems to have become the emblematic movie representation of the writer at work—is of Garp impatiently tearing some copy from the typewriter...

...With The Marriage of Maria Braun and the yet to be released Veronika Voss, it forms a trilogy focusing on strong female characters...

...The New Wave was never a coherent artistic movement, but more a cinematic outpouring from a bunch of young French filmmakers who shared certain attitudes (including an appreciation of the best in American studio-made films), and promoted production methods which allowed for the making of films both personal and popular...

...The most creative work seems to have gone into the production of a condensed script that retains as many of the novel's major moments as possible, and into editing this necessarily fragmentary adaptation to get as much in while still preserving some sense of coherence...

...The film, however, not only diminishes the novel, but neglects to compensate for the loss (as Harold Pinter attempted to do in his screenplay for The French Lieutenant s Woman) through imaginative cinematic adaptation...

...It's not Fassbinder's masterpiece, but a good enough film to appear on any critic's list of the year's ten best—a pungent, often irritating work, elaborating on the filmmaker's constant theme of the uses and abuses of power, with a whorehouse as central metaphor, a vibrant performance in the lead role by Barbara Su-kowa (who also stars in the current Margarethe von Trotta film, Marianne and Juliane), and some of the most outrageous, inventive use of color ever brought to the screen...

...The Thing John (Halloween) Carpenter's remake of the 1952 Howard Hawks-Christian Nyby horror classic...

...This just doesn't work, and the film's Garp, as a result, becomes a flatter and less interesting character...

...Also jettisoned is the pervasive distrust of the motives and methods of scientists in the Hawks-Nyby original...

...His ill-fated gambit is played out within a tautly realized drama of love and loyalty, treachery and deceit—and concludes with bittersweet irony...

...The protagonist (Jeff Bridges) finds adventure and combat within the video game world of a giant computer system...

...The film substitutes New York for Vienna (with considerable loss in color), and a newly concocted tale ("The Magic Gloves") for Garp's initial literary effort...

...This is a film of considerable intrinsic merit, a pivotal work in the career of an important filmmaker, and a work that has exercised no little influence on the course of French filmmaking...

...Its mise-en-scene is strictly functional and anonymous, and it lacks any clear sense of cinematic style...

...Blood, gore, and viscous monstrosity abound, but the filmmakers have neglected to establish a meaningful human context...

...But The World According to Garp is not, for all this, a breakthrough motion picture...

...A maker of personal films from an independent leftist (and homosexual) perspective, he was the most important figure in the "New German Cinema," and, to my mind, the most significant filmmaker of the past dozen years...

...Two bright spots (but not, unfortunately, saving graces): the zany comedy of Dom DeLuise, and a brilliant musical routine by veteran Charles During in the role of the Governor...

...It is the 1955 Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), written, produced, and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, and only now enjoying its first American release...

...Hill has done well to forego a full musical score, exploiting instead a few period songs, each a good choice...

...The film has no lack of visual thrills, but is notably weak in narrative content and thus, despite all the high-tech spectacle, takes a tiresome turn early on...

...Lola, Fassbinder's antepenultimate work, is now on a U.S...

...A former Vietnam air ace, with the aid of dissident Russian Jews, steals a super-formidable Soviet plane for our side...

...And there is a wonderful introductory credit sequence, bound to soften even the most cynical movie-goer for what is to come...

...Mary Beth Hurt is a convincing Helen (Garp's wife, the "reader"), and Robin Williams is a credible Garp, although I wish he'd made himself a tad less endearing...

...U Hits and Misses Tron Disney studio's much heralded entry into computer animation, released with the longest list of production credits anyone has ever seen...

...Bob's extraordinary appeal is due largely, I think, to Melville's success in representing a Paris that is both palpably real and mythic, and in recreating the peculiar atmosphere of the after-hours city and the socially marginal characters who haunt it...

...The perfect antidote for the saccharine banalities of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (see "Hits and Misses...

...this one just makes me want to skip dinner...

...Rainer Werner Fassbinder died this spring at the age of thirty-six, having completed thirty-nine feature-length works and several shorts...

...Dolly Parton sings well but is otherwise cloying, Burt Reynolds barely walks (limps...

...The work has been imaginatively cast and the performances are generally excellent—especially those of Glenn Close (as feminist Jenny Fields, Garp's nutty, saintly mother) and John Lithgow (as Roberta Muldoon—formerly Robert, tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles...

...What I find even more disappointing, however, is that the film fails to assert itself as a work about the making of a writer, and not merely a study of a nice guy who's a wrestler and confirmed family man...

...The novella's genesis is suggested through recall and transposition of a few images, and the concluding incident is pictured for us, but most of what we know of this work is presented through a very brief verbal synopsis...

...It chronicles the German economic resurgence and the accompanying spiritual malaise of the 1950s...

...A thoroughly awful movie, which suffers from lackluster acting (Eastwood at his most laconic and inexpressive), dramatic anemia, and the foolish attempt to appeal to younger audiences through the addition of whappo special effects, all of them embarrassingly derivative and unconvincing...

...Melville (ne Grumback—he took the name of the American novelist out of "admiration for an author who meant more to me than any other") has been called the "father of the New Wave" (although he came to denounce these younger filmmakers), and Bob shows why: It reflects the influence of American studio films of the 1940s and 1950s, displays notable authorial control, uses extensive location shooting, and is photographed by one of the New Wave's favorite cinematographers (Henry Decae)— all in a relatively cheap independent production...

...through his role, and the big song-and-dance production number is a shameless theft from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers...

...Bob is also endowed with a fine, jazzy musical score, and with some of the most succulently slangy dialogue heard in French movies since the screenplays of Jacques Prevert, though Melville makes no effort to poetize an argot which is colorful enough in its unaltered state...

...The only other images of Paris that affect me so strongly are in the photographs of Brassai, Truffaut's 400 Blows (also shot by Henry Decae), and Godard's Breathless, for which Bob served as an obvious precedent...

...Firefox Clint Eastwood's contribution to a rekindling of Cold War antagonisms and fears of Soviet military superiority...

...Instead of embodying an overall vision, it tends to rely on gimmicks (the animation sequence, fancy stunt work, the flashing of mental images between the opening and closing of Venetian blinds...

...Bob Montagne (Roger Duchesne), an aging gambler short on luck but long on personal and professional honor, walks these mean streets until circumstance sets him on to a daring caper that will, he hopes, set him up for good...

...Nonetheless, it has been endowed by scriptwriter Steve Tesich with some of the best dialogue in contemporary movies...

...This results partly from a felicitous choice and use of locations and uncommonly expressive black-and-white photography: deep inky blacks, luminescent whites, and shades of gray I'd not seen before...

...The film inherits an abundance of rich thematic and narrative material from John Irving's best-selling novel...

...The adventure of life, fear of life, lust, death, ideology and its contemporary aberrations, the complex making of an artist—it is, alas, a bit more than a two-hour movie can assimilate...

...Bob le Flambeur is a pseudo-tragic underworld melodrama set in the demimonde of the bars, dens, and clubs of the Place Pigalle (shot contemporaneously, but invested with a feeling for the area as it was in the late 1930s...

...The first Thing still scares me...

...A nifty and visually effective animation sequence is inserted into the otherwise live action...

...I liked Irving's novel, but I don't regard it as sacrosanct, nor even an important book...

...Irving manages to be convincing in this respect by stocking the novel with samples of Garp's writing—including a novella written in Vienna—which are quite as well written as the novel itself...

...Melville's work is almost unknown in this country...

...The World According to Garp (directed by George Roy Hill) has a lot going for it...

...I hope Bob will encourage American distributors to make some of his other films available—especially Leon Morin Pretre, Doulos the Finger Man, and Le Samourai...